SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #793 (58), Friday, August 9, 2002
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TITLE: Crew of Sheremyetevo Crash Buried
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Thousands of mourners gathered Thursday to pay their last respects to the 14 crew members who died after an Il-86 passenger plane lurched upward and crashed shortly after taking off from Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.
Pilots and flight attendants from St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Airlines stood in an honor guard by the 14 coffins at the Aviation Workers' House of Culture in Aviagorodok, near the Pulkovo airport as tearful relatives huddled nearby. The coffins were covered with flowers and uniform caps as are worn by airline staff.
The Il-86 had just carried 250 passengers from the Black Sea resort of Sochi to Moscow and was returning July 28 to its home airport, Pulkovo-1 in St. Petersburg, with only crew aboard, when it slammed into a wooded area just off the landing strip of Sheremetyevo-1. All of the crew on board were from St. Petersburg or the Leningrad Oblast.
Two flight attendants who were sitting in the back of the plane survived. One, Irina Vinogradova has since been released from hospital, and Itar-Tass reported Thursday that the other, Tatyana Moiseyeva, is expected to be hospitalized for another week. Vinogradova has already returned to St. Petersburg, but Pulkovo spokesperson Yelena Yelagina said that, emotionally, Vinogradova did not feel up to attending the ceremony.
Interfax reported on Thursday that Vinogradova was planning to return to her job at the airline this month, while Moiseyeva has decided not to return to work in the industry.
Officials say the plane started climbing almost vertically 42 seconds after takeoff, causing it to stall and crash. Investigators say the plane's stabilizer shifted to an extreme angle, causing the nose to jerk upward, but they have not yet determined whether this was due to a technical malfunction or pilot error.
Investigators are now studying the plane's twin flight-data recorders and debris from the crash site. Yelagina said it could take several more weeks before they reach their final conclusion.
"For now we have only heard that something went wrong with the stabilizer," Yelagina said. "But it may take a month more to get the investigation's results."
The stabilizer is a small wing on the aircraft's tail that controls the angle of the plane's nose during flight.
During Thursday's ceremony, near Pulkovo Airport, the husband and daughter of one of the crash victims, 39-year-old flight attendant Natalya Fetisova, touched their heads to her coffin.
"It was a highly qualified crew," said one Pulkovo Airlines pilot, who declined to give his name. "I knew all of them."
Since the crash, officials have said they would conduct tests on all Il-86 jumbo jets, one of the main workhorses of Russian airlines. The Il-86 had previously been considered a very reliable plane, without any fatal crashes in the 22 years it has been in use.
Pulkovo Airlines said would it pay $18,000 in compensation to families of those killed in the crash, in accordance with the crew's work contract, Interfax reported. The families are also due to receive 100,000 rubles ($3,150) from an insurance company, Interfax said.
Following the ceremony, the crew members were taken to burials Thursday in various cemeteries in St. Petersburg, Gatchina and in the Pskovskaya Oblast.
TITLE: Investigation Blames Senior Police Officers
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An inspection of two-thirds of the city's district police departments that was begun by an Interior Ministry commission in early July has found cases of negligence and inefficiency to be widespread among St. Petersburg police.
At a Tuesday press briefing, Deputy Interior Minister Vitaly Mozyakov slammed the city's police force, saying that the results of the examination were negative across the board, and that further analysis of the assessment's results may lead to criminal charges being brought against some officials, including a number of senior members of the local Interior Ministry Administration (GUVD).
Mozyakov said that those units responsible for investigating crime and ensuring public safety were particularly inept; that police departments in the Admiralteisky, Tsentralny, Primorsky and Gatchina districts had received particularly bad marks; and that St. Petersburg had the highest rate of street crime in Russia.
Local Interior Ministry representatives say that Mozyakov's statements were a sign that changes within the St. Petersburg police force were likely.
"Those guilty of these infringements will be punished, as Mozyakov clearly stated at the briefing, and there will certainly be a staff shake-up as well," said Pavel Rayevsky, the head of the press service for the local Interior Ministry Administration in an interview on Thursday.
But Rayevsky said that Mozyakov's claim that senior officials within the city police force would face charges was unrealistic.
"This is a simple case of disinformation," he said. "Only one middle-ranking official might face charges, and even this remains uncertain."
The staff shake-up Mozyakov promised at the briefing had actually already begun within the force, with the most significant change being the appointment of Mikhail Vanichkin as head of the St. Petersburg police on July 9.
The post became vacant when former chief Venyamin Petukhov retired in June. Prior to his appointment, Vanichkin had been working as the head of the Interior Ministry's national Interpol office.
While Mozyakov's report pointed to improper and illegal activities as being behind the city's police woes, a number of experts believe that the roots of the problems lay elsewhere.
"Mozyakov didn't mention the GUVD's most serious problem: that over 4,000 staff members have left in the past few years because the pay is too low for such a difficult job, and that people are continuing to leave," said Arkady Kramarev, a Legislative Assembly lawmaker who served as police chief between 1991 and 1994. "This means that the work load has doubled for many of the employees who have remained."
Rayevsky says that the majority of the irregularities identified during the Interior Ministry investigation involved reporting procedures.
"The assessment revealed that failure to register cases is the most common infringement," he said. "This is due to the fact that a department is evaluated on basis of the percentage of its cases that are solved. The fewer cases that are registered, the higher the percentage of solved cases is likely to be."
Kramarev said that the results of the assessment are neither as surprising nor deplorable as they were being made out to be. The problem of non-registration had always existed, he said, adding that it is not the responsibility of the police force to deal with the trivial situations that are often reported to them.
As for the assessment that St. Petersburg has become Russia's street-crime capital, Kramarev was just as dismissive.
"Statistics can mean anything," he said. "There is a very wise saying that goes as follows: 'All sciences were created by God, and all statistics by the Devil.'"
TITLE: Floods Cause Havoc On Black Sea Coast
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Flooding caused by torrential rains submerged the Black Sea coast Thursday, killing at least two people and leaving more than 100 people missing. Rail links and power were also cut off in parts of the Stavropol and Krasnodar regions.
The downpour came as Europe saw some of its worst flooding in decades, with fierce rainstorms filling London's subway system, ravaging wine grapes and olive groves in northern Italy and deluging scenic Austrian villages.
Seven Black Sea villages were flooded, forcing the evacuation of at least 440 people, said Oleg Grekov, a spokesperson for the Emergency Situations Ministry in the Southern Federal District. At least 100 people were missing, Grekov said.
The bodies of two flood victims were found in the Krasnodar village of Abrau-Dyurso, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
At least eight people, who had earlier been reported missing from that village after a local lake overflowed, were later found, Interfax reported.
Rising waters also submerged tourist camps and resorts in the Stavropol region, sweeping away a number of tourists who were camping near the Black Sea, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesperson for the Emergency Situations Ministry.
Beltsov said he did not know how many tourists were missing, but he said 10 people had been picked out of the water alive, two of them in critical condition.
A bus with 25 people was pushed off the road by a mudslide, but all onboard survived and rescuers were working to extricate the passengers, RTR television reported.
The port city of Novorossiisk was without electricity Thursday evening, as water rose high enough to submerge the ground floor of some houses in the city, trapping residents inside. Cars were also swept into the sea by rising lake waters, in what local residents described as the worst rains many could remember.
The Emergency Situations Ministry was sending a flight of rescue personnel from Moscow to the region Thursday evening.
RTR said more than 3,000 people - including many children - were stranded in Novorossiisk's train station.
Rains caused a 400-square-meter retaining wall to collapse over railroad tracks near a tunnel leading into Novorossiisk, blocking 10 trains from leaving the city, Grekov said. Five trains had earlier been blocked from entering the city, he said.
In the Krasnodar region, rain halted trains on routes between Minsk-Novorossiisk and Nizhny Tagil-Novorossiisk, the Railways Ministry said.
Other trains partially resumed service after a two-day standstill, but were running 24 to 27 hours behind schedule, the ministry said. Forty five trains had been stuck, and 16 extra trains have been put on the tracks to make up for the delays.
The rail disruptions started Tuesday when mudslides blocked traffic between Sochi and Tuapse.
The Railways Ministry said it has refunded the tickets of 4,668 travelers to the tune of 2.526 million rubles ($716,000) over the past two days.
Five repair trains and more than 500 railroad workers are fixing trains and tracks. Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev inspected the area Wednesday.
Meanwhile, in London, heavy rainfall caused extensive flooding of the city's subways and train system Thursday, closing several stations and cutting services before the morning rush hour.
In northern Italy, hail and heavy rain battered much of the region earlier in the week, damaging wine grapes, tobacco crops and olive groves. Vineyards in the Veneto region, where the Bardolino and Valpolicella wines are produced, were heavily damaged by hailstorms this past weekend. The Italian Agriculture Confederation estimated the damage would cost nearly $200 million.
In Austria, seemingly unending torrential rainfall caused widespread flooding that washed away bridges and roads in the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria and prompted the evacuation of hundreds of people cut off from the outside world. Drinking-water supplies, telephone service and power lines were seriously affected.
In Romania, two people drowned and hundreds of houses were flooded as storms and torrential rain hit several regions. In the Czech Republic, 2,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes in southern Bohemia, and a 21-year-old student was killed when a falling tree crushed a cottage in Pisek, 90 kilometers south of Prague, Czech state-run radio reported.
- AP, SPT
TITLE: A Collision Survivor's Harrowing Tale
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Perhaps more than anyone, Larisa Savitskaya can empathize with the two flight attendants who survived the recent Il-86 crash at Sheremetyevo Airport. She was in midair plane collision high above the forests of the Far East - and made it out alive.
"I didn't want to live after that," said Savitskaya, 41, the sole survivor of the 1981 crash that killed her husband, 25 other passengers and the crew of an An-24 turboprop plane. The pilots on the Tu-16 bomber that struck her plane also died.
As Savitskaya fell from 5,220 meters for a long eight minutes, the only thought going through her mind was how to soften the moment of impact.
"I reconciled with what had happened and didn't scream," she said in an interview this week. "There was no way to stay alive."
But she did.
Savitskaya, then 20, was returning from a honeymoon with her husband, Vladimir, also 20.
The morning flight was delayed until lunchtime, and the young couple spent hours waiting at the airport with the other passengers. "People waiting for the flight sat together. I remember many faces."
Savitskaya was sound asleep when the Tupolev bomber hit the turboprop at 5,220 meters, razing off its roof and severing both wings.
Her plane was 30 minutes away from home.
The bomber was from an air base in the town of Zavitinsk, not far from the collision.
"I thought it had been an explosion," Savitskaya said. "There was a cacophony of the wind whistling, people screaming. The cold was burning my face, the sky above my head ... It's difficult to compare it with anything else ... ."
"It abruptly changed my life.
"My husband was sitting next to me. I turned to look at him, he was taller, and his head was hit by the debris. I saw a river of blood, something at odds with life. But many people were still alive."
She turned to her husband and said good-bye. Then the plane fell apart.
She was thrown into an aisle and passed out.
When she came to, she realized was falling. She was still trapped inside a chunck of the plane.
She frantically tried to figure out how to make the impact less painful. Suddenly, she remembered a movie in which a woman survived a plane crash by clinging to her seat.
Savitskaya dragged her way to a window seat and sat down. She peered out into the low afternoon clouds, looking for the earth.
"I was waiting for the moment the airplane hit the ground," she said. "I was pushing against the seat with my hands and feet, perhaps hoping to absorb the blow."
The impact knocked Savitskaya unconscious. Trees broke the fall.
She suffered a concussion, a broken arm and rib and spinal injuries. She recovered consciousness a few hours later. It was raining and cold.
Two days passed. On the third day, she ventured outside the shell of the plane to look for help. She gave up and returned to the wreckage.
Shortly after, a surprised rescue team found her sprawled on the seat by the window.
Only eight years later did she find out why the plane had crashed.
"Officially planes never crashed in the Soviet Union," she said.
Five years later, life was returning to normal and she became a mother. She said she had wanted a child "for herself."
These days, she lives with her son, Georgy, 17, and a cat in a one-room Moscow apartment. She has lived in Moscow since 1990 and works for a real estate agency three days a week.
"I am still overwhelmed about what happened. I don't feel like it is over," she said.
She said she does not have nightmares. She usually only thinks about the crash when someone asks her about it or when a plane goes down.
Those memories flooded back when the Pulkovo Airlines Il-86 crashed shortly after takeoff July 28. Investigators said the two flight attendants survived the fall from 200 meters because they were in the rear section of the plane, which landed largely intact. Pilot error or a mechanical malfunction are suspected as the cause of the crash.
Savitskaya continues to fly despite the scrape with death. An engine that caught fire before a flight in 1990 did not scare her away either.
TITLE: Little Progress In Bomb Probe
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Wednesday, on the eve of second anniversary of the blast in a Pushkin Square underpass in Moscow that killed 13, Moscow city prosecutors released new details about how the attack was staged, but acknowledged that they have failed to make any arrests.
Two unidentified men dropped a briefcase and a plastic bag near a currency-exchange kiosk in the underpass at about 5:50 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2000, and hurried away in the after-work rush-hour crowd, according to a prosecutors' report obtained by The St. Petersburg Times.
Several minutes later, a home-made bomb, packed with the equivalent of 700 grams of TNT, detonated, killing 13 kiosk merchants and passersby and injuring 118. The bomb, made of TNT and hexagon, contained screws to increase its force and was wired to a small motorcycle battery, the report said.
Investigators have questioned more than 300 survivors and witness and compiled composite sketches of the suspects. One suspect is described as having a "clearly Caucasus" appearance, and both are said to be between 25 and 30 years old.
The blast was a deadliest attack in Moscow after the bombings of two apartment buildings almost a year earlier, in September 1999. More than 200 people were killed in those explosions, which served as pretext for Russia to launch a second military campaign in Chechnya.
City prosecutors remain uncertain about the motive for the Pushkin blast. They have investigated whether it was terrorism, hooliganism or a business dispute. In following the dispute theory, investigators have checked hundreds of offices, shops and warehouses belonging to more than 6,000 companies, the report said.
The identities of almost 6,500 people who left Moscow after the attack have been double-checked by investigators.
In exploring the possible hooliganism motive, prosecutors were able to arrest two members of the Kemerovo criminal group and convict them of illegal possession of weapons and drugs, the report said. However, prosecutors failed to link them to the explosion.
The report said that nobody has been detained or charged for the attack, and that the investigation was continuing.
TITLE: Georgians Identify Body Of Missing Army Officer
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia - Georgian forensic experts said they identified the body of a missing Russian officer Thursday, as Moscow and Tbilisi continued to trade accusations about the movement of Chechen rebels across their border.
The badly disfigured body, found Wednesday on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, was identified as Colonel Igor Zaitsev, a Russian officer who served with Russian forces in the Transcaucasus region, said Zaza Okruashvili, lead expert at Tbilisi's Center for Forensics.
Zaitsev, 52, disappeared July 27 in Tbilisi. After the body was found, his son was able to identify him Thursday, Okruashvili said. The victim appears to have died from several massive blows to the head, she said.
Police have detained a Georgian from the town of Rustavi in connection with Zaitsev's death, said Maya Mosidze, a spokesperson for Georgia's Interior Ministry.
A Russian Foreign Ministry official said Georgia should take full responsibility for the murder.
"The guilt for this crime lies entirely with the Georgian authorities," Russian diplomatic envoy Boris Malakhov said in a statement Thursday.
He said the killing had occurred against the backdrop of "aggressive action by fighters and international terrorists" against Russian interests in Georgia and accused Georgian officials of mounting a "noisy anti-Russian campaign" which encouraged criminals to murder Zaitsev.
Zaitsev served in the Transcaucasus region, which includes the three Soviet-era military bases that Russia maintains on Georgian territory.
Meantime, Moscow continued to criticize Tbilisi over its failure to hand over a group of 14 alleged Chechen rebels who were captured after crossing from Chechnya into Georgia on Saturday and Monday.
"Speaking about Georgia's policy in the fight against terrorism, one can say that it is duplicity. Complete duplicity," said Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov during a visit to Astrakhan, a southern Russian city on the Caspian Sea, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
In another sign of growing tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi, Georgian authorities put severe restrictions on Russian commercial flights Thursday, saying they could only cross Georgian airspace between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.
The decision came in response to a similar measure by Russia, which restricted Georgian commercial flights earlier this week, claiming it was necessary because of military exercises in Russia's North Caucasus region.
In Chechnya, seven Russian soldiers were killed and 12 wounded in rebel attacks and mine explosions over the preceding 24 hours, an official in the Moscow-backed administration in Chechnya said. Russian warplanes bombed rebel targets in two Chechen districts, Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt, while Russia artillery shelled targets in Vedeno and three other districts, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
TITLE: Lebed's Brother Pulls Out of Governor Race
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With only a month left before Krasnoyarsk's gubernatorial election, Alexei Lebed pulled out of the crowded race Tuesday, saying that the fight for control of the resource-rich Siberian region was turning ugly.
Lebed is the younger brother of former Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Lebed, who died in a helicopter crash earlier this year, and the governor of the neighboring Khakassia region.
"The fight for the post of my late brother is very dirty and will not end in September, and I do not want to take part in it," Lebed said in the city of Krasnoyarsk, Interfax reported.
Lebed was one of the first candidates to register for the Sept. 8 poll in Krasnoyarsk, where his brother had governed since 1998, and was considered one of the top contenders.
Alexei Titkov, a regional-elections analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said Lebed probably withdrew his candidacy after deciding his chances of winning were not high enough, and a defeat could deal a fatal blow to his career in Khakassia.
"Lebed has financial resources, but not enough to win the election," Titkov said. He said Lebed had the Kremlin largely to thank for his political career and perhaps he was not getting Moscow's backing in the Krasnoyarsk race.
A total of 29 candidates have applied to run in the Krasnoyarsk gubernatorial race, and 13 candidates have been registered, including Krasnoyarsk Mayor Pyotr Pimashkov, regional legislative-assembly Speaker Alexander Uss, Taimyr Governor Alexander Khloponin and Duma Deputy Sergei Glazyev, a Communist.
TITLE: Officials Struggling With Marijuana
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Marijuana is being grown on about 1 million hectares of Russia but drug-enforcement officials managed to destroy only a tiny one-thousandth of those crops in the first half of the year, officials said Tuesday, warning that the country's drug problem would grow.
Officials on the Interior Ministry's drug-enforcement taskforce said a dubious twist in legislation meant that even though they could find marijuana fields, they were banned from touching them.
"Local authorities, who are in charge of the land, must destroy the crops, and they often don't care," Sergei Pestretsov, a taskforce official, said at a news call.
Pestretsov and other officials said the law, poor police response, and other factors were to blame for the poor results seen so far this year in an attempt to crack down on drugs.
The number of registered drug addicts grew 5.5 percent in the first six months of 2002, compared to the same period in 2001, said Mikhail Melekhov, the taskforce's deputy head. As of July 1, about half a million drug users were registered in Russia, but the actual number may be five to eight times higher, he said.
He said two-thirds of drug users are unemployed and turn to illegal means, most commonly theft, to find the money to buy drugs.
About 104,000 criminal offenses related to drugs were registered in the first half of 2002, an increase of 19 percent compared with the same period last year. Some 52,000 people were charged for drug-related crimes in the first six months of 2002.
Melekhov blamed criminal gangs from the former republics of the Soviet Union for the drug problem, saying the business is controlled by 4,000 non-Russian criminal gangs that only hire Russians for simple jobs, like courier services.
"The fact that they are composed of ethnic groups makes penetration by our agents a very problematic task," he said.
According to the police, Tajiks accounted for 34 percent of the 1,300 non-Russian traffickers from 24 countries arrested this year. Azeris accounted for 18 percent, and Ukrainians 16 percent.
Wealthy and aggressive drug traffickers have little problem dealing with Russia's 7,000 drug-enforcement officers, who are underpaid and lacking in basic equipment, officials said.
"My forecast is unfavorable. The sale of drugs and their use will continue to grow, and the market share of hard drugs, like heroin and amphetamines, will increase," Melekhov said.
TITLE: Putin's Girls Having La Dolce Vita Break
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - At the personal invitation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the two teenage daughters of President Vladimir Putin are frolicking at one of Europe's fanciest sea resorts on monthlong summer vacation.
Maria, 17, and Yekaterina, 16, are swimming, suntanning and sightseeing around Sardinia during the day and spending the night at Berlusconi's luxurious La Certosa summer residence on the northern coast of the island, the Corriera Della Sera newspaper reported this week. Keeping them company is the prime minister's daughter Barbara, who speaks Russian.
A diplomat at the Italian Embassy in Moscow confirmed the report Wednesday.
News of Putin's daughters vacationing on the invitation of one of the richest men in Europe provided a rare insight into the jealously guarded private life of the Putin family. While Putin's wife, Lyudmila, makes occasional public appearances as the country's first lady, Putin has gone to great lengths to keep his daughters out of the limelight.
Maria and Yekaterina grew up in East Germany, where Putin worked as a KGB officer in the 1980s. Maria was born in St. Petersburg and Yekaterina in Dresden.
A Kremlin spokesperson refused to comment on the whereabouts of the president's daughters on Wednesday.
"We only have information about the president's work," the spokesperson said.
The Italian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Putin's daughters were vacationing in Italy.
"They are in Sardinia. However, there has been no official information about that," the diplomat said.
Maria and Yekaterina Putina are not the only guests at the La Certosa residence. Berlusconi's favorite singer Mariano Apicella is vacationing with them at the prime minister's invitation, Corriera Della Sera said.
The newspaper said Berlusconi is not only relaxing but also trying to lose some weight ahead of the wedding of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's daughter at the end of the month.
The Italian leader had a chance to check out Putin's Bocharov Ruchei summer residence earlier this year when he flew down to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for an informal meeting.
Corriera Della Sera said Barbara Berlusconi cut short a trip to Australia to welcome her Russian friends to Italy. Barbara, who is the same age as Maria, goes to a lyceum in Monza, outside Milan. Upon graduation, she intends to study management at the University of Milan.
Sardinia, located to the south of the French island of Corsica in the Mediterranian Sea, is a posh vacation sport catering to wealthy tourists.
All is not fun and games, however, for Putin's daughters. The La Nuova Sardinia newspaper reported Wednesday that one of the girls suffered airsickness during a helicopter trip to the neighboring Maddalena island on Tuesday and had to receive medical care.
It was not clear which daughter became sick.
Corriera Della Sera reported that Putin might join Maria and Yekaterina later this month for a few days.
The Kremlin would not comment on Putin's travel plans.
School starts at the beginning of September, and Maria and Yekaterina receive private lessons at home.
The trip to Italy is a change from the girl's low-profile lives. When Putin was elected president in 2000, his wife Lyudmila said, in one interview, that the family's lifestyle had become more discreet due to security concerns and both Maria and Yekaterina started studying at home.
The girls, whose courses include German, French and English, have complained that being pulled out of school did not mean less homework.
"We get a huge home assignment even now when we do not go to school, " Maria said in a rare interview published in a 2000 book about Putin titled, "In the First Person: Conversations With Vladimir Putin."
At the time, Maria wanted to study management and Yekaterina dreamed of becoming a furniture designer.
TITLE: Skating Officials Deny Olympic Fix
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian skating officials, coaches and judges on Thursday vehemently denied any wrongdoing at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and accused a U.S. judge of pressuring the other judges in the disputed pairs competition.
"We rarely open up our house to outsiders, but now we are forced to do so," Russian Skating Federation head Valentin Piseyev said at a news conference titled, "The incessant campaign of unfounded attacks on Russian skaters launched in North America."
Piseyev denied that he and other Russian skating officials in Salt Lake City had ever seen or talked to Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, the reputed Russian mobster who was arrested in Italy at the request of U.S. prosecutors last week. He is suspected of trying to fix the pairs and ice-dancing competitions at the games in February.
"These attempts to tarnish our athletes' reputations are due to growing competition in the world of figure skating, where big money is at play," said Tamara Moskvina, the coach of Russia's pairs champions Anton Sikharulidze and Yelena Berezhnaya. "Some people use dirty tricks, but we behave in a noble manner and suffer for it."
Russian judges Maria Sanaya and Alla Shekhovtsova, who judged the pairs and ice-dancing competitions, said they were not pressured by Tokhtakhounov or any other person who might have wanted the Russians to win.
"They talk about a vote-swapping deal. [French judge Marie-Reine] Le Gougne gave her vote to us in the pairs, and I voted for our skaters in the ice dancing," said Shekhovtsova. "Where is the actual swap? The allegations about a conspiracy are absurd."
Sanaya heaped criticism on U.S. referee Ronald Pfenning, saying he had shown a bias against the Russians.
She said Pfenning ordered the judges at the start of the short program to award Berezhnyaya and Sikharulidze scores no higher than 5.8 in order to give the others a chance. "You should have seen the faces of the judges at that moment," Sanaya said. "He had no right to say that."
She said Pfenning also told the judges from Russia, China and Canada to exercise caution in voting for their home teams and threatened to punish those who showed partiality.
In addition, she said Pfenning failed to inform the judges that the Canadian pair had skated 13 seconds longer than the permitted time limit of 2:40. She said that the judges would have had to give the Canadians a lower score, and that they would have come in no better than fourth place.
The Canadians, Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, were awarded duplicate gold medals after le Gougne said she had been pressured to vote for the Russians.
Sanaya said Pfenning rushed to notify the judges when the Russians skated 1 second over the limit.
Pfenning was unavailable Thursday, and an official in his office declined to comment.
Sanaya said she filed a complaint against Pfenning to the International Skating Union's executive committee in April and is still waiting for a reply. She said the complaint was forwarded to the union's technical committee, of which Pfenning is a member.
Vladimir Vasin, the deputy head of the Russian Olympic Committee, said Olympic rules would not allow the results of the Salt Lake Games to be changed, as some top Olympic officials have discussed doing should Tokhtakhounov be found guilty.
"Results are never reconsidered," he said. "Only judges may be punished for their mistakes."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Fliers Found
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A team searching for war artifacts and memorabilia in the Leningrad Oblast has found two crew members of an Il-2 bomber plane that was shot down during World War II that they were attempting to dig up, Interfax reported the oblast administration as announcing on Thursday.
Documents were also discovered among the wreckage, identifying the crew members as Junior Lieutenant Faradyk Sakhabutdinov, born in the village of Verkhny Tabyn in the Tartar Autonomous Republic, and Sergeant Yegor Kretov, born in the village of Molotycha in the Kursk Oblast.
Subsequent archive research has established that the Il-2 plane was part of the 281st air division, and that it was shot down by anti-aircraft shells in the region of Karbusel in April, 1943.
Swimming Risks
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The quality of water at the city's beaches has worsened as a result of the unusually high temperatures over recent weeks and increased use of the city's reservoirs, Interfax reported on Thursday.
In August, unsatisfactory levels of water purity were recorded in the Suzdal lakes, the Olgino reservoir and on the beaches at Kronshtadt on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. The national Epidemic Control Committee, which reported the findings, stressed that swimming in these locations had not been forbidden.
According to the committee's press service, the beaches of the Gulf of Finland, from the suburb of Lisy Nos to the town of Ushkovo, and the Razliv Lake to the north of the city remain open. Since July, a rise in the levels of algae, however, has been noted in shallow-water areas along the coastline. For this reason, the committee advises that these sections of the coast not be used for recreation.
Caspian Maneuvers
MOSCOW (AP) - Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov traveled to the Caspian Sea on Thursday to observe large-scale naval maneuvers, news agencies reported.
Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan also plan to participate in the maneuvers, which are to last from Aug. 8 to Aug. 15. Turkmenistan, which proclaims neutrality, and Iran declined to take part.
The maneuvers are to include exercises to protect civilian ships from terrorist attacks, and will culminate in an assault on a barren coast to destroy a large militant group trapped by the sea, Itar-Tass reported.
Some 10,000 service personnel from the Russian armed forces, 60 vessels and 30 aircraft will take pace in the exercises, the agency reported.
WWII Mine Blast
MOSCOW (AP) - Two people were killed and four others injured when a World War II-era mine exploded during a demining operation in northwest Russia, an official said Thursday.
A 36-year-old sapper and a 16-year-old boy were killed near the village of Sosnovy on Wednesday when a member of their demining group attempted to defuse a World War II-era mine and it exploded, said Lyudmila Tokareva, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman in the northwestern region of Karelia.
Four other teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 16, were injured in the blast, she said. The teenagers were all members of the demining group, from Archangelsk in northern Russia. They were taken to a local hospital.
TITLE: Foreign Investor Tries Desperate Remedy
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prompt, brief and vague.
That's the kind of answer Henri Bardon got when he asked President Vladimir Putin to redress the loss of $12 million he invested in a Vladivostok grain company.
Bardon, who runs Seattle-based Euro Asian Investment Holding Inc., sent a six-page petition to Putin on July 1. He detailed how his investment in a firm that had a regional monopoly on flour and animal feed when he bought into the company, were essentially commandeered, making him a shareholder in an empty company.
For three years, Bardon has unsuccessfully pursued his case through the courts and has lobbied the local administration, the State Customs Committee, the local prosecutor's office, the Tax Police and the Federal Securities Commission. He has even brought his plight to the attention of the U.S. Commerce Department, as well as several U.S. senators. He characterized his appeal to Putin as his last hope.
In reply, Putin's control office, a sort of legal comptroller to the president, issued a three-paragraph statement that read:
"The Central Control Department of the president of the Russian Federation has considered the application of the president of Euro Asian Investment Holding Inc. to the president of the Russian Federation.
"Taking into account the fact that Russian legislation protects shareholders and investors from unfair actions of the management of joint-stock companies, your company has the right to pursue your interests in court.
"The above application has been forwarded to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, as a body performing supervisory functions."
When contacted by telephone, an official at the control department refused to say what prosecutors do with letters received from his department or how many similar cases his office has handled.
An official at the prosecutor's office said the letter would be forwarded to prosecutors in Vladivostok, to whom Bardon has already appealed.
Bardon claimed that the letter seemed like just another example of official buck-passing.
"It appears that it is being referred to the prosecutor. Maybe that is good. Who knows?" he said by e-mail from Seattle. "It is the first such letter we have received from any single authority... but it's too little, too late."
The story began in 1997, when Bardon paid $2 million for a 20-percent stake in Primorkhleboprodukt, or PKP. He and a partner then set up Euro Asian Investment Holdings, or EAIH, to manage the investment and subsequently invested $10 million in working capital.
PKP hit hard times in the aftermath of the August 1998 crisis. Bardon went to a regional court in 1999 and obtained a ruling that froze PKP's assets as a safeguard for his investment, but the company's debts continued to grow, reaching some $10 million - about two-thirds of which was owed to Bardon - by the start of this year.
On Jan. 31, after months of negotiations, Bardon signed a debt-restructuring deal with PKP under which he would be paid back $3.7 million over four years. He also agreed to unfreeze the assets in exchange for an additional 40-percent stake in the company.
"They told us that they needed to use them [the assets] as a collateral for loans to pay off debt," Bardon said earlier this year. PKP was to make the first payment March 31, but the money never came. Nor did PKP take out any loans or hand over the 40-percent stake. Instead, on March 11, the company's board approved a new valuation of PKP's prime assets and their sale. The properties were priced cheaply and sold quickly.
Bardon now has 20 percent of a company with no assets, and he rents an office in a building he once owned.
Last month, Bardon met with Igor Ivanov, the deputy governor of Primorye, who until last fall served as chairperson of the board of directors of Vladkhleb, the company that purchased the biggest asset sold by PKP in the March selloff.
According to the minutes of the meeting, provided by Bardon, Ivanov said: "I am prepared to assist you within the limits of my authority, but sorting out business disputes is not within the competence of the regional administration. Such issues must be resolved in court."
Bardon said Ivanov told him that he had pursued the wrong strategy in Primorye, such as applying to the London International Arbitration Court, and blamed him for painting a bleak picture of the region's investment climate.
Next month, Vladivostok will host an international investment forum that is expected to attract hundreds of foreign companies interested in investing in the region, and Ivanov is clearly unhappy with the negative press Bardon's case has generated.
"You are looking at the whole investment potential of Primorye through the prism of one person - the director of an enterprise of which you are a shareholder," Ivanov said, according to the transcript of the meeting. "As a result of your efforts, a negative impression of the investment climate in Primorye as a whole has formed."
A Vladivostok court is next scheduled to review EAIH's complaint against the sale of PKP's assets Aug. 27.
TITLE: Fears Not Calmed By Kudrin
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Cabinet continued to puzzle investors and analysts Wednesday, uttering contradictory remarks regarding the country's fiscal health and borrowing plans.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin - apparently apropos of nothing - said that the government was "not expecting any default or sharp devaluation of the ruble," news agencies reported. Kudrin, who is also a deputy prime minister, added: "Nor will we allow inflation to rise or wages to lose value in 2003."
Few observers think Russia is anywhere near a repeat of 1998, when it devalued the ruble and defaulted on its domestic debt. However, many agree that the overall budget situation is showing signs of trouble, leaving the government little room to maneuver in the coming debate with parliament over the 2003 spending bill.
"One simply has to ignore any discussion of potential default or devaluation next year, because there is really nothing beneath [such assumptions]," said Marcin Wiszniewski, Russia analyst with Morgan Stanley in London.
In an effort to make good on social promises and to aid struggling regions, the government this week revised all the major parameters of this year's budget, cutting the surplus target to 0.53 percent of gross domestic product from 1.63 percent, and increasing expenditures by 7 percent.
As a result, the 2003 surplus was cut from 0.77 to 0.6 percent of GDP and the size of the so-called financial-reserve fund, which is built to cover the ballooning international-debt payments due next year, will largely depend on the future of the cancelled privatization of a 6-percent stake in LUKoil, the country's largest oil company.
"The recent budget adjustments have reduced flexibility for the government and made its job tougher, but it is still manageable," Wiszniewski said. "It will need to do more privatizations, borrow more domestically and probably issue Eurobonds," he said.
To fill the possible gaps, the government originally planned to issue up to $2-billion worth of Eurobonds this year, which was written into the 2002 budget. Until Wednesday, however, the Finance Ministry said it was confident that it would not need to resort to tapping the international markets to make ends meet.
However, Reuters quoted an undisclosed source in the Finance Ministry as saying Wednesday that the government is planning to issue $1 billion to $1.5 billion in Eurobonds this year to pad the financial-reserve fund so it can meet its debt problem next year, when more than $17 billion comes due.
Meanwhile, both Interfax and Prime-Tass quoted another unnamed, top-ranking official as saying that the Finance Ministry is determined to balance the 2003 budget without external borrowing.
Wiszniewski called the contradictions dangerous for emerging-market countries, since trading in their bonds is linked. "This kind of announcement should not be made when Brazil is in the middle of a crisis," he said.
It also leaves a negative impression, said an investment banker at a large European bank, who asked that his name be withheld. "The whole communication policy is so incoherent and inconsistent it makes the whole situation confusing."
TITLE: Gazprom Won't Sell Off Stake in NTV Prior to Elections
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Gazprom will not sell its media holdings until after the presidential election in 2004, Vedomosti quoted Gazprom sources as saying Wednesday.
"This was a political decision that was made from above," an unnamed executive at the state-controlled gas monopoly was quoted as saying.
After acquiring the remains of exiled tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky's stakes for debts owed to it by his Media-MOST holding, Gazprom subsidiary Gazprom-Media now owns outright the top-three national television broadcaster NTV, its cable arm, NTV-Plus, second-tier channel TNT and 66-percent of the influential talk-radio station Ekho Moskvy, as well as a controlling stake in the 7 Dnei publishing house.
Officially, Gazprom says it wants to wait until the charter capital of its media holdings double to $700 million before selling. However, two company sources told Vedomosti that the timeframe for selling the assets had nothing to do with finances.
Gazprom representatives have been talking about the sale of the former Media-MOST companies to a strategic investor in the media business since they received control of them last year.
However, the sale was held up initially because of the need to conduct an evaluation of all assets by German bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. President Vladimir Putin then said that the amount of the valuation, which Gazprom has not published, "was not impressive."
The date by which these assets are to be sold was not named by Gazprom.
Gazprom received control of the assets in exchange for $262 million in debt.
Gazprom-Media board chairperson Alexander Dybal told the newspaper that selling now would not be beneficial for Gazprom.
"We are not talking about selling dates," he said.
TITLE: Aeroflot Predicts $80-Million Profits
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aeroflot expects to quadruple its net profit this year, according to international accounting standards, to a staggering $80 million, the flagship carrier's financial director said Wednesday.
"We are hoping for a net profit of $80 million this year; that is what we have put in our budget," Nikolai Kuznetsov said in a conference call. "We believe we have some possibilities to improve operating margins."
Aeroflot had an operating profit of about $45 million in the first half of 2002 according to preliminary estimates, compared with $15 million in the same period last year, Kuznetsov said. If the positive trend continues throughout the rest of the year, Aeroflot could reach $80 million for all of 2002, he said.
The airline is cutting expenditures by slashing a number of loss-making routes while boosting the frequency of flights to popular destinations and grounding fuel-intensive aircraft such as the Il-86, Il-62 and Il-76.
Aeroflot is also restructuring its fleet of 27 aircraft to use only two types of planes. By 2004, Aeroflot plans to have nine long-range Boeing 767s and 18 medium-range Airbus 320s.
Kuznetsov said that restructuring the fleet will allow the company to save up to $100 million annually.
Analysts, however, said Aeroflot's profit forecast is too optimistic.
Vladimir Savov of Brunswick UBS Warburg said the airline's net profit would come in at around $20 million.
Madina Butayeva of Aton said net profit cannot be quadrupled by better route management and fleet utilization, and suggested that an $80 million profit can only be achieved through "accounting manipulation."
TITLE: No Role Models These
AUTHOR: By Zia Mian, Ramamurti Rajaraman and Frank von Hippel
TEXT: ALTHOUGH the current South Asian crisis seems to have ebbed for the present, the underlying dynamic remains. The next flare-up will be even more dangerous if the region's nuclear confrontation develops in the same direction as the Cold War U.S.-U.S.S.R. standoff - with nuclear missiles on alert, aimed at each other and ready to launch at the shortest warning.
As Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, has said, it was "no thanks to deterrence, but only by the grace of God" that the United States and the Soviet Union survived their crises. The question is, will South Asia be so fortunate?
India and Pakistan are using the U.S. and Russian postures as blueprints. India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine calls for everything the superpowers have - although on a more modest scale - including a "triad" of bombers and land and sea-based missiles. It envisages an "assured capability to shift from peacetime deployment to fully employable forces in the shortest possible time." Finally, it calls for "space-based and other assets ... to provide early warning." Pakistan has, from the beginning, been determined to obtain nuclear capabilities matching those of India.
Early-warning systems have little point unless there is the ability to order a retaliatory launch in the time before the attacking weapons arrive. Pakistan's Shaheen missiles and the latest version of India's Agni missile use solid fuel. The United States used solid fuel in its Minuteman intercontinental missiles so that they were launch-ready at all times.
A launch-on-warning posture would be far more dangerous in South Asia, however, than it was for the United States and the Soviet Union. It takes a frighteningly short 30 minutes for a missile to travel from the United States to Russia. Still, that allows at least some time to figure out whether the warning of incoming missiles that one is receiving is real, or if it is the result of a human or hardware problem. In South Asia, the total missile flight time between India and Pakistan is only about 10 minutes.
Neither country is believed to keep its nuclear weapons deployed on missiles or aircraft on a regular peacetime basis today. But such non-deployment characterized the early U.S. and Soviet nuclear postures as well. As the recent South Asian crisis abates, it's unclear to what extent the various steps taken in the past few months toward nuclear deployment will be reversed. Once elements of South Asia's nuclear arsenal begin to be permanently deployed on high alert, U.S.-Soviet experience shows, bureaucratic and political forces will come into play, resisting any attempt to roll the situation back from a hair-trigger posture.
If we are to help prevent launch-ready weapons from becoming a dangerous reality in South Asia, the nuclear superpowers must become more responsible role models. The United States and Russia could, for example, take off alert now the nuclear weapons that are, under the Bush-Putin agreement, scheduled to be decommissioned over a decade. They could also open talks focusing on options for taking the rest off alert in a mutually transparent manner that would not make their nuclear forces vulnerable to surprise attack. The United States could keep its ballistic-missile submarines out of range of Russia instead of sending them forward with their missiles launch-ready as it does today.
These steps would clear the way to take up India's suggestion for an international conference to identify ways of eliminating nuclear dangers. It would be hard for India and Pakistan to say no. India has made this proposal each year since 1998 in a U.N. resolution on reducing nuclear danger. The chief goal should be a global zero alert for nuclear forces.
As the nuclear superpowers unwind their Cold War hair-trigger postures, they should also do nothing to encourage India and Pakistan to move toward thier own nuclear deployment. Political leaders and military planners in South Asia have sought U.S. command-and-control technology, citing concerns about nuclear-weapons safety. Such technology could also provide them the confidence to deploy the weapons and, in a crisis, adopt more threatening and dangerous postures. Down that path lies disaster.
Zia Mian is a Pakistani physicist on the research staff of Princeton University. Ramamurti Rajaraman is a physics professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Frank Von Hippel is a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University.
TITLE: Building Castles or The Future?
TEXT: THE presidential property department has proudly announced that when European leaders visit Russia next year, they will be met in style.
Some 3,000 workers are toiling overtime to complete the renovation of the Konstantin Palace, a regal 18th century residence that will serve as a presidential abode and an upscale center for international conferences. The 150-hectare complex just 40 kilometers outside of St. Petersburg will include a helipad, an intricate network of canals, piers on the Gulf of Finland and 20 two-floor mansions for honored guests.
Official cost estimates have climbed over the past two years, with the latest figure given by Kremlin Property Manager Vladimir Kozhin being $200 million, although industry experts believe that to be unrealistically low.
Kozhin told reporters last week that not a kopek of the $70 million spent thus far on the project came from the budget.
Nonetheless, the irony - some might say hypocrisy - of the project is hard to overlook, considering the dreary shade of Russia's fiscal picture.
Just last month, President Vladimir Putin railed against the Cabinet for failing to pay state wages on time and lagging behind in payments in the so-called social sphere. He lamented that, despite pledges by the government to cut wage arrears by the summer, they "have grown, and considerably so."
The Finance Ministry said this week that public-sector wage arrears as of July 1 totaled about $92 million - only some $20 million more than the donations so skillfully solicited for the Konstantinovsky complex.
Moreover, while it is true that the money for the palace has come from corporate sponsors, many of those companies - including energy giants Rosneft, Slavneft and Gazprom - are state-controlled and, therefore, particularly pliable donors.
Officials in charge of the Konstantinov project have emphasized that the renovation of the palace is neither a whim nor a luxury, but a vibrant sign of Russia's rejuvenation and its integration with the West.
The goal is laudable. But actions speak louder than words. If Moscow would like to demonstrate a true commitment to the values of Western democracy, perhaps the Kremlin should consider using its finesse in fund-raising to help bolster hospitals and schools or pay doctors and teachers.
Otherwise, there is little doubt that, come September, as the laborers at the Konstantin Palace begin work on its interior, thousands of school teachers marching to their classrooms will not regard the project as a sign that Moscow is "turning its face" toward Europe. Instead, they will feel it is turning a decidedly different part of its anatomy toward them.
TITLE: Denouncing Debasement of Russia's Soul
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: WHAT could be more gratifying than publicly exposing a friend and mentor? I shall allow myself that satisfaction in this column.
Dmitry Furman is one of Russia's brightest political scientists and winner of the Cassandra prize for journalism. Last week, he published an article in the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti called "History Will Determine the Guilty," about the question of who blew up the apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999, and why. There are two competing versions, Furman explains: the government's official line, in which the Wahhabites are the main culprits, and the Berezovsky-Prokhanov line, in which the culprit is the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He concludes that, from the logical point of view, the second version of events is more convincing.
The shock of such evil acts inevitably led Russians to unite around the then-little-known prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and that, in turn, helped him get elected president. The Wahhabites, on the other hand, couldn't have achieved any rational goal by carrying out the bombings and, if they were motivated by a pure, abstract desire for revenge, they could have chosen a more fitting target than an apartment building full of simple working people.
But history shows that the logical explanation isn't always the accurate one, as Furman notes. "When people encounter something truly terrible, it is easier for them to believe that it was the result of a diabolical plan than the action of morons or just plain absurdity." For this reason, popular belief for centuries blamed Boris Godunov for the death of Tsarevich Dimitry, the rightful heir of Ivan the Terrible. After all, Godunov went on to become tsar. This belief lingered despite the fact that Dimitry was an epileptic who truly could have fallen onto his own knife, as the official version held.
We will probably never learn the truth about the apartment bombings, Furman believes, but in the popular consciousness, the "Berezovsky version" will probably win out. As always, Furman delivers a substantial commentary on an issue about which most people have already sort of made up their minds. So what got my goat? Most of all, his infringement on the people's copyright!
I remember well how at the time of the bombings the thought automatically entered even my politically correct mind that the poor Chechens had gone completely nuts - unless the blasts were the work of the special services. I'm quite sure that a similar thought occurred to just about every citizen of this country. The paranoid nature of our consciousness feeds the insanity of our lives, and vice versa. In our hearts, often without even realizing it, we are proud to live in a country where both citizens and the powers that be are capable of every sort of evil. Herein lies the mystery of the Russian soul.
Furman has unthinkingly taken what nearly every Russian already ponders and labeled it the "Berezovsky version." He has associated a popular idea with a man whose very name evokes associations with swindling and hustling. It is a disgrace!
As a true Russian, I simply cannot accept this. And so I have decided to respond in the true Russian tradition - by writing this public denunciation of Dmitry Furman, a man whom for a quarter century I have considered my mentor.
Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda)
TITLE: end of another era for poligon
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With an all-night concert featuring a dozen bands last Thursday, the notorious alternative rock club Poligon celebrated its eighth anniversary - and the closing of its current location on Lesnoi Prospect.
According to a posting on the club's official Web site, Poligon will reappear in a different location before long.
During its eight-year history, Poligon has held hundreds of concerts by both popular and completely unknown bands - the latter often played on the condition that they would buy a portion of the tickets for their own show - and gained a somewhat odious political reputation.
Poligon's history began in August 1994, when Viktor Tikhomirov, formerly the bassist in popular band Kino, started to promote concerts in an officers' club in the village of Sertolovo. Tikhomirov bought various pieces of equipment and, eventually, assembled a decent concert sound system. The proto-Poligon only managed to hold a few concerts in the village, which, despite its small size at the time, boasted ten criminal groups, according to the club's official history.
Poligon's second location was in the Humanitarian University in Kupchino, in southern St. Petersburg, in September 1994. It then moved to the Krasny Oktyabr House of Culture on the Petrograd Side of the city, followed by a former cinema on the corner of the rowdy Ligovka - or Ligovsky Prospect - and Obvodny Kanal, and, finally, to Lesnoi Prospect.
Though the club's best days were on Ligovka in 1996 and 1997, Poligon was often criticized for its acts and crowd, which was mainly drunken teenagers coming from the city's outskirts.
Yevgeny Fyodorov, of the city's best-known alternative band Tequilajazzz, which chose the place for showcasing its album "Virus" in 1997, says he has lost his illusions about Poligon since then.
He says that he did not like the atmosphere at the club's last location. "The previous location was [a notorious] place - the 'extreme Ligovka' - but here everything has somehow changed, and not at all in the right direction."
"And then the [repertoire] changed - [nationalist rock acts] Korroziya Metalla, Yegor Letov and the rest started to appear - and it became uninteresting for us," he added.
Letov's band, Grazhdanskaya Oborona, from Omsk in Siberia, became famous as Russia's leading punk band in the late 1980s, but later, in 1993, became extremely nationalistic, joined Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party and founded the abortive Russky Proryv (Russian Breakthrough) movement.
Korroziya Metalla is a pro-Nazi thrash-metal band from Moscow that incorporates a Hitler lookalike for its stage set and sings xenophobia-packed songs with such titles as "Heil Fuhrer."
No other local club - with the exception of Spartak, which folded last year - has hosted these two acts.
Poligon's manager, Pavel Klinov, however, defended the club. "Korroziya played only once, and we have, on principle, refused to work with them since then," he wrote in an e-mail interview this week. "As for Letov, he stopped his political activities long ago and, by the way, he wasn't involved in any propaganda activities at the club."
However, at the press conference after his concert in 1998, Letov voiced Soviet nationalist sentiments, and hinted at being backed by armed militants.
The club's repertoire broadened over the past 12 months to include more popular acts such as the electronic band Deadushki, Moscow's alternative hip-hop performer Delfin, and even St. Petersburg's best-known rock band, Akvarium. For the latter, it was the first performance at a local rock club.
Rumor has it that the new Poligon will be in the city's southwest, a working-class district, and that the new location will only be accessible by bus from the Prospect Veteranov metro station, the last station on the subway's red line, or by car.
TITLE: 'dance trip' turns into nightmare
AUTHOR: by Anastasia Boreiko
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It was supposed to be the biggest event of the summer, a triumph for one of Moscow's biggest clubs in the backyard of its competitors in the Northern Capital.
However, Saturday night's "Ultimate Dance Trip Fort 2002," at the Alexander Fort, in the Gulf of Finland near Kronshtadt, was far from the smash-hit success for which the exclusive Moscow club Zeppelin had hoped, after an organizational disaster left thousands of those wanting to get to the party stranded in Kronshtadt, waiting for one of the official boats that were the only way to get to the fort.
The hype had been building for weeks, with posters and billboards covering the city, and the organizers promising a top-quality sound system and a galaxy of star DJs from around the world.
The high-prestige nature of the event was reflected in the ticket prices - 350 rubles ($11.11) for a regular ticket and 500 rubles ($15.87) for a VIP ticket, which allowed entrance to the fourth dance floor and was supposed to guarantee transport to the fort on a special boat.
However, many of those with tickets - VIP or standard - waited in vain for several hours to get on a boat bound for the fort. The three boats - two standard and one VIP - were meant to run regularly from 8 p.m. on Saturday to noon on Sunday, to ensure the event ran smoothly, said Zeppelin's art director, Dmitry Ashman, in a telephone interview from Moscow on Thursday.
Those present in Kronshtadt, however, told a different story. Alexander Sirzhkov, who had paid for a VIP ticket, said that, although the boats were running early in the evening, there was a two-hour period during which no boats ran at all. At 2 a.m., said Sirzhkov, there had been no boats for two hours, and his group went home disappointed. Two boats subsequently departed, but these were the last of the night. Others present said that, by 1 a.m., not even those with VIP tickets were able to reach the fort.
According to Kirill Bratenkov, Zeppelin's PR representative, approximately 25,000 people - with tickets and without - came to the dock in Kronshtadt, hoping to go to the fort. Once at the dock, however, those with and without tickets formed a disappointed and somewhat chaotic crowd, as no ticket checking was enforced before getting on a boat.
As the evening progressed, the site became hectic - when the boat did come to pick up passengers, many of those anxious to get to the fort jumped the rails, resulting in incidents with people falling into the water.
According to Ashman, the problems began due to the fact that, by Kronshtadt's maritime law, only three boats are allowed to run the route to the fort at any one time, and the boats' slow movement led to a huge build-up of people waiting. Private boats were not allowed.
However, Ashman explained, the build-up would not have been so severe, were it not for several other factors. First, he said, 5,000 fake tickets to the event had been printed, leading to a much larger crowd than the organizers expected.
Ashman also laid heavy blame on the boat-operating company. He insisted that, "since the boats were working on an hourly rate, the crew wanted to take more time transporting people around." Finally, he explained, the security staff hired for the evening was unable to control the crowd or reduce crowd numbers.
Ashman said that 2,000 regular tickets and 800 VIP tickets had been sold, in addition to approximately 600 free passes for sponsors, the media and special guests. However, he also said that some 8,000 to 10,000 people managed to reach the festival, a condition he blamed on the security staff for not checking tickets for validity, for which, he implied, the staff was taking money.
In addition, Ashman said, the Kronshtadt police and the OMON troops from St. Petersburg who were present did not help matters by trying to ingratiate themselves with young women waiting for the boats, and taking money from event-goers, rather than doing their job.
The venture left a sour taste for many who had anticipated a good night out, and also, according to Ashman, left Zepellin club to cover a financial loss, although he would not give a figure.
Alexandra Dergachyova, the art director of the Flagmann vodka company, one of the event's sponsors, said that, although she made it to the fort and considered the party itself to have been a great success, the organization had major flaws.
"It simply doesn't look good" that people who paid for tickets did not get to the fort, she said. However, she added that "it is not completely out of the question for Flagmann vodka to invest in future projects."
Ashman recognized that the organizers of the event "seriously broke the trust of the people." He explained that the organizers were working on a way to compensate those who purchased tickets, although he did acknowledge that it will be hard to ensure that the right people - i.e. those with tickets who did not get to the fort - receive compensation.
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The hip, grungy student bar Cynic, which has been on the brink of closing down for the past six months or so, has finally called it quits.
Cynic's owner, Vladimir Postnichenko, said it was officially closed on July 23, though it kept operating "secretly" until last week, when the electricity supply was cut off.
According to Postnichenko, the popular hangout will move to 4 Pereulok Antonenko, just off St. Isaac's Square.
Postnichenko said the staff managed to move most of the old club's furniture to the new place, next to PORT Club, including the bar, which they had to saw into five pieces.
Postnichenko, who earlier planned to launch the new location before September, now says it won't be open until November or even December, because of bureaucracy. "The builders work very fast, but it takes a lot of time to have officials sign every paper," says Postnichenko.
The building near Moskovsky Vokzal that Cynic occupied is scheduled to be torn down to provide space for a hotel.
Meanwhile, the popular band Babslei has produced an offshoot.
The three members which quit the all-female, folk-punk band in May have formed a new, also all-female, band called Iva Nova.
Iva Nova's lineup includes Babslei's founder, drummer Katya Fyodorova, accordion player Lena Zhornik and guitarist Inna Lishenkevich, as well as new members, bassist Lena Stankevich of indie pop band Kiparis, and singer Vera Ogaryova, who used to sing country and jazz and spent a stint as a member of a Bulgarian choir.
"There were some purely musical, but not vindictive, difficulties [in the band]," says Fyodorova. "I didn't quite understand what happened - I was in London at a festival and when I came back, everything changed. So we just turned around and left. Let them do it themselves if they're so self-confident."
Because of the contract between Babslei and local record label Bomba-Piter, the new band can't use Babslei's older material, but Fyodorova says Iva Nova has already prepared a full set of new material.
"Except for four songs," she says. "There were eight newer [Bablei] songs not included in the contract, so we divided them evenly [between the two bands.]"
Fyodorova claims the style won't differ drastically from that of Babslei. "[Zhornik], [Lishenkevich] and I used to write most of the songs, which is why I can't say things have changed much. But the sound has probably become tighter, because the bassist is very strong."
Iva Nova played a low-profile, six-song set at Orlandina on July 21.
According to Fyodorova, Iva Nova will not incorporate a violin, in order not to sound similar to Babslei, whereas Babslei now performs without an accordion player.
Iva Nova will perform at the recently-opened Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Psychological Center for (TsaPLya) on Aug. 30. Call 232-3344 for more information. The band's full-fledged concert debut is scheduled for Sept. 7 at Moloko.
Meanwhile, Babslei will play at City Club on Aug. 15.
- by Sergey Chernov
TITLE: comedy venue has serious food
AUTHOR: by Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The self-described "art cabaret cafe-bar-restaurant" Prival Komediantov ("Comedians' Rest-Stop") has to be one of the most intriguing venues that this column has covered in some time.
Its rather inconspicuous exterior - a standard Petersburg rococo facade facing Marsovo Polye, where the Moika River meets Kanal Griboyedova - conceals a series of spacious rooms, separated by heavy velvet drapes. The first room, done up in red and green, introduces the "comedian" theme. Photographs of famous Russian actors adorn the walls, while the predominate place on the bar goes to two large televisions playing Soviet comedy classics. These provided an unusual background noise for our meal - slightly irritating after a while - in the form of the first half of "Kavkazskaya Plennitsa," ("Prisoner of the Caucasus") from the legendary director Lenoid Gaidai.
The second room, blue from floor to ceiling, is more of an evening restaurant, and is fitted with a small stage and a piano, where bands and stand-up comedians perform on Friday evenings. (There is an entrance fee of between 150 and 200 rubles for this room during these events.) The third room is predominantly yellow, and presumably meant for private parties or celebrations, as it is smaller and more intimate than the others, and has just one table - albeit a large one.
We opted for the first room, and sat down on folding, cinema-style seats that turned out to be more comfortable than most real cinema seats. We ordered three Sibirskaya Korona beers (60 rubles, $1.90) and pored over the menu, which is somewhat more restrained stylistically than the extravagant interior. However, there are a few unusual dishes offered (for example, an omlet dlya bednykh muzikantov, or "omelet for poor musicians," under the hot-snacks section) and an impressive selection of teas and coffees.
As a starter, my first dining companion had cold slices of steamed sturgeon with horseradish sauce (160 rubles, $5.08), which he said was tasty, although a bit on the dry side. This was followed in rapid succession by a large, grilled tuna steak (190 rubles, $6.03). My companion polished this off with little complaint, although he said that he thought the fish was not as fresh as he had hoped, and it contained a few bones. The baked-potato garnish (45 rubles, $1.43) both looked and tasted delicious, wrapped in foil with a sour-cream dressing.
Prival Komediantov's menu boasts an extensive selection of fish dishes, making a nice alternative for non-meat-eaters. True vegetarians, however, will be disappointed with the absence of main-course dishes at Prival Komediantov, although there are a fair number of meat-free starters, both hot and cold.
My second dining companion, however, is an unabashed carnivore, and had a sizable plate - Prival Komediantov is not stingy with its portions - of veal chops in cherry sauce (190 rubles, $6.03) with fried potatoes (45 rubles, $1.43). He thoroughly enjoyed this combination, although the cherry sauce, in his opinion, was probably canned rather than home-made. His starter, the mushroom julienne (90 rubles, $2.86) - or "Mushrooms a la Novgorod," as the English-language menu rather ambitiously described the dish - was also decent enough, if smaller than he had expected.
I couldn't resist the cheese plate (140 rubles, $4.44) as a starter. However, cheese in Russia never comes close to the standards in my native France, and here again I was disappointed. The small cubes of camembert and edam were quite bland, but the Danish blue was piquant and enjoyed by all.
For a main, I chose the special, smoked reindeer (110 rubles, $3.49), trying not to think that this animal was probably in the red book of endangered species. (I checked later, though, and it isn't). The meat, which came with slices of peach and apple, proved to be surprisingly tasty and tender, and the fried-potato garnish was satisfactory, although slightly greasy.
My dining companions were not yet finished, despite starting to sink comfortably into their seats, and decided there was still some space for dessert. The menu here contains a few slightly unusual items. My first dining companion opted for tiramisu (65 rubles, $2.06), my second companion for a baked apple with nuts and honey (60 rubles, $1.90), and I let them talk me into ordering the medovik, or honey cake (also 60 rubles).
While neither of the first two items won high praise from my companions, it nonetheless did not last long. The medovik was declared a great success by all, as I was forced to surrender it to my insatiable companions after a few bites, being too full to manage it myself.
Two decent espressos (30 rubles, $0.95, each) closed the meal. We decided that Prival Komediantov is a strange, cozy place, and promised ourselves another visit.
Prival Komediantov, 1 Nab. Reki Moiki. Tel.: 314-3961. Open daily, noon to midnight, later on Friday and Saturday. Menu in Russian and English. Dinner for three, with alcohol: 1,540 rubles ($48.89).
TITLE: the new face of tatyana
TEXT: Everything is going well for Irina Matayeva, a soprano who has been a member of the Mariinsky Theater's Academy of Young Singers since 1998.
Having returned from Washington, where she sang the p art of Micaela in a production of Bizet's "Carmen" conducted by Placido Domingo, she is now rehearsing for the lead female role of Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's "Yevgeny Onegin," for the Mariinsky's new production, which premieres on Wednesday. This "Yevgeny Onegin" is something of a departure for the Mariinsky, as it is being staged by an all-French team, led by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier.
As Matayeva waited for the rehearsals to start, Larisa Doctorow asked her a few questions.
q:Is this your first appearance as Tatyana?
a:No, I sang it in my class's performance when we graduated from the [Rimsky-Korsakov] Conservatory in 1997. Also, a Mariinsky soloist performing the part fell ill, and I was called on to replace her. Since then, I have performed the role from time to time. ... I like the role very much, and, besides, it suits my voice.
q:Do you think that you have to be in love with Onegin to sing Tatyana?
a:Yes ... for me it's indispensable. But here we have several casts and I sing with a different partner each time. I cannot be in love with all of them, although, ideally, I should be, because this opera is about love.
q:How do you manage to keep your emotions fresh?
a:It's not hard. The opera is not staged often - probably about once a year. Every time, we rehearse it as though it were a new production.
q:This time, it really will be a new production, put on by foreigners.
a:There is a tendency here to invite foreign stage directors to put on Russian operas. [The Mariinsky] probably want[s] to see new concepts, new approaches to the classics. Most of the soloists will be Academy students. It will have a very young cast.
q:How did you get [the part in Washington]? That must have been a great achievement.
a:Yes, it was. Two years ago, I took part in the Placido Domingo Competition in Los Angeles. I did not even make it to the third round, but someone spotted me and, a year later, I was asked to sing the part of Micaela in Washington. The role is new to me, but I had a year to prepare for it. I worked at it with our professor, Graer Graerovich [Khanedanian, a professor at the academy].
q:Were you anxious about performing a new role in such a prestigious theater, and being conducted by Domingo?
a:It was very scary, but I knew the role. Besides, the staging was traditional, as was the interpretation of the character. Sometimes, Domingo stopped us and demanded more passion, especially in the mountain scene with the smugglers. At one point, he even told me: "You are too calm. You have to grab him."
The opera was staged ten years ago, and this year saw its revival. Micaela does not move around much. Everything was hidden inside the characters. The opera is about inner feelings, which did not show on the surface.
q:What did you think of [Domingo]?
a:He is unique. He loves everybody and everybody loves him. He is sunny. I understand Americans who adore him - there is a cult of Domingo over there. He finds time to do everything: he conducts, sings, directs, encourages the artists, helps everyone.
q:Were you nervous?
a:Yes, but I think that is necessary. Nervousness helps you to do the job well. Sometimes, when I am calm, I know that something will go wrong. In Washington, I was nervous because I felt a tremendous responsibility, first, to myself - I wanted to perform well - and, second, to our Academy - because I wanted to show off our training and the Mariinsky's tradition.
q:Do you feel that same kind of responsibility when you perform here?
a:I do, but people know me here and I know them. There, we were signed just for this opera - it is not a repertory theater. All of us tried to do our best. The atmosphere was great.
There is a big difference with repertory theaters, where relationships are much more complicated. There, everybody praises everybody. Everybody smiles at you and says, ''Bravo.'' They will never tell you if it is not good. But, if they don't like it, they will never invite you again. So you have to be careful. Still, to work in such an atmosphere was very pleasant for me.
q:Which other roles do you like to sing? What about Puccini?
a:I like Puccini very much, but, up to now, I have only sung Mimi in ''La Boheme.'' For me, Mozart is good. I sing Susanna and Barbarina in ''The Marriage of Figaro,'' Zerlina in ''Don Giovanni,'' and bel canto operas.
q:Do you like modern music? Does it suit a lyrical soprano?
a:Maybe, but I feel that modern music is not balsam for the voice, unlike bel canto. I like Donizetti and Rossini, although the latter demands more technique than I have now. The Mariinsy at present is very much involved in operas by Wagner and Prokofiev, which are not suited to my voice. One thing I have learned is that it is very important is to sing with your own voice. Sometimes people ask why I sing the role of Tatyana, because, normally, soloists with stronger and deeper voices do it. Although my voice is lyrical, I feel comfortable with this role.
q:What about concert performances?
a:I do a lot of singing around the concert halls of St. Petersburg with other academy students. It's good - useful and rewarding.
q:Are you nervous there as well?
a:For me, the concerts are trying. I feel like I am one-on-one with the public and nothing can protect me from my own mistakes. In the theater, by contrast, you have the scenery, the costumes, and your partners to help you.
q:How do you feel about competitions? Are they very important for launching a singer's career?
a:I am not one for competitions. I participated in two, one in 1997 and the other in 2000 - the fourth International Rimsky-Korsakov Competition here in St. Petersburg - and I won a prize in both. For me, they are as frightening as exams.
Sometimes, a singer [can win prizes at] many competitions and their career does not progress, but there is another model, for example Dmitry Khvorostovsky, who only took part in one competition and saw his career take off immediately.
q:And what are your plans for the future?
a:In January 2003, ''Yevgeny Onegin'' is supposed to be shown in Paris in the Chatelet Theater, and I hope to be there. Next spring, I go to Germany to perform Prilepa in ''The Queen of Spades.'' There is an agency in London that takes care of several of our students. They often come here to hear us and, if they like what they hear, they offer us roles in other theaters. That was how I was offered the part of Micaela.
TITLE: a fortifying break from piter
AUTHOR: by Tatiana Andreeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg often makes a proud boast of its nearly 300-year history as the cultural capital of Russia. But the crowds of tourists that flock to the city during the summer rarely stop to consider that three centuries of ruling the Neva delta and the surrounding area leaves a whole swathe of history unaccounted for. The royal, glittering world of the Northern Capital seems to be unquestioningly accepted as the only one worth visiting.
However, another, longer history silently awaits the more inquisitive traveler. For those who have a thirst to discover new places, who envision a summer-weekend adventure with a quiet picnic far off the beaten tourist track, the fortress at Koporje, 87 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg, is an ideal place to go.
Although Koporje is now in ruins, it was an important strategic hub in the early medieval period for the Slavs and their rivals for the territory - the Teutonic Knights and the Swedes. The reason for the unending struggle for control of the area is simple: The Neva basin, situated on the border of the principality of Novgorod - and later Moscow - was an important trade route to Europe. Controlling this region automatically meant controlling the developing Russian state.
Fortresses on the site date back to between 1237 and 1239, when the Teutonic Knights built an earth-and-wood fortification over the Koporka river as a base for raids on passing Slav merchants. A few years later, however, Alexander Nevsky - now the patron saint of St. Petersburg - removed the invaders from the northern part of Novgorod's territory. Later, however, the persistent knights constructed another fortification nearby, so a brigade, under the command of Dmitry, one of Nevsky's sons, was dispatched from Novgorod in 1297 to build the fort at Koporje as a permanent border guard. The fortress that was built became the second most important stone bastion in the northwest of Russia - after the Ladoga fort - until the 16th century.
In 1581, however, Sweden occupied the castle, and remained there for 10 years before it was recaptured. But the Swedes liked the fort so much that, in 1612, they sent a 2,000-soldier-strong army to recapture it - an impressive number for a fortress with a perimeter measuring just 400 meters. Finally, in 1703, Koporje was recaptured by Peter the Great and, with the foundation of St. Petersburg and the northward shift of the Russian border, the fort's significance dwindled. It was even deprived of official fortress status, and passed into private hands. The walls of the fort had one last military role to play, in 1919, when White Army troops made a base there, behind enemy lines.
When the fort was founded, it was by both the Baltic Sea and the Koporka river. Over the course of eight centuries, however, the sea has receded 12 kilometers, and the river has become shallower, leaving the ruins to dominate only expanses of green. Today, Koporje is a paradise for history buffs that has very few signs of any attention from the state, except a plaque announcing that it is a historic monument.
Due to the fort's location on a rock, the only safe entrance is via a drawbridge over a ditch. Originally, the fort had a moat with a drawbridge - an unusual feature for a Russian fort - although this vanished during a recent restoration.
The wall containing the main gate and the two adjoining towers are the best preserved parts of the ensemble, containing rooms and passages for exploration and a vast observation space on top for those who fancy recreating the experience of watching out for marauding bands of Swedes or Teutonic knights.
The south and southeast walls run along a steep slope over 30 meters high,and contain fragments from the very first bastions from 1297. Climbing is not advisable here, but it is possible to get outside the walls at the eastern end to try to descend the slope. Here, it pays to be cautious, and it is possible to get a very good idea of the logistical difficulties encountered by the many different groups that laid siege to the fort over its history.
The center of the fort is overrun by wildflowers and thickets of raspberry plants that hide the ruins of a 16th-century church. The northern walls also date from around this time, and are 5 meters thick in places.
The corner tower, which joins both sets of walls, offers marvelous views over the valley. With a slight effort of the imagination to move the Sosnovy Bor nuclear-power station over the horizon, the view is almost the same as that seen by Alexander Nevsky in 1241 - a feeling and a view that are definitely rewarding.
How to get there. The easiest way is by car along the Tallinn highway. Look for a sign saying "Koporje 23 km" on the right. For a more adventurous route, take the train from Baltiisky Vokzal to Sosnovy Bor/Kalishe (about 1 1/2 hours), then change trains and travel two stops to Koporje, and walk about 3 kilometers southeast from the station. Koporje is a also a good destination for cyclists - just get off the train in Kalishe and cycle the rest of the way.
Where to eat. There is nowhere to buy food at the fort, so the choice is entirely up to you ...
Where to stay. There is no accommodation, so anyone wishing to stay overnight will have to bring a tent. This does, however, have the inestimable advantage of being absolutely free.
TITLE: a portrait of two geniuses
AUTHOR: by Elizabeth Kendall
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: One spring day in 1925, Igor Stravinsky, the diminutive 42-year-old Russian composer with thick, round glasses, dropped in on Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo to observe the restaging of his 1920 "musical fairy tale," "Le Chant du Rossignol." In charge of the rehearsal hall he found a thin, intense 21-year-old dancer, George Balanchine, who had left Soviet Russia in July 1924.
Despite the disparity in their ages, Stravinsky, the master, soon began to notice the musical intelligence of Balanchine, the apprentice. Balanchine had studied piano and theory for three years at the Petrograd Conservatory while dancing in the State Opera corps de ballet and running his own ballet ensemble. He was quick to grasp what lay under the surface of Stravinsky's music, and quick to match the music with dance material that would not upstage but complement it in imaginative and spirited ways. The two men clinched their relationship in 1928 when they collaborated on "Apollon Musagete" (called "Apollo" by the New York City Ballet) for the Ballets Russes. That chamber ballet, by turns playful, mystical, athletic and majestic, rescued musical and balletic classicism by aligning it with the late Jazz Age. Or, as Charles M. Joseph says in his masterly book, "Stravinsky and Balanchine," the ballet established both men's "unswerving devotion to the abiding principles of reason, balance, austerity and order" - principles they would honor throughout their artistic collaboration, which spanned most of the 20th century.
The story Joseph tells of this collaboration, a "journey of invention," is anything but straightforward. After Diaghilev died suddenly in 1929, the Ballets Russes disbanded, and Balanchine and Stravinsky, like the other Russian members of Diaghilev's entourage, were flung out into the world to fend for themselves. Both men crisscrossed Europe on various commissions, and both eventually made their way to the United States - Balanchine in 1933, brought by the young impresario Lincoln Kirstein to start a ballet company (which would later become the New York City Ballet), Stravinsky six years later. They maintained a fruitful working relationship until Stravinsky's death in 1971 - and beyond, since Balanchine kept choreographing Stravinsky scores until his own death in 1983. Those 29 Balanchine-Stravinsky ballets provide an amazing record of these two artists' joint translation of St. Petersburg classicism into a universal cultural ideal, as much American as Russian, as much New World as Old, as much cerebral as ritualistic.
Joseph, a professor of music at Skidmore College and a master of an elegant and refreshingly courteous prose, goes a little off course in his presentation of the Diaghilev period in the two men's collaboration. He has not given enough weight to their shared sense of home across generations, a lost Russian home that gave both men a shorthand set of principles - not to mention a common language - as they matched their art to their exile. Or rather, he misses the continuity between the older Stravinsky's prerevolutionary "Silver Age" St. Petersburg culture - that uniquely Russian mix of traditional and avant-garde - and the immediate post-revolutionary Petrograd artistic experiments that shaped the younger Balanchine.
But when Joseph gets his subjects to familiar American ground, his narrative rights itself. He is an intrepid researcher, who seems to have read every book that touches on these two men and their times, and he has spoken to every living person who was close to them. Not only that, his manner is engaging. He remains at the reader's side, laying out evidence, sharing his critical judgments, gravely convinced we can understand it all. His text fills in whatever background we need, and his footnotes brim with further information.
As beautifully as he tells the story, Joseph's greatest contribution is his close analysis of Stravinsky's scores and Balanchine's choreographic responses to them. Four times in the book, Joseph slows down and walks us through the minutiae of the construction of a Stravinsky composition and its attendant choreography. Each ballet in what can loosely be called the Stravinsky-Balanchine "Greek" trilogy gets a cluster of chapters: "Apollon Musagete," the 1948 music-dance drama "Orpheus" and the 1957 dance suite "Agon." For a finale, Joseph takes apart the ballet that more than any other looks back on the collaboration, "Stravinsky Violin Concerto," one of the eight dances Balanchine made for the New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival in 1972, which took place a year after the composer's death.
We can almost see Stravinsky's densely woven structures and Balanchine's fiendishly lyrical, intelligent responses to them, which have been analyzed before but never together on such a scale. Suddenly, all the favorite moments in the Stravinsky-Balanchine oeuvre make sense. That instance in "Apollo" when the Muse Calliope, in Joseph's words, "clenches her arms violently to her body while bending her knees" is Balanchine's response to a "one-pulse sforzando D-minor chord" so "musically emphatic" that he had to echo it. A lovely extended canon danced with linked arms by Apollo and the three Muses is Balanchine "metaphorically explaining" a canon happening simultaneously in the music.
Joseph's explanatory powers reach a peak in his explication of "Agon," which also marks the apogee of Stravinsky and Balanchine's collaboration. He recounts the stress of the actual composing: the 75-year-old Stravinsky, in a creative crisis, converted, in the middle of "Agon," to the dodecaphonic (12-tone) system. The result was the dazzling coexistence of pre-tonal Renaissance pitches, rhythms and instrumental allusions with post-tonal ones. He presents choreography with racial daring (the black Arthur Mitchell and the white Diana Adams were paired in the central pas de deux), female empowerment ("Agon"'s females are involved in "shaping the sexuality of the action"), and four men and eight women visualizing the music's complexity by means of complicated lifts, groupings, partnerings, precise gyrations and interlocking canons.
Bar by musical bar, measure by choreographic measure, Joseph proves what has long been known but not understood: that Balanchine took his cues directly from the musical structure of Stravinsky's scores. And yet, one can still ask where the impulses came from that breathed life into the structures. Both Balanchine and Stravinsky loved to talk about nuts and bolts, about cooking and carpentry - about any humble craft, but not about creating. Such everyday talk obviated the need to mention pain, grief and yearning, not easy subjects for two men who had lost the sights and sounds of their childhoods to a revolution. Joseph has picked up his subjects' reticence, perhaps to a fault. Though he never shies away from a theme that might illuminate the ballets, at times he stops just short of exploring implications he himself has suggested.
Take, for instance, "Stravinsky Violin Concerto." It is true that the concerto's opening toccata is "sectionalized into 16 divisions" and that Balanchine has made "eight choreographic blocks," giving two divisions to each of the four principal dancers. But surely it is not a coincidence that Stravinsky wrote this violin concerto in 1930 and 1931, after Diaghilev died, the Ballets Russes dissolved and the composer was cut off from the one constant in his roving life. Or that Balanchine choreographed the final version of the ballet (he had used the music once before, in 1941) after Stravinsky's death, when he in turn was cut off from the friend who had most signified home. In Balanchine's choreography, four principal dancers whirl on and off the stage during two musical divisions each, like people on a journey, without ever meeting each other or dancing together. It is in the ballet's middle sections, Arias I and II, that they pair off for separate pas de deux (one a contest of wills, the other a study in tenderness and submission), which have been called, Joseph says, "contrasting examples of Balanchine's views about the natural tensions that repel and attract males and females." Couldn't the two arias also represent different views of what it feels like to collaborate with someone who was closer at times than a wife, who was a mentor, a father figure, and a fellow Russian?
At any rate, Joseph's analyses do not preclude our own interpretations of these ballets. He has written a generous book that partakes of the intelligence, reticence and wit of the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration itself. Most of all, he has understood the importance of these two men's art, an art of exiles, central to a century of war and dislocation. "It was the voyage itself," says Joseph, "the process of embarking upon the unknowable, that they found spellbinding."
Elizabeth Kendall is a dance critic. Her most recent book is a memoir, "American Daughter."
TITLE: belgium's 'venice of the north'
AUTHOR: by Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg is not the only European city that lays claim to the title of the "Venice of the North." Of the others, Brugge is probably the best contendor for the title: Not only are there so many canals in the city that visitors are almost guaranteed a hotel room with a canal view, or at least to dine out by one, but, in medieval times, the Belgian city was a trade rival of its now better known Italian counterpart.
Brugge, or Bruges in French, is a city of 120,000 inhabitants in Western Flanders, and is the most visited city in Belgium. This year, it also one of two "European Capitals of Culture," along with Salamanca in Spain.
The origins of Brugge date back to the 8th century, when a fortified castle was established to safeguard the territory of the counts of Flanders, but it took a freak of nature to bring the city to prominence. In 1134, a severe storm ravaged the North Sea coast, and ripped out a creek that became known as Zwin. After the storm, Brugge found itself just 5 kilometers from the sea. Its enterprising inhabitants dug out a canal and turned their village into a dynamic trading center.
The city flourished between the 13th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, and this is amply demonstrated by some of the buildings that survive from that time: over 8,000 mansions, churches, monasteries, beguinages (religious institutions of the Middle Ages where women lived and produced handicrafts, while their merchant husbands traded around the world), hospitals and covered markets, as well as the numerous canals running through the city and connecting it with neighboring towns and the sea.
By the mid-15th century, Brugge was a cosmopolitan city in the Hanseatic League - a broad trading alliance of Northern European cities - and had a population comparable in size to that of Paris. It boasted Europe's largest market, and seventeen countries - from England to Egypt to Novgorod - maintained trade offices there.
What nature had given to the city, however, nature evntually took away. By the mid-16th century, the waterway to the sea was blocked by silt, despite efforts to maintain navigability and, by the end of the century, Brugge was no longer a seaport.
For 400 years, Brugge remained a forgotten down, dreaming about its glorious past. The population dwindled, and elegant buildings became run-down. As it turned out, this was not entirely a disadvantage, as being a backwater spared the physical effects that the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought to nearby towns like Ghent and Brussels.
The British Romantic movement re-discovered and popularized Brugge in the late 19th century, but it was an exhibition of Flemish paintings - by Jan van Eyck and the so-called Primitivists - in 1902 that really brought Brugge back into the limelight. Thousands of visitors came to the exhibition and, in the process, fell in love with the city.
The choice of Brugge as a European Capital of Culture was taken to mark the exhibition's centenary, and another exhibition of medieval Flemish art - a key part of the year's events - is being held in the city's Greoninge Museum.
On display are some 130 works by painters who lived and worked in Brugge between 1430 and 1530. The exhibition reveals some of the technical innovations employed by van Eyck and his colleagues, such as oil-based paints and the use of perspective that influenced all contemporary Europe, including such Italian masters as Leonardo da Vinci. As well as van Eyck, leading painters of the time included Roger van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Gerard David and Petrus Christus.
But Brugge has much more to offer present-day visitors than its art exhibition. For many years now, the city government has been taking steps to make Brugge into a town for people to live and work in. Since 1972, it has bought some 5,000 beautiful, but dilapidated, houses, restored them, and rented them out at modest rates to artists and young people.
Even one day spent in Brugge is enough to convince the visitor that the city is alive and vibrant, and definitely one of the region's commercial centers. This new vibrancy has been reflected in the growth of hotels, restaurants, cafes and other establishments for visitors to the city. Souvenir shops offer traditional wares from this locale, among them lace and gobelin wall hangings, made in small workshops around the city. Antique shops and flea markets draw visitors from all over.
The medieval lay-out of the city has been preserved, and this makes Brugge a real pleasure just to stroll through. Every turn opens new vistas: churches tucked behind centuries-old trees; stone bridges, stretching across canals and rivers; limestone facades descending into still waters, whose peace is disturbed only by mild ripples from passing boats. To add to this, most of the city is closed to motor traffic, meaning that the cobblestoned embankments echo only to the clatter of of hooves, as horse-drawn carriages take visitors around.
It is a good idea to allow three to four hours for a walking tour of the city, including brief visits to churches, hospitals and so on. The best place to start is on Grande Place, with its former guildhalls and the covered market, with its 13th-century belfry, a majestic construction and a vivid reminder of the city's past prosperity. On the other side of the square is the 14th-century city hall, the oldest in Belgium.
Of the city's many churches and beguinages, perhaps the most rewarding to visit is the Church of Our Lady, which houses a rare Michelangelo sculpture, "The Madonna and Child," brought there by a city merchant in 1507. The gothic church, which dates from the 13th to the 15th century, is magnificent, rich in paintings and sculptures. A smallish, graceful composition tucked in the corner to the right side of the intricately carved wooden alter remains the main attraction for thousands of visitors.
The city's old hospitals and pharmacies - dating from the 13th century onward - demonstrate how it cared for the sick, especially in times of plague. Now, many of these buildings are museums, adorned with medieval sculptures and paintings. For example, the Hospital of St. John houses eight of the extant 100 works by Hans Memling.
For centuries, Brugge was the seat of the Princes of Burgundy, and magnificent royal dwellings bear witness to those days. Some have been turned into hotels, while others function as government offices.
The Groeninge Museum, as well as the special exhibition for this year, also has has a vast collection of local masters from later periods, including the expressionists Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux, Rene Magritte and Paul Alechincky, all of whom who established the reputation of modern Belgian art.
Like a gondola trip in Venice, a boat trip along the canals is an essential component of a day spent in Brugge. Small boats driven by electric motors ply the waterways. The trip usually takes about 1 1/2 hours. Knowledgeable guides provide ample information about the city and its architecture in English and other languages - a welcome change from St. Petersburg. Another welcome change is the umbrellas handed out if it should rain. A common feature, though, is the wide availablity of beer: A small cafe on the landing stage will be selling one of Belgium's 300 varieties of beer to make the journey that much more enjoyable.
Brugge is also renowned as a gastronomic center. The French influence on local cuisine makes Belgian cooking exceptional. It strongly favors fish, mussels and rabbit dishes, and makes generous use of beer as a basic ingredient.
The local government is continuing its regeneration program. Its latest initiative saw the opening of a new concert hall in March, just in time for the year's festivities, which seats up to 2,500. For those in search of classical music, Brugge attracts top-class luminaries, including orchestras such as the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics.
This year, the city is pulling out all the stops for its visitors, organizing events ranging from medieval-esque religious processions to nightly son-et-lumiere performances, all within a short walk of the city center.
There is always something to do, hear or watch in Brugge, but the city is also for those who merely want to do nothing except spend hours in the contemplation of history and beauty.
The best time to visit anywhere in Belgium is the summer - when the rain tends to be warmer - but Brugge's cultural offerings ensure a pleasurable time whatever the weather.
Where to stay. Two charming hotels in old mansions stand out. The Hotel Hans Memling (+32-50-471-212) and the Hotel Duc de Bourgogne (+32-50-332-038) charge between 105 and 130 euros for a double room in the high season. Medium and low-price hotels are best booked upon arrival - it is highly unlikely that there will not be a room anywhere.
Brugge is also well served by international hotel chains, such as Accor, Six Continents and Accor's budget arm, Ibis. Rooms can be booked online at www.accor.com, www.sixcontinentshotels.com/sixcontinentshotels, or www.ibishotel.com.
Six Continents has the Crowne Plaza (+32 50 44 68 44), a beautiful 16th-century palace in the very center of the city, with all amenities like indoor swimming pool, and several restaurants. Rooms go for 225 euros per night.
Where to eat. A good, inexpensive meal can be found on the Grande Place, where nearly every building has a street-level restaurant with sidewalk terrace, typically serving Belgian as well as international dishes.
The Hotel Duc de Bourgogne has two well-known French-cuisine restaurants, Les Carmelites and La Biere, both of which enjoy good views of the canals. There are several recommended restaurants near the Hotel Hans Memling, including the Simon Steven and the Brasserie Vraiment.
How to get there. Brugge is 90 kilometers from Brussels, and is well served by road and rail links to the Belgian capital. All major airlines offer connections to Brussels from St. Petersburg, although there are, unfortunately, no direct flights.
TITLE: Inauguration Triggers Colombian Rebels
AUTHOR: By Susannah A. Nesmith
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOGOTA, Colombia - Mortar shells rained on Bogota, killing 14 people and injuring more than 60, as Colombia's guerrillas fired their opening salvo against new hard-line President Alvaro Uribe on his inauguration day.
Three shells exploded just blocks from the congress building a few moments before Uribe was sworn in Wednesday. Two other shells hit the building next to the presidential palace, wounding a police officer who staggered, bloodied, from the scene.
Mortar shells were also sent crashing into a military installation in northern Bogota. A mortar attack aimed at a military base in central Colombia hit 20 houses and a school instead, though casualties have not been confirmed.
Late Wednesday, one person died trying to set off a car bomb in Cali, Colombia's third largest city.
The attacks were the rebels' first show of force against Uribe, who has promised to bring the guerrillas to their knees on the battlefield.
Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus said two of the houses used to launch the attacks were rented two weeks ago, suggesting a well-planned assault. Mockus said intercepted radio communications implicated the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in the attacks.
"The FARC did this, but Uribe is going to make them sorry. They will pay," said Maria Luz Valenzuela, whose home was rattled by the blasts.
The attacks occurred despite tight security in Bogota ahead of the inauguration. Combat helicopters and spy planes circled over the parliament building, roads were closed and the traditionally public inauguration ceremony was moved inside.
"It's worrisome that this happened while 25,000 soldiers and police were deployed in the city," Antonio Navarro, a member of Congress, told Radionet.
The presidents of Panama, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador and Honduras attended and were not hurt, officials said.
With the slogan "Firm hand, big heart," Uribe has promised to take a hard line with the 16,000-member FARC and another rebel group waging a 38-year war against the state.
Some 3,500 people die every year in the war. Uribe's own father was killed by rebels during a kidnapping attempt and the new president has survived more than a half dozen assassination attempts, including a deadly attack on his motorcade during the campaign.
Uribe plans a massive military buildup but insists his vows to hammer the rebels on the battlefield are not motivated by revenge. He's also promised to take on right-wing militias as well as the drug traffickers who finance both groups.
He didn't mention Wednesday's attacks in his brief inaugural address, instead sticking to a prepared speech that detailed all the country's ills: high unemployment and crushing poverty, bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, drug trafficking and finally, the war.
"We want peace," he declared simply.
Diminutive and bespectacled, Uribe cuts a somewhat peculiar figure leading the country into a stepped-up war. But he has aroused high expectations among a populace exhausted by decades of violence.
A poll published in El Tiempo Wednesday gave Uribe a 77-percent approval rating. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percent.
Of the 1,038 people surveyed, 98-percent said violence and insecurity were the most important problems facing the country.
"We are a country at war. Hopefully Uribe can fulfill his promises to end this mess," said Ramon Herrera, a shoe seller who heard Wednesday's explosions from his home about 25 blocks away.
In his speech, Uribe highlighted what he would try to do, but he was careful not to promise miracles.
"We will start an administration which is honest and austere," he said. "It cannot work miracles, but it will work."
He has not said that he will defeat the rebels, preferring to say that he will batter them on the battlefield, setting the stage for another round of peace talks in which the government will have the advantage.
His predecessor, Andres Pastrana, tried for three years to negotiate a peace with the FARC. The talks broke down in February without achieving substantial results.
A 50-year-old lawyer with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Uribe served two terms in the Senate, was mayor of his native Medellin, director of Colombia's civil aviation authority and governor of violence-ravaged Antioquia state.
TITLE: Hussein Promises 'Disgraceful Failure' for Attackers
AUTHOR: By Sameer N. Yacoub
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein warned Thursday that anyone who attacks Iraq will die "in disgraceful failure," as thousands of armed civilians marched through Baghdad in support of the Iraqi president.
Speaking on the anniversary of the end of the Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988, Hussein made no direct mention of the U.S.-British demand for the return of U.N. arms inspectors to Iraq. But his speech comes as U.S. officials consider a possible attack on Iraq to oust him for allegedly building weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraqi leader did not mention the United States and Britain by name, but referred to them as the "forces of evil" - a phrase the Baghdad government frequently uses after U.S. and British airstrikes in the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq.
"The forces of evil will carry their coffins on their backs to die in disgraceful failure," he said in the televised speech.
The United States has warned Iraq of unspecified consequences if it does not allow U.N. weapons inspections to resume. Iraqi diplomats have held three meetings with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan this year to discuss the issue and related topics.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that some U.S. officials believe Iraq could acquire nuclear weapons in the future. He also expressed skepticism that the return of UN inspectors, barred by Iraq since 1998, would solve the problem.
Eventually, Cheney said, the international community will have to "figure out how we're going to deal with this growing threat to peace and stability in the region and obviously, potentially, to the United States."
Hussein, dressed in a dark suit behind a desk spread with white lilies, called on the United Nations to "honor its obligations" over sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
"The right way is that the Security Council should reply to the questions raised by Iraq and should honor its obligations under its own resolutions," Hussein said.
He was referring to 19 questions given to Annan at a meeting in March, and to council resolutions which say that UN sanctions on Iraq can be lifted once it has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction and fulfilled other requirements.
Iraq has long said it has fulfilled these conditions and that the sanctions should be lifted.
Annan circulated the 19 questions, which deal with various Iraqi complaints, to the Security Council members, who have not replied.
About 15,000 members of the "Jerusalem Army" marched through Baghdad shortly before the Iraqi leader's 22-minute address was broadcast. Dressed in khaki uniforms and carrying rifles, the marchers held up placards that said, "Long live Saddam!" and "Down with U.S.A!" Others carried photographs of Hussein or Palestinian and Iraqi flags.
"We reject the U.S. war threats and we are ready to face them," said Sabah Mohammed, a 45-year-old woman taking part in the march.
The government has organized similar demonstrations for the last week. The Jerusalem Army is a civilian force established by Hussein in 2000 with the aim of driving the Israelis out of Jerusalem and supporting the Palestinian uprising.
While members of the administration of U.S. Presdient George W. Bush and Congress have spoken openly about war with Iraq, it's not clear that a military effort to topple Hussein would have international support - particularly if Baghdad allows U.N. inspectors to return.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud said Wednesday that his government is opposed to a U.S. strike on Iraq, and would not allow its soil to be used as a base for such a military action.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has warned that a U.S. attack on Iraq could wreck the international coalition against terrorism and throw the Middle East into turmoil.
Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, considered Washington's strongest ally, faces opposition to war at home.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Saudi Arabia Opts Out
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Saudi Arabia will not give the United States access to bases in the kingdom for an attack on Saddam Hussein, but the foreign minister said Wednesday that the longtime U.S. ally does not plan to expel American forces from an air base used for flights to monitor Iraq.
In an interview, Prince Saud said that the 70-year-old U.S.-Saudi alliance was just as solid now as before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.
He said Osama bin Laden, who directed the al-Qaeda attacks and was stripped of Saudi citizenship, had intended to drive a wedge between the two countries when he chose 15 Saudi citizens to be among the 19 hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
Afghan Base Attacked
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Raising fresh doubts about security in this troubled capital, gunmen assaulted a hilltop Afghan army post Wednesday, touching off a running, three-hour gunbattle that killed 16 people on Kabul's southern outskirts.
The firefight came as U.S. forces reported killing four men in a car in eastern Afghanistan the previous day. That incident was in the same area of Kunar province where Americans killed two men Monday, and Afghan leaders said the U.S. military operation had made local people edgy and angry.
Elsewhere, an American soldier was wounded Wednesday while on patrol south of Khost near the Pakistani border, according to General Richard Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Israel Retaliates
BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli troops demolished the homes of four Palestinian terror suspects and raided a Gaza Strip town Thursday, as negotiators failed to reach agreement, but scheduled more talks on a gradual Israeli troop pullback from some Palestinian areas.
During Israel's incursion into the Gaza town of Beit Lahia, hundreds of children and teenagers threw stones at four Israeli tanks blocking the main road. Soldiers fired from a tank-mounted machine gun to drive back the crowd, wounding five people, including a teenager who slumped to the ground after being shot in the head.
In the West Bank, troops destroyed four homes - two belonging to suicide bombers, one to a man who supplied explosives for an attack and a fourth to a suspected bombing mastermind. The demolitions brought to 18 the number of houses of demolished since Israel revived its controversial policy last month.
Human rights groups say that house demolitions amount to collective punishment and violate international law. Israel says the demolitions provide an important deterrent against terror attacks.
Taiwan Drops Exercises
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan tried to soothe tensions with China by scrapping military exercises Wednesday as the communist giant's state-run media threatened to use war to win peace.
The current flare-up between the rivals has been the worst since Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian was elected two years ago, promising to help heal a five-decade split with China.
China was angered by Chen's comments last week that Taiwan and China are separate countries - a bold challenge to Beijing's firm view that the self-ruled island belongs to the mainland. Chen also said he favored creating a law that would allow Taiwanese to vote on the island's future.
TITLE: Pressure Starts To Tell as Cardinals Lose Seventh-Straight
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - There were probably more than a few players on the reeling St. Louis Cardinals who wished they had joined Steve Kline in his seventh-inning dugout demolition.
The Cardinals dropped their seventh straight Wednesday night, 4-1 to the Montreal Expos. Their once-comfortable five-game lead in the NL Central has dwindled to one game over the Houston Astros, who beat the Florida Marlins 7-2 for their fourth win in a row.
"Do you think it's happy in here?" reliever Kline said. "Hell, no. Everybody is trying as hard as they can but it's not working out."
After allowing a run on two hits and a wild pitch in the top of the seventh, Kline went to the dugout and started throwing gloves and garbage pails. He had to be restrained by batting coach Mitchell Page and teammates from approaching plate umpire Bruce Froemming, who told Kline he was acting inappropriately.
'"You're acting like a crazy person,' is what he told me," Kline said. "What's his business? Go back and sit back behind the plate and have a cheeseburger and watch the game."
Manager Tony La Russa continued the argument with Froemming and was ejected.
"This guy gives up a double to the pitcher and he's mad at himself," La Russa said. "I'm happy he's mad. We're supposed to care out here. You don't do things like that and just walk back and say, 'Hah, hah, big deal."'
The Cardinals have been outscored 45-14 during their longest losing stretch since dropping seven straight in August 1999. St. Louis has not homered in 58 innings.
San Francisco 4, Chicago Cubs 3. Barry Bonds must wait at least another day for his 600th homer. Instead, Jeff Kent took all the bows at Pacific Bell Park.
Jeff Kent hit an early two-run homer, then slid home with the winning run on Benito Santiago's infield single in the 10th as San Francisco beat Chicago at Pacific Bell Park for its fourth-straight victory.
One night after hitting his 599th homer, Barry Bonds went 1-for-3 with a double and an eighth-inning walk. He had homered in three straight games in his bid to join Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays in one of baseball's most exclusive clubs.
Robb Nen (5-1) blew the save in the ninth on Bill Mueller's RBI triple.
Houston 7, Florida 2. Roy Oswalt pitched three-hit ball for eight innings, and Jeff Bagwell homered and doubled in leading host Houston past Florida.
Daryle Ward and Geoff Blum each drove in two runs as Houston won its fourth straight and 12th in its last 15.
Oswalt (13-6) allowed two unearned runs, struck out four and walked three.
New York Yankees 6, Kansas City 2. Roger Clemens came off the disabled list to throw seven sharp innings at Yankee Stadium, getting home run support from Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter to earn his 289th career win.
Driving off the mound with strength and purpose, the Rocket (9-3) showed no ill effects of the injured right groin that kept him out since July 13.
Posada drove in four runs with a three-run homer off Jeff Suppan (8-11) and a bases-loaded walk, while Jeter went deep for the first time in a month.
In other games, it was: Colorado 7, Cincinnati 2; Milwaukee 6, N.Y. Mets 2; Arizona 6, Atlanta 3; San Diego 5, Philadelphia 2; Los Angeles 4, Pittsburgh 0; Seattle 5, Toronto 4; Chicago 7, Anaheim 6; Baltimore 6, Minnesota 4; Cleveland 6, Tampa Bay 2; and Texas 7, Detroit 2.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Mutombo a Net
EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey (AP) - The New Jersey Nets acquired 7-foot-2 (218-centimerter) center Dikembe Mutombo from the 76ers for forward Keith Van Horn and center Todd MacCulloch in a trade Tuesday between the last two Eastern Conference champions.
Mutombo gives the Nets one of the NBA's perennial top rebounders and shot blockers and a presence in the middle - something they didn't have in being swept by Shaquille O'Neal and the Lakers in the finals in June.
"If you look historically at the NBA, any time you have a center who is a defender, rebounder and shot blocker, it's always an advantage," Nets president Rod Thorn said.
Van Horn, who has not lived up to his billing as the second overall pick in the 1997 draft, is expected to give Philadelphia another scorer to help Allen Iverson - something it didn't have in losing to the Lakers in the 2001 Finals.
"Obviously we will miss those guys, but this is a business and every team will try to get better," Nets coach Byron Scott said of Van Horn and MacCulloch. "That's what we feel we have done today."
Waugh Doubts Tour
MELBOURNE, Australia (Reuters) - Australia test cricketer Mark Waugh has said the latest violence in Pakistan places further doubt over Australia's tour of that country in October.
Six Pakistanis were shot dead in an attack on a school for children of foreign missionaries near Islamabad on Monday.
"Obviously what happened two days ago with the shooting at the international school puts a few more question marks over the tour," Waugh said in an interview on Australian radio station Sport 927 on Thursday.
"There's no doubt about that. I think the ACB [Australian Cricket Board] would be first to admit that."
Several other senior players have also expressed reservations about the tour.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf contacted Australian Prime Minister John Howard and told him that the safety of the Australian cricket team could be guaranteed, Howard revealed last week.
Cannavaro Moving?
ROME (Reuters) - Parma's Italian international defender Fabio Cannavaro is on his way to Inter Milan, according to a report on Inter's website on Wednesday.
Inter said that it was in the "defining phase" of the transfer but did not provide any other details.
Shortly afterwards, ANSA news agency reported the deal had been completed and Cannavaro was on his way to Milan to sign a contract.
"For Parma, this is a significant loss," ANSA quoted Parma player Marco Di Vaio as saying.
"This squad will be left without last player of the old Parma that has won so many cups in Italy and Europe," he added.
Cannavaro, 28, said he was leaving Parma three months ago but began training with the team in July after failing to secure a transfer.
Juventus and AC Milan had also held negotiations with Parma but deals had stalled over the transfer fee.