SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #824 (89), Friday, November 29, 2002
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TITLE: Fake Leaflets Raise Ire of Candidates
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The campaign leading up to the Dec. 8 elections for the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, which both City Hall and the City Electoral Commission (CEC) have described as quiet, finally began to generate some noise this week.
 
Following the anger expressed by some of the candidates that false election materials are being circulated under their names, an Interior Ministry raid on Tuesday night apparently turned up one of the guilty printing presses. Moreover, allegations were made that the CEC and the city administration are turning a blind eye to violations of election laws.
 Bogus campaign leaflets are nothing new to St. Petersburg election campaigns, but some local candidates say that the number is much higher this time around, and they are attempting to do something about it.
 "The number of different examples of violations has reached such a level that we cannot remain silent any longer," said Stanislav Yeremeyev, who, along with Legislative Assembly Yabloko faction leader Mikhail Amosov, leads of the SPS+Yabloko electoral bloc in the elections, at a press conference on Wednesday. "We have no choice but to answer with legal action."
 On Wednesday, SPS+Yabloko sent a complaint to the Federal Electoral Commission, asking it to take concrete measures aimed at preventing further violations.
 At the press conference, Yeremeyev produced examples of some of the fake leaflets making their way around the city.
 "I am cunning and perfidious, because I am a lawyer ... I lie to everyone, even friends," reads a leaflet bearing the name and photo of Vitaly Martynenko, the SPS+Yabloko candidate in the 30th electoral district, in the Admiralteisky District. "Am I foolish enough to engage in philanthropy? ... I am your only candidate! And I look so handsome on these posters!"
 Thousands of leaflets of this type have been distributed in St. Petersburg in the past few days, ranging from the downright ridiculous to the offensive and racist.
 In one leaflet, bearing the name and likeness of Amosov and the title "I cannot live without being a deputy," Amosov, who is running in the 10th electoral district in the Kalininsky District, allegedly threatens to commit suicide should he fail to be reelected. 
 "I am scared of thinking that someone else could take my place in the Legislative Assembly. I am scared of ending up in solitude ... I think that, if this happens, it will be the end of my career," the leaflet reads. "I will go further: it would be the end of my physical existence on this earth ... I have made a firm decision: if you, district electors, do not support my candidacy in the Dec. 8 elections, I will commit suicide. I am not afraid of death."
 In a second leaflet, apparently aimed at tapping public reaction the seizure by Chechen terrorists of the Theater Center na Dubrovke in Moscow, and the subsequent deaths of 129 hostages in the storming of the center, Amosov allegedly declares that "Aslan Maskhadov is a civilized politician" and proposes, on behalf of the SPS+Yabloko electoral bloc, to "build houses for Chechen refugees in St. Petersburg," financed by the city budget.
 The most offensive of the leaflets was another targeting Martynenko, bearing the title "Kill the Democrat Inside Yourself!!!" Further down, the leaflet reads "The following insolent groups have driven us nuts," followed by a list including "lice-infested intelligentsia, yids, lawyers, doctors, teachers ... ."
 A criminal investigation related to the leaflets was opened on Tuesday by the Kirovsky District Prosecutor's Office, under article 121, paragraph 2, of the Russian Criminal Code, which deals with the violations and obstruction of citizens' electoral rights. Criminal charges have not been filed, and the prosecutor's office does not as yet have any suspects. The case was opened after two students were arrested last Friday in district 15 while distributing the flyers.
 A possible step in determining the origin of the leaflets and trying to stop their distribution happened Tuesday evening, when inspectors from a special department of the Interior Ministry Administration for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast (GUVD) responsible for monitoring the campaign discovered an illegal printing operation in the building that houses the Capella.
 Local Rossiya television showed the director of the Capella, Yevgeny Kolchin, who once headed the city administration's Culture Committee, trying to bar journalists from entering a room containing piles of leaflets and printing equipment.
 The GUVD's press service could not be reached for comment on the incident on Thursday.
 Ruslan Linkov, who heads the local branch of the Democratic Russia party, said that Kolchin had first verbally assaulted the film crew, and then hid from it and the police by locking himself in a toilet. According to Linkov, one of the people involved in supporting the operation is Vladimir Yeremenko, former City Prosecutor, a current lawmaker and outspoken ally of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev.
 While many candidates welcomed the raid, they say that the discovery is unlikely answer the question of who commissioned the leaflets.
 SPS+Yabloko representatives say that the similarities between the various leaflets found throughout the city suggest that they have been commissioned by the same people, saying that they believe that allies of the governor are the most likely suspects.
 "It is not a registered, legitimate political party that is waging this battle against us, but what is referred to as a 'third-term party,'" said Yeremeyev.
 The term refers to the group of politicians who support Yakovlev in his desire to run for a third term as governor, a question that has been at the center of a heated controversy over the past five months.
 "Among the organizers of the violations we have mentioned, I can name Vladimir Bolshakov. We know enough to say that he is involved in this," Amosov said at the press conference. "But it is clear that this type of actions are not carried out individually, and require a certain degree of organization. I hold Yakovlev personally responsible for this whole outrage. He is responsible for the graffiti on the walls, for the illegal leaflets and much more."
 Bolshakov is the director of the Social-Psychological Center, which specializes in organizing and running election campaigns.
 City Hall reacted angrily to SPS+Yabloko's declarations, denying any involvement in the production of the fake leaflets.
 "Today it's snowing, and SPS+Yabloko will say it's the governor's fault. If the temperature drops, it will also be the governor's fault," said Alexander Afanasyev, Yakovlev's spokesperson, adding that "SPS+Yabloko is not a serious organization" and criticizing its campaign and the content of its leaflets.
 "Everything they promise in their leaflets is already being carried out by the city administration, such as repairs in the metro and the construction of the ring road," he said
 Like City Hall, the CEC is also downplaying the charges, saying that the situation could be a lot worse and describing the campaign so far as relatively normal.
 "For the moment, everything is taking place normally. There have been a number of unlawful flyers and articles since the beginning of the campaign but, in comparison to previous years, the situation is quite calm," Rita Malova, the head of the commission's information department, said in an interview on Wednesday.
 The CEC is responsible for monitoring election-law violations and informing Interior Ministry organs, the City Prosecutor's Office and the courts of its findings.
 The CEC is also in charge of overseeing the work of district electoral commissions. On Wednesday, it sent a warning letter to the commissions, saying that it will turn over to the courts any cases where there is suspicion that commission members are interfering with the progress of the elections.
 "In these elections, the district commissions are extremely politicized. At least half of the staff at the commissions are members of one political party or another," Dmitry Krasnyansky, the deputy director of the City Electoral Commission, was reported by Interfax as saying on Wednesday. "Political interests hinder district-commission members from carrying out the work they have been called upon to do. In certain districts, the work has even stalled completely."
 Some politicians and analysts, however, are critical of the work of the CEC itself, saying that it turns a blind eye to many violations and, sometimes, even encourages them. 
 Linkov says that the CEC is influenced by criminal and political groups and even helped one candidate, Vadim Voitanovsky, get registered after he had been charged with distributing food packages to the elderly in exchange for promises of votes.
 "The CEC pressured the district commission, which had already twice refused to register Voitanovsky. In the end, the CEC registered Voitanovsky itself, although this contradicts federal law. All the CEC is allowed to do is to confirm or overturn registration of candidates by the district commissions," Linkov said. 
 Linkov said that the CEC also failed to bring sanctions against offensive or racist comments candidates during television commercials. According to Linkov, there have already been at least four such cases where the CEC should have taken action, but did not.
 SPS+Yabloko says its appeal to the Federal Prosecutor was motivated by the lack of action on the part of the bodies responsible for ensuring that electoral laws are enforced in St. Petersburg.
 "Unfortunately, there is no efficient method for fighting against dirty electoral techniques to this day," said Yeremeyev. "As for the CEC, its position is not to interfere."
 Despite the complaints, however, the CEC does appear to have passed on some recommendations to the courts.
 On Wednesday, the City Court voided the candidacy of Yury Antonov, charging that he was trying to buy votes by organizing free concerts and movie showings for children. Antonov, who is currently the head of the 30th district's municipal council, was running in the 15th district in the Kirovsky Region.
 Two other candidates, Alexander Pipia, who was running in district 41, and Igor Matveyev, in district 37, informed the CEC on Wednesday that they were pulling out of the race. Matveyev had been running as a "double" of the deputy of the same name currently running in the same district. The two have the same first and last names, but different patronymics. The use of doubles of this type is a common technique in trying to discredit or split votes off from candidates during election campaigns.
 Most analysts say that the tensions are likely to increase as the election date draws closer, and some candidates are already comparing this year's campaign to that run four years ago, which was renowned for the level of corruption involved.
 "The CEC always says that everything is normal," said Linkov. "In reality, this election campaign is just as dirty as the one in 1998."

TITLE: AIDS Workers Struggle To Get Message Out
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The question of HIV/AIDS infection rates is not just a government problem in Russia. While health experts regularly criticize the government for the inaccuaracy of official infection-rate figures, they also say that the stigma associated with infection leads many to keep the problem to themselves.
 
Most Russians who are HIV positive not only opt not to tell their friends and colleagues that they are infected, but also withhold this information from ambulance workers, doctors and dentists.
 "It happens because of the fear of becoming a social outcast," said Nikolai Panchenko, the head of the St. Petersburg Doveriye ("Trust") Center, a non-government organization that assists the city's HIV-infected community. "Many of these people have already experienced discrimination as a result of reporting their illness."
 Panchenko says he is familiar with numerous occasions when ambulance personnel, despite the fact that they are required by law to provide care, have refused to treat patients after the patients informed them that they are HIV positive. The number of HIV-positive people who lose their jobs as a result of informing their employer of their infection also remains high, he says, citing the case of a hairdresser whom his center treats, who lost her job a couple of weeks ago after telling her boss.
 "Beyond what is officially considered as discrimination, these people often find that their friends and acquaintances abandon them as well. It happens all the time," Panchenko said.
 At present, 220,545 people in Russia have been officially registered as HIV positive, with experts both inside and outside Russia estimating that the true figure is five to ten times higher. Vadim Pokrovsky, the director of the Center for AIDS Prevention and Treatment in Moscow, estimates that the real figure for HIV-positive people in Russia is between 800,000 and 1.2 million, the Associated Press reported.
 More than 20,000 of the officially registered cases are in St. Petersburg. According to state statistics, 90 to 95 percent of these are intravenous drug users.
 According to Gennady Onischenko, Russia's chief public-health physician, the infection rate has slowed slightly this year. In the first 10 months of 2002, the country registered 41,000 new HIV cases, half the number registered in the same period for 2001.
 A similar drop occured in St. Petersburg, where 5,000 new cases were registered over the first nine months of this year, compared with more than 9,000 registered in the same period last year, said Alla Davydova, the head of the AIDS-prevention department at the St. Petersburg AIDS Prevention Center, which is funded by the city's Health Committee.
 Onischenko says that the fall in registered cases is a result of a fall in the narcotics use in Russia. Davydova, while not convinced that drug use has fallen, says that addicts are more aware of the dangers involved and many have shifted to taking drugs orally, or are more careful in using clean needles.
 But Pokrovsky says that the figures are misleading, and that the fact that Russia's Health Ministry has stopped paying for HIV tests, forcing individual regions to pick up the cost, is largely responsible for the drop. He said that fewer Russians are being tested, meaning a large number of HIV-infected people were simply not being registered.
 Despite the disagreement over the accuracy of infection figures for the country, most health experts agree that problems with regard to HIV/AIDS awareness remain, saying that the difficulty of providing HIV/AIDS education is a two-edged sword. On the one side, there is the difficulty of reducing the resistance among health-care providers to treating HIV-positive patients, while, at the same time, delivering a strong message to high-risk groups concerning HIV-infection prevention.
 Panchenko says that, as a result, it is hard to get people to report their illness, and that this causes further medical difficulties.
 "It's a problem ... because HIV-infected people end up not even going for essential medical treatment," he said.
 "There are two particular difficulties in addressing this problem in Russia," Panchenko added. "The first is a serious lack of AIDS education, and the second is the conservative nature of Russians in discussing these problems."
 He says that, where the work of high-profile figures who have tested HIV positive in other countries, such as basketball star Magic Johnson in the United States or French director Cyril Collard, whose final film, "The Savage Nights," dealt with AIDS-related issues, the same has not been the case in Russia.
 "Well-known Russians who have tested positive for HIV help organize and participate in events aimed at fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS, but they do it secretly and never go public with the fact that they have contracted the virus," Panchenko says.
 Pokrovsky says that another factor hindering raised awareness is the relatively small amount of money provided for education and prevention. While the federal budget provided $3.1 million for HIV/AIDS treatment, only $781,000 was earmarked for prevention, an amount that is too small to provide for large-scale education programs.
 Alexander Kalygin, assistant director of the St. Petersburg Health Comittee, said the city's anti-HIV/AIDs program for 2002 to 2003 has a budget of 65.5 million rubles ($2 million).
 The figure is a jump from the 26.3 million rubles ($850,000) allocated for the program this year. Of that, only about 7 million rubles ($35,000) went to preventative projects.
 "Of course, we need more money for expanding the program. The number of HIV-infected people grows every year," Kalygin said.
 But Davydova of the St. Petersburg AIDS Prevention Center says that there is no lack of information on the problem here.
 "We do our best to make this information available to St. Petersburg residents, but the problem is that many of them don't use the infomation they are given," she said.
 Davydova says that the center, which is funded under the municipal anti-HIV/AIDS program, distributes hundreds of thousands of brochures, leaflets, cards and computer disks for teachers, university students and schoolchildren, providing information related to the problem. The center also organizes seminars at schools, where children are encouraged to ask questions about the subject.
 Davydova says that the center has even produced a booklet for children aged from five to eight with information about the problem. The colorful booklet, with cartoon illustrations of HIV-virus bodies attacking the human immune system, mildly warns children against piercing their ears or making tattoos by themselves or at unsafe salons.
 At the other end of the spectrum, she says that the center also spent a year running seminars for ambulance workers.
 "The instances when doctors refuse to provide medical care to HIV-positive people is mostly a sad comment on the level of professionalism among these people," Davydova said.
 According to Panchenko, HIV-positive people are not required by law to inform doctors who are treating them that they have the virus. They are only encouraged to do so, in order to allow the doctors to determine better treatment.
 He said that, ideally, doctors dealing with open wounds, blood or the treatment of teeth should automatically take personal-safety measures, including wearing proper gloves, masks and glasses, regardless of whether the patient is known to be HIV positive.
 "They should also sterilize their instruments properly each time," Panchenko said.
 Ultimately though, fighting the rise of HIV/AIDS often comes down to the simple question of education and awareness, and Panchenko says that the situation is still troubling in Russia.
 "Perhaps we just haven't had enough time to break down all of the associated stereotypes and fears that Western countries have already worked to overcome," he said.

TITLE: Legislating the Way That Russians Speak
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Next time President Vladimir Putin wants to talk about "snuffing" someone in an outhouse or to chat in English with his friend George W. Bush, he may find himself violating federal law.
 
A bill establishing Russian as the official state language, due to be considered by the State Duma in the critical second reading this week, bans the use of language that is "vernacular, disdainful or foul," and mandates the use of Russian in all official contacts, even with foreigners.
 The proposed legislation also prohibits foreign words that have commonly accepted Russian equivalents.
 Asked whether this would mean that soccer-loving bureaucrats would be punished for using the popular term &quot;goalkeeper&quot; instead of the Slavic analogue <i>vratar</i>, the bill's main author, Duma Deputy Alexei Alexeyev, replied: &quot;Let's not exaggerate.&quot;
 &quot;If we throw out all foreign words, we'll be left with half a language,&quot; Alexeyev said Wednesday, pointing to such borrowings as &quot;president&quot; and &quot;telephone.&quot;
 The bill, he said, was simply meant to establish a state language, try to keep it clean and foster the spread of Russian abroad, for example by improving training for teachers of Russian as a foreign language.
 The legislation does not spell out any types of enforcement or punishment, but Alexeyev said he hoped separate amendments would be introduced for that.
 Critics of the bill have scorned it as ineffective, saying that it tries to cover too much ground - some of it ideological rather than legislative.
 &quot;This is not a law that is needed; this is yet another attempt to find a national idea,&quot; said Professor Maxim Kronhaus, director of the Linguistics Institute at the Russian State Humanities University.
 Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian language has absorbed dozens of Western words, like &quot;manager,&quot; &quot;speaker&quot; and &quot;bodybuilding,&quot; many of which have mutated in meaning or been Russified, like <i>kompyuterschik</i>. But Kronhaus said that banning such expressions was absurd, because &quot;our language is rapidly changing&quot; and would naturally retain or reject foreign borrowings and freshly hatched slang.
 He also pointed out that parts of the bill did not look much like serious legislation.
 According to Article 1, Russian as the official state language would &quot;enhance mutual understanding&quot; and &quot;foster the spread and mutual enrichment of the spiritual culture&quot; of the country's many ethnic groups.
 Kronhaus said that a law defining a state language was necessary, insofar as it could establish certain legal guarantees, such as ensuring accurate translations of official documents or court hearings - which the current bill does.
 But the proposed legislation is too amorphous in defining the areas where the new rules apply, he said.
 Likewise, the bill covers advertising, although the regulations would not be applicable to brand names or trademarks, nor would they affect &quot;functional&quot; signs such as exit markers or stop signs.
 As far as the rules for media, the latest version of the bill is significantly less restrictive than the version passed in first reading in June. Now, journalists and television personalities will be able to use &quot;vernacular, disdainful or foul&quot; language and foreign words if they are &quot;an inalienable part of an artistic concept.&quot;
 Deputy Alexeyev said the bill's authors had taken into account national-language legislation passed in countries like China and France, but would not push for the kind of sanctions, like fines, established in other places.
 That may be a good thing for the president.
 Last year, Putin addressed the Bundestag in his impressive German.
 Earlier this week, when Putin met with media executives and agreed to veto legislation placing new restrictions on journalists, he surprised observers by using the decisively un-Russian neologism <i>zavetirovat</i>, instead of the more familiar <i>nalozhit veto</i>.
 Asked whether the language bill would mean Putin would be punished, Alexeyev smiled and said, &quot;Fortunately, liability has not been spelled out yet.&quot;

TITLE: Bill Limits Regional Control of Senators
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma will soon consider a controversial bill slashing regional authorities' control over their representatives in parliament's upper house and making senators virtually untouchable for the first year of their terms.
 
The proposed legislation, submitted by deputies from three pro-Kremlin factions, would make it harder for regional governors and legislatures to sack their envoys to the Federation Council, while allowing the chamber to kick out its members - in some cases, without the consent of those who appointed them.
 &quot;A trend is emerging whereby Federation Council members are becoming overly dependent on the possibility of getting recalled by the regional authorities who appointed them,&quot; wrote the bill's authors in an explanatory note. &quot;This makes their position highly unstable, which hinders [them] from expressing the interests of the state overall, not just a specific region.&quot;
 Under existing law, senators can be recalled for any reason by the regional officials who appointed them.
 The new bill lists five violations for which senators can be sacked: (a) engaging in activity closed off to them under existing legislation; (b) absence from work for longer than six months; (c) missing more than three meetings in one session; (d) actions &quot;disgracing&quot; a senator; and (e) failure to vote as instructed by regional authorities on legislation falling under the joint jurisdiction of federal and regional government. However, such instructions can be ignored if the president, cabinet or Federation Council feels they violate the letter or the spirit of federal law. 
 In all cases except for the first violation in the list, the senate's consent is required. The Federation Council can also initiate the ouster of any of its members if one-fifth of the chamber supports the idea.
 The bill also calls for a simplified procedure for extending senators' terms. Under the current law, a delegate's term ends at the same time as the term of the regional officials who selected him.
 The proposed amendments will face a competing bill from the liberal Union of Right Forces party, or SPS.
 While SPS lawmakers agree that senators should be protected from the caprices of regional leaders, they also believe representatives should be accountable to those who chose them.
 The SPS bill lists three violations for which regional officials can recall their envoys: The first two are the same as Unity's; the third is failure to act as instructed by regional authorities, regardless of what federal officials have to say about it.
 The legislation proposed by SPS gives the right to recall senators only to the regional officials who chose them, as long as two-thirds of the regional legislature supports the move.
 Both bills introduce a one-year moratorium on firing senators. But, in the bill submitted by the pro-Kremlin deputies, this restriction applies only when regional authorities want to sack their delegates for failing to follow instructions.
 The non-SPS bill is widely believed to have Kremlin backing, although last spring - when a first draft was submitted - Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko criticized it as &quot;groundlessly restricting regional authorities' right to independently appoint or elect their representatives, as well as to recall them before the end of their terms.&quot;
 Matviyenko's doubts do not reflect the government's overall position. Earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko slammed the SPS bill, in part for the same reasons cited by the pro-Kremlin lawmakers - for making senators too dependent on the regions, while their duty was to the nation as a whole.
 Some regional leaders agree that the procedure for firing senators needs to be clarified, but have protested against a curtailment of their powers.
 &quot;Banning the regions from recalling their representatives would be direct interference in the jurisdiction of the [Russian] federation's constituent territories and a restriction of our rights,&quot; Nikolai Voronin, chairperson of the Sverdlovsk regional legislature, told the Kommersant newspaper.

TITLE: Official Slams Repair Projects
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russia's top construction official this week criticized a number of preparations for St. Petersburg's upcoming 300th-anniversary celebrations, saying that, in some cases, work is behind schedule and funds are being used ineffectively.
 
&quot;I must say that there are projects that are organized on an unsatisfactory level,&quot; Nikolai Koshman, the head of the Federal Construction Committee, or Gosstroi, said at a press conference on Wednesday. 
 &quot;We are dissatisfied with the work at the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Botanical Garden,&quot; said Koshman, referring to the inspection team with which he is in the city. &quot;The construction work at the city's flood-protection barrier is in the worst condition.&quot;
 The inspection team was sent to the city on the initiative of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, after a Federal Audit Chamber inspection discovered a number of serious problems with the anniversary preparations and reported them to President Vladimir Putin, a St. Petersburg native. Putin publicly lambasted city officials - including Governer Vladimir Yakovlev - about the state of the preparations live on national television during a visit to his hometown earlier this year.
 Next year's anniversary is meant to be a large-scale cultural and political event for Russia. More than 40 foreign leaders have already been invited to the city, which is aiming to attract foreign investment, as well as merely attention, during the celebrations.
 With just 178 days to go until the city's official birthday, on May 27, preparations are currently proceeding at full speed, with many buildings, historical sites and monuments covered in scaffolding.
 Using very correct and careful language, Koshman said that a number of project contractors would have to review their tasks, that the Federal Construction Committee's St. Petersburg office would be expanded, and that work-financing systems would be changed and made completely transparent.
 He also said the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, may give a $325-million credit for completing work on the flood-protection barrier. The agreement with the EBRD could be signed as early as January, depending on the completion of the necessary formalities.
 The scheme was signed into existence by the Soviet government in 1979. Since then, 25.4 kilometers of the planned dyke - approximately 70 percent - has been completed. Some $420 million is needed to finish the project.
 Koshman said that the renovation work at Smolny Cathedral and the Sheremetyev and Shuvalov palaces needs more financing, options for which will be considered by the federal government.
 Not all was doom and gloom, however. Koshman voiced positive opinions on the work on Palace Square, and expressed confidence that the broken metro line between Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva stations would be repaired by the end of 2003.
 The Federal Construction Committee is in charge of work at 19 locations in and around St. Petersburg, including Palace Square, the Mariinsky Theater, the Russian National Library, parts of Peterhof and the broken metro line.
 Koshman is due back in the city in a couple of weeks with another inspection team, scheduled to focus on the Leningrad Oblast.

TITLE: Putin's Popularity Soars Following Hostage Crisis
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Likely as a result of national consolidation in the aftermath of the hostage crisis in Moscow, President Vladimit Putin's approval rating jumped to an all-time high of 83 percent in November, one of the country's leading pollsters said.
 
The All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, or VTsIOM, said that a poll conducted among a representative sample of 1,600 Russians from Nov. 22 to 25 showed that Putin's rating grew this month by 6 percentage points, from a steady 77 percent in September and October. The percentage of those who disapprove of Putin's performance dropped from an average of 20 during the past five months to an all-time low of 15 percent.
 The poll's margin of error is 3.8 percent.
 At the same time, when asked about specific aspects of Putin's domestic policies, Russians were more critical of their president. Only 33 percent consider Putin's handling of the economy and citizens' welfare a success, while 62 percent consider it a failure to various degrees. 
 Only 18 percent said Putin had been successful in &quot;routing the rebels in Chechnya,&quot; and 73 percent (up from 67 percent in March) said he had failed. The question about Putin's success in finding a political settlement in Chechnya brought similar results.
 Putin's foreign policy won much more support. The percentage of people polled who considered his foreign policy a success grew to 71 percent from 57 percent in March.
 VTsIOM director Yury Levada said the jump in Putin's approval rating is a result of the Oct. 23 to 26 hostage crisis.
 &quot;It is mainly connected to the Dubrovka emergency situation - which still remains because nothing has been explained, because people are expecting other dangers,&quot; Levada said in a telephone interview Thursday. &quot;It is similar to what Americans call 'rallying around the flag,' only, in our country, the president acts as a national symbol.&quot;
 Leaders' approval ratings typically increase when a country feels itself in danger or under attack, as with U.S. President George W. Bush's after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
 Levada also said that he senses a growing desire for revenge. While at the beginning of the year about two-thirds of respondents said the Chechnya conflict should be phased out through negotiations, in November more people (48 percent) argued for a continuation of the war than for talks (43 percent).
 &quot;Putin clearly appears as a winner in the war against terror,&quot; pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov said. During the crisis, Putin performed the role of the nation's military leader well, but he has not yet shown himself to be a successful economic manager.
 &quot;He has not raised living standards, he has not created conditions for small and medium-size businesses,&quot; Markov said. 
 That is why Putin's &quot;abnormally high&quot; rating is likely to decrease when and if issues such as housing-sector reform or the fight against corruption take priority in people minds, Markov said.
 &quot;If he is successful, his rating is bound to decrease,&quot; he said. &quot;That will mean that the country is becoming normal.&quot;

TITLE: Moscow To Pay a Price for Not Celebrating
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova and Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - First there was Scrooge, the Dickens character who banned holiday celebrations at work. Now there's Mayor Yury Luzhkov, Moscow's own anti-scrooge.
 
The Moscow mayor's love of holidays has him insisting &quot;forcing, actually, on pain of fine&quot; that every single shop dress itself up for this year's winter celebrations.
 Long known for his passion for decorating the city streets lavishly ahead of every holiday, Luzhkov has ordered all stores, restaurants, cafes and markets to adorn their shop windows and interiors with decorations ahead of the winter holiday season, and has even given a Dec. 1 deadline to do so.
 Those who do not comply with the mayor's order will face fines of up to 200 rubles, Zhanna Artyomova, deputy head of City Hall's consumer-goods department, said Thursday. She said public institutions, like post offices and banks, have until Dec. 15 to put up decorations.
 Artyomova said she sees nothing wrong in forcing companies to get into the holiday spirit.
 &quot;As of next week, our inspectors will be out checking whether people comply with the order,&quot; Artyomova said, adding that she does not expect many people to resist the idea of creating a festive atmosphere.
 &quot;People who, for example, operate a store, must understand that it is not their house but a kind of public place. After all, their mission is to please consumers and to keep them in good spirits,&quot; she said.
 Forcing people to celebrate may be an unusual way to govern, but the Moscow mayor is not the first to try his hand at it. Peter the Great is known to have ordered everyone to have fun over the Christmas period. But the winner for drawing forced smiles and gritted teeth has to go the Chinese government, which encouraged Tibetans to take part in celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Communist rule under threat of pay and pension cuts. Luzhkov still has a long way to go.
 Artyomova said the city will not impose strict guidelines for the decorations, only that they should be done in a certain style. 
 Tiny stores or kiosks will be not be obliged to spend a fortune on expensive trees and decorations. &quot;Of course, everything will depend on their wallets and imagination,&quot; she said.
 The city has at least one hard-and-fast rule, however. Every business must make sure its windows are illuminated from 4.30 p.m. until 1 a.m. &quot;Those who fail to switch the lights on will be considered violators and subject to fines,&quot; Artyomova said.
 Some storeowners said they would have adorned their windows without the city ruling, but they did not like the idea of being forced to do so, especially so long before New Year's Eve. 
 Avtosalon, a dealership on Leningradskoye Shosse, heeded the order but in as subtle a way as possible, with just a string of lanterns in the window and two small Christmas trees, all of which were outshone by the huge amount of chrome on display.
 &quot;If they had chosen Dec. 15, then there would be only two weeks before the New Year. But, now, it's a month and a half away. It's not right,&quot; said Valery Abramov, Avtosalon director, adding that stores should be free to do what they want.
 Further down Leningradskoye Shosse, a giant snowman stands in front of the Magistral supermarket. The supermarket's managers say they always put up decorations, but they didn't agree with the spirit of the ruling.
 &quot;I don't think you should force people to celebrate,&quot; said Vladimir Yevdokimenko, who is in charge of Magistral's decorations.
 &quot;You can't force people to drink champagne,&quot; piped in store manager Sergei Baranov. &quot;I like cognac.&quot;
 The Darina cafe near Vodny Stadion metro station packed its windows full with shining lights.
 &quot;Maybe it is a little bit early, but I think it beautifies the city for the whole month,&quot; said Vladimir Paramonov, the cafe's general director. &quot;I think it's OK.&quot;
 Next door, tire shop Trek had a more humble display on its tiny front window - two silver trees and a poster beside an ad for Michelin. Surrounded by rows of tires, the shop assistant said, &quot;A holiday is a holiday.&quot;

TITLE: Gazprom Figures Fall Short in First Half
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Investors punished Gazprom on Wednesday for posting first-half financials far below expectations and failing to offer much of an explanation why.
 
The gas giant's stock closed down 3.5 percent after the company revealed January-June revenues under international accounting standards of just $9.19 billion - about three-quarters of what it was in the same period last year. Net profit dropped 15 percent to $310 million.
 The company blamed the decline on one thing - lower gas prices in Europe, which accounts for the bulk of its revenues - but analysts said that Europe was not the only problem.
 &quot;We think a lot of things are going wrong,&quot; said Mattias Westman, director of Prosperity Capital Management.
 Although the company showed improvements in some areas, the figures raised concerns that the company has failed to stem the kind of financial shenanigans that cost former CEO Rem Vyakhirev and his top managers their jobs more than a year ago.
 &quot;They used every provision they could to lower their numbers, so that they could push for higher tariffs,&quot; said Bill Browder, managing director of Hermitage Capital, which is thought to control some 2 percent of Gazprom's stock.
 Domestic sales are a money-losing proposition for Gazprom, because the government keeps prices artificially low.
 Although analysts said that the bulk of the first-half revenue drop could be accounted for by lower prices abroad, they were at a loss to explain a decline in domestic revenues, despite prices being 9 percent higher.
 Analysts point to Gazprom subsidiary Mezhregiongaz, which has a virtual monopoly on domestic sales, as a possible leak. Last month, Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais accused Mezhregiongaz of forcing customers to buy gas through intermediaries at inflated prices.
 Gazprom spokesperson Igor Plotnikov denied that such a scheme exists, although investigations are underway.
 Compounding the jitters is the company's ballooning debt load, which now stands at some $15 billion, nearly $8 billion of which is short term.
 Due to debt servicing and higher capital expenditures, Gazprom has a negative free-cash flow for the first time since 1999, meaning that it spent all its operating cash in the first half of this year, leaving nothing to pay off debt. The company notched up free-cash flows of $1.4 billion in 2001 and $1.2 billion in 2000.
 Most of Gazprom's short-term debt is being rolled over by new loans from Western banks backed by exports.
 &quot;[But if] there are any problems in the capital markets, if there is a credit crunch, without cash flow, Gazprom could find itself squeezed,&quot; said Westman, whose fund does not own Gazprom stock because it considers the play too risky. &quot;One could be concerned about what richer companies could do if they come in and offer to roll over the debt instead.&quot;
 Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has long been eyeing Gazprom as a potential acquisition, should financial problems force the company to break up.
 Other analysts, however, said that the cash crunch at Gazprom was likely to be short-lived.

TITLE: Delta Fund Predicts End of 'Foreign Investment' in Russia
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Delta Fund, a multimillion-dollar private-equity fund set up by the U.S. government to promote investment in Russia, said Tuesday that Russian industrial groups are at long last moving into direct investment and predicted that there would be no such thing as a &quot;foreign investor&quot; in a couple of years.
 
&quot;In the past, private equity has been seen as a foreigners' game and foreigners' territory, but, very quietly, Russian investors have entered this market,&quot; Delta Fund President David Jones said.
 &quot;I predict that, in two or three years, the expression 'foreign investor' will disappear and we will all become just 'investors,' which is good for all of us in the end,&quot; Jones said.
 Delta Fund was launched as the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund in 1995 with a $440-million grant from the U.S. Congress. Since then, some $200 million has been invested into more than 30 companies. The fund is managed by Delta Capital, which was set up in 1999.
 Delta Fund - which controls DeltaCredit, Delta Leasing and Delta Bank - focuses on financial services. It also has invested in media, including CTC and TV3 television and StoryFirst Communications; consumer-goods and retail companies, including beer major Sun Interbrew and supermarket chain SPAR Moscow; and high-technology.
 A number of direct equity funds, some managed by financial giants Templeton and Framlington, were active before the 1998 financial crisis. Then they paid back their shareholders and left.
 Jones said that despite the big gains on the stock market over the past few years, foreign investors have shied away from direct investment in smaller, privately held companies, citing corporate governance risks. &quot;We were left almost alone in the market after the crisis, which gave us an opportunity to start several new projects and successfully exit existing ones,&quot; he said.
 Delta Fund has left six companies since 1998 and posted an average 20-percent rate of return on original investment, Jones said. The most recent sell-offs were the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, which Delta sold to the NIKoil financial group, and the Saint Springs water company, which was sold to Switzerland's Nestle Group.
 Other foreigners only re-entered the private equity market in January of this year, with Baring Vostok Capital Partners launching a $205-million fund to manage direct investments.
 Since then, the major news has come from local players.

TITLE: Law Firm Marks 10 Years in St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While commercial law may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the State Hermitage Museum, for Baker &amp; McKenzie, the museum's theater turned out to be a pretty good fit.
 
The Hermitage Theater hosted a concert and reception Wednesday night to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of Baker &amp; McKenzie's St. Petersburg office and five years of collaboration with the museum.
 Bringing together Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky and the chairperson of Baker &amp; McKenzie's Executive Committee, as well as representatives of St. Petersburg's business and diplomatic communities, it highlighted the experience of the company's 10 years in the city in relation to questions of culture. While work with the Hermitage is the obvious example, the more obscure question of bringing an international corporate and legal mentality into a situation characterized by a changing Russian legal culture is, in itself, an interesting study.
 At the outset, the St. Petersburg operation was relatively small.
 &quot;It was just me working here for a little bit, and then we took on one Russian lawyer,&quot; says Arthur George, who opened the office and was the managing partner until 1997. &quot;We had had an office in Moscow since 1989, and I had been working there for about 3 1/2 years. Things developed quickly enough here that a lot of our foreign clients were moving here and were kind of expecting us to open here.&quot;
 Time can sometimes play little tricks on the memory and, jokingly, James Hitch, who took over as partner in the office in 1997, says that this may be the case with George.
 &quot;Arthur's wife, Olga - I won't say anything negative about Moscow - preferred to live in St. Petersburg, so I think that one of the main reasons that we have the St. Petersburg office is that she was born here,&quot; Hitch says.
 Whatever the case, the office has since thrived, growing from its modest beginnings to its present staff of seven lawyers, following the stewardship of George and Hitch to that of Maxim Kalinin, the managing partner today. Needless to say, the 10 years have witnessed a slew of changes, as commercial law was still in its infancy in Russia in 1992.
 &quot;You know, contracts in Russia were typically a page or two, and it took people a little while to get used to the document-production aspects, the contract-writing aspects and negotiating contracts,&quot; George says. &quot;That's something that never really happened in the Soviet Union. It isn't really taught in law school very well, even in America. So, it took people a little while to get used to knowing how to manage a set of documents competently.&quot;
 As a result, training lawyers to deal with the demands of foreign firms moving into St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast was one of the first tasks facing Baker &amp; McKenzie here, but George says that the office got lucky.
 &quot;By the time I got up here, things had already changed somewhat from how they had been in 1989, when I first got to Moscow. When I opened Moscow, things were so new that none of the young guys coming out of law school had any idea about commercial law,&quot; he says. &quot;By the time I opened up here, there was a chance to get kids coming out of law schools who had a better idea or even had some experience abroad ... I was able to get two or three sharp kids and they worked out really well.&quot;
 One of those &quot;kids&quot; was Kalinin, who joined the firm in 1994. Originally from St. Petersburg, he went to Moscow in 1986 to study law at the Moscow Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). After graduating, he worked for a short time at a small law firm opened by American lawyers, and then for a large international accounting firm, before hooking up with Baker &amp; McKenzie. Kalinin says that, even with experience working with Western firms, the move took a little getting used to.
 &quot;It takes several years. The firm's culture and the international standards of the company mean a lot of training,&quot; he says. &quot;This, even after I was educated in one of the best institutions in the country, by professors who were the country's stars of international trade litigation.&quot;
 Hitch says, however, that the flow of expertise was not only one way.
 &quot;I was surprised that our [Russian] attorneys here were so diligent about saying to me: 'Jim, we can't do this, as it's too close to the edge,'&quot; he says. &quot;I was very lucky that these guys were either trained so well by Arthur, or knew instinctively what we could or could not do.&quot;
 Kalinin, one of the group that was there to raise the red flag if the firm's tack came &quot;too close to the edge,&quot; is now also in charge of managing Baker &amp; McKenzie's partnership with the Hermitage. Since 1997, the firm has been involved with the museum's Friends of the Hermitage fund, including running the annual &quot;Our Hermitage&quot; program, which takes place in the lead-up to Christmas and the New Year and is specifically designed for children with learning difficulties. The program includes a special Christmas theater production for the children.
 In 1999, the relationship between the firm and the museum was formalized, with Baker &amp; McKenzie being named as the priority provider of international legal services for the museum. The joint project between the Guggenheim Fund in the United States and the Hermitage is just one of the instances in which the law firm has provided legal support, and Hermitage officials say that agreement is a perfect fit.
 &quot;Just like Baker &amp; McKenzie, the Hermitage is an international organization with a large international presence, putting on dozens of exhibitions in other countries every year&quot; says Yevgeny Fyodorov, the senior officer for corporate membership in the Hermitage's development department. &quot;Baker and McKenzie is present in all of the countries that are of interest for the museum.&quot;

TITLE: GDP Growth Not Real, According to EBRD
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Despite the strong gross-domestic product figures posted by the government over the past three years, the economy has a long way to go before it starts showing any real growth, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development cautioned Wednesday, in a report urging Russia to diversify the economy from the natural-resource sectors.
 
&quot;What we've seen in Russia during the last years, by its nature, cannot be considered real economic growth, but rather catching up between available industrial capacities and growth in productivity after the 1998 crisis,&quot; chief EBRD economist Willem Buiter told reporters at the presentation of the bank's annual transition report on Russia and 26 other countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
 The Russian economy has been showing negative growth for much of the past decade, and its GDP in real terms is still almost 30 percent below the level it was at in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, economists say.
 Capacity utilization in Russia is about 57 percent now, back at the levels where it was in 1993, according to the World Bank, which, with the International Monetary Fund, is also pushing Russia to diversify its economy.
 &quot;More importantly, it has gone up sharply from 37 percent after the 1998 crisis, but remained flat since 2001, which means that it has reached its maximum level,&quot; said Christof Ruehl, the World Bank's chief economist for Russia.
 The EBRD expects the economies of the nine most-developed countries of Central Europe and the Baltics to grow by 3.7 percent in 2003, compared with a forecast of 2.2 percent in 2002. The EBRD forecasts that Balkan countries will grow 4.1 percent in 2003, up from 3.6 percent this year.
 However, growth in the Commonwealth of Independent States is expected to slow down to 4.0 percent, down from 4.4 percent this year, as the easy growth from Russia's oil and gas and the 1998 default and devaluation runs out of steam.
 The Russian government is predicting GDP growth of about 4 percent in 2002 and 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent next year.
 &quot;The growth in Russia, starting from next year, will be only driven by new capacities, created by investments and by the increase of productivity and technological progress,&quot; Ruehl said.
 In addition to long-expected progress in the restructuring of Russia's energy and banking sectors, the EBRD pointed at three main weak spots in the economy: the lack of diversification, the small role of small and medium-size companies, and difficulties with both entering and exiting business projects.
 &quot;Diversification of the local industrial groups into noncore sectors is a good thing, provided it does not restrict the ability of others to do the same,&quot; Buiter said. &quot;It is a positive development that they are bringing capital to other industries, but the question remains whether they will encourage competition in these sectors.&quot;
 According to the EBRD report, successful diversification depends on a regulatory environment and on the extent to which both domestic and foreign firms can compete in the new markets that these conglomerates are trying to enter. &quot;It should be a level playing field for all,&quot; Buiter said.
 However, the bank said that it expects to see significant improvements in SMEs with the introduction of new taxation and accounting procedures for small companies in early 2003.

TITLE: Investment Planned for Historic Factory
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: NIKoil, the owner of a 75.21-percent stake in Lomonosov Porcelain, plans to invest $5 million in production, said Nikolai Gordeyev, NIKoil vice president and new general director at the porcelain factory, at a press conference on Friday. Lomonosov Porcelain also plans to open its first retail outlet abroad, in Paris, following a recent agreement with the French factory Deshouliers, in which NIKoil holds a 51-percent stake.
 
The Lomonosov Porcelain Factory was built in 1744, making it the first Russian and one of the first European porcelain factories. Between 1765 and 1925, the plant was called the Imperial Porcelain Factory. 
 In 1993, the plant was privatized, with the staff and the State Property Ministry being given controlling stakes in the company. In 1999, the USA-Russia Investment Fund (later named Delta Capital), the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co. (KKR) investment firm and Stoomhamer Amsterdam acquired a controlling stake in the company. 
 In early 2002, Galina Tsvetkova, the wife of Nikolai Tsvetkov, president of the NIKoil corporation, began buying up shares in Lomonosov Porcelain from the foreign shareholders. 
 At present, Tsvetkov's family owns 75.21 percent of Lomonosov Porcelain, with the staff holding 14 percent and KKR holding 10 percent.
 NIKoil will invest the $5 million in production expansion over a period of two years, Gordeyev said, adding that only 50 percent of the factory's facilities are being used at present. 
 According to its own reports, the turnover at Lomonosov Porcelain amounted to $11 million in 2001. Experts believe the porcelain market in Russia to be worth around $150 million to $500 million annually. Alexei Kropotov, marketing director at the Toy Opinion market-research company, which has studied the sector, said that Lomonosov Porcelain holds an 8.5-percent market share in Russia and a 16-percent market share in St. Petersburg. Major domestic competitors include Dulevsky Porcelain, the Konakovsky Faience Factory and the Pskov Pottery Factory.
 Lomonosov Porcelain manufactures a range of over 500 porcelain products, with much of the work being done by hand. Though many of the factory's goods are mass produced, the firm has also aimed its wares at the higher end of the market. &quot;The foreign shareholders wanted to fully automate the production, but there was a huge protest against it,&quot; said Larisa Velikotnaya, head of the product-range department.
 The foreign investors have had some impact at the factory, however. &quot;They restarted the production of the so-called 'Malevich teapot' [a teapot in the form of a train] and they also introduced discipline among the workers at the factory,&quot; Velikotnaya said.
 Discussing plans for development at the factory, Gordeyev said that &quot;We are going to restart production of more items from the collections of the Imperial Factory and the Museum of Lomonosov Porcelain.&quot;
 In 2001, the State Property Ministry handed the collection of the Museum of Lomonosov Porcelain, which comprises 25,000 exhibits, to the State Hermitage Museum. 
 &quot;At present, we allow the Hermitage to house the Porcelain Museum on the Lomonosov Porcelain grounds for free, and we are carrying out repair works at our own expense. In return, the Hermitage is giving us the opportunity to copy some of the exhibits,&quot; Velikotnaya said. 
 &quot;We suffer a great deal from illegal copies of our works, which are produced both in Russia and abroad,&quot; she said.
 In September 2002, NIKoil acquired at 51-percent stake in Deshouliers, founded in 1826, which specializes in porcelain production for hotels and restaurants and has a well-developed international distribution network.In 2001, the company had a turnover of 15 million euros.
 Joint projects by the Russian and French porcelain factories are currently being discussed, Gordeyev said, and plans include the opening of Lomonosov Porcelain's first foreign shop, in Paris.
 At present, the factory has five shops in St. Petersburg and one in Moscow.

TITLE: Russia Loses Vast Satellite in Failed Launch
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - The world's largest civilian communications satellite went into the wrong orbit Tuesday, dooming it to destruction, because of a Russian booster failure, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency said.
 
It was the biggest setback yet to Russia's satellite-launching program, which Moscow has seen as a potential cash cow for its depressed space industry.
 The failure follows an accident about a month and a half ago when an unmanned Soyuz-U rocket carrying another satellite blew up half a minute after liftoff.
 The Astra-1K satellite blasted off early Tuesday atop a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The rocket successfully carried it to a preliminary orbit, but the Russian-made DM-3 boosting unit failed to give a secondary impulse to send it to a higher orbit, said Konstantin Kreidenko, a spokesperson for the Russian Aviation and Space Agency.
 Officials have opened an investigation.
 Kreidenko said in a telephone interview that a glitch in the software that controls the DM-3 may have caused the failure.
 The Astra-1K, manufactured by France's Alcatel Space Corporation for the Societe Europeene des Satellites of Luxembourg, was the largest communications satellite ever built at 5.25 metric tons.
 With a height of 6.6 meters, a total span of 37 meters and 10 antenna reflectors, the satellite was intended to replace three Astra satellites now in orbit, broadcasting radio and television programming and providing mobile telephone and Internet connections.
 SES engineers were still trying to rescue the satellite Tuesday night and had managed to boost its orbit a little, SES spokesperson Yves Feltes said. &quot;We are not very happy today,&quot; he said.
 Kreidenko said that the DM-3 boosting unit, manufactured by RKK Energia, is frequently used without any identifiable problems to launch satellites to high, geostationary orbits.
 &quot;Until now, it has had a good reputation for safety,&quot; he said.
 Denis Pivnyuk, a deputy director of the Khrunichev company, which manufactures the Proton boosters, told Ekho Moskvy radio that the rocket itself had functioned properly.
 He added that the satellite was insured by the owner.
 Interfax reported an insurance industry source as saying that the satellite was insured for more than $217 million.
 Khrunichev carries out commercial launches of Protons in a joint venture called International Launch Services with U.S. company Lockheed Martin. Pivnyuk said that the failed launch would probably not delay the company's plans to send up a commercial satellite next month.
 Khrunichev is also scheduled to launch a Russian satellite atop a Proton next month, Pivnyuk said.
 
 <i>(AP, SPT) </i>

TITLE: Aeroflot Approves Historic Upgrade
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aeroflot's board of directors late Tuesday approved the largest fleet upgrade ever undertaken by a Russian carrier.
 
The state-controlled company's board, dominated by government representatives, agreed to acquire a total of 18 mid-range Airbus A320s - 10 under seven to 10-year operational leases and eight under 12-year financial leases.
 The list price of the A320 and its A319 derivative is $50 million, but neither Aeroflot nor Airbus will reveal the true cost of the package. What is known, however, is that Aeroflot's board called an extraordinary shareholders meeting for the end of December to formally approve the deal, which means, under company law, that it is worth more than 50 percent of the carrier's assets, currently valued at $554 million.
 Aeroflot currently flies 111 airplanes, 27 of which are foreign, including 11 Airbus A310s and 16 Boeings - 10 737s, four 767s and two 777s. The airline intends to shed the 737s and 777s and fly just two foreign models starting in 2005: 18 A320s and nine 767s.
 By the end of 2004, when all 18 jets are to come into service and the overhaul of the foreign fleet completed, the company expects to save $100 million a year in operational costs and boast the youngest foreign squadron in Europe.
 Sergei Koltovich, head of Aeroflot's fleet-planning department, said that U.S. giant General Electric's aviation-finance arm, GECAS, is handling the operational leases, while the financial leases would likely be arranged by one or more European agencies, such as Britain's ECDG, Germany's Hermes and France's Coface.
 Aeroflot's capital investment will not be significant, he said.
 Aeroflot expects to receive the first A320 by September and take delivery of another seven plus a Boeing 767 by the end of next year.
 The rest will be delivered in 2004.

TITLE: Slaying the AIDS Monster: No Time To Lose
AUTHOR: By Rian van de Braak
TEXT: WORLD AIDS Day on Sunday is a time to celebrate the gains made in treating and preventing HIV/AIDS, as well as to highlight the need to protect the human rights of those living with the virus. It is also a time to remember the lives lost and to learn from past failings. And just as importantly, it is an opportunity to put the spotlight on the huge socioeconomic and human catastrophe in the making in Russia.
 
Despite its late start, Russia is currently experiencing the fastest-growing epidemic in history. While there were only 1,000 HIV-infected people officially registered at the end of 1995, the number has more than doubled in each year since. In November, there were 218,000 people in Russia with HIV/AIDS. National and international experts estimate that the actual number of cases is five to 10 times greater, which puts the number of Russians infected at 1 million to 2 million. Current forecasts are that 5 million people will have HIV or AIDS by 2005.
 These are terrifying figures. However, they are not just figures, but people - young people, to be precise. More than 80 percent of those infected are under the age of 30. Without proper treatment, they will have no future by the age of 40.
 Looking at the epidemic's economic consequences, it is clear that a disaster lies ahead. Recent estimates by the World Bank indicate that the HIV and tuberculosis epidemics, combined with widespread drug use, will reduce Russia's workforce by 900,000 people by 2005. As a result, they estimate that, in 2005, GDP will be 1.3 percent lower than it would otherwise. Moreover, the uninhibited spread of HIV will lower the economy's potential long-term growth rate, knocking off half a percentage point annually by 2010 and a full percentage point by 2020.
 Within a few years, millions of infected people will need intensive medical care. How will the healthcare system be able to cope financially and practically?
 Russia produces only a few of the drugs that are needed to effectively treat HIV/AIDS and, consequently, relies upon imported drugs. In Russia, effective treatment through a combination of antiviral drugs (called triple therapy) now costs $10,000 per person per year. The cost of treating only officially registered HIV-infected people would be in excess of $2 billion per year - not including the costs associated with administering treatment, such as medical staff salaries and hospital resources.
 Healthcare professionals are not prepared for the task that lies ahead. They do not have the experience or the capacity to deal with the wave of AIDS patients coming their way. Considerable time and money is required to expand and reform the healthcare infrastructure to cope with the imminent deluge.
 Nevertheless, there is hope. Those of us who have been involved in setting up HIV/AIDS programs in Russia for the past couple of years have witnessed that lessons learned elsewhere in the world can be successfully applied in Russia. Many of those directly involved in fighting the epidemic are committed to turning best-practice examples from around the world into practical programs here. Russian professionals working in AIDS centers, drug treatment centers and inside the prison system are learning to work with nongovernmental organizations and self-help groups. A wealth of knowledge has poured into Russia over the past six or seven years and there are plenty of motivated medical professionals and NGO workers. They have saved, and continue to save, lives every day. However, they cannot reverse the tide of the epidemic on their own.
 In September, First Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko spoke of the need to &quot;intensify control&quot; of the spread of HIV in the country, and voiced concerns about the government's limited contribution on this front to date. The national budget for HIV/AIDS this year is only $5 million, and much of the money still goes toward large-scale HIV testing, which Onishchenko considers an inefficient use of the meager resources available.
 Currently, only about 500 people in Russia are receiving proper treatment. Additionally, there are no major HIV-prevention programs for young people in general or those in high-risk categories, such as injecting drug-users, prison inmates and those working in the sex industry. Onishchenko has also stressed the urgent need to set up treatment programs for the growing number of HIV-infected pregnant women in order to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child, before or after birth (through breastfeeding).
 However, dealing with HIV/AIDS is not solely the responsibility of the Health Ministry. HIV/AIDS touches on all aspects of society, and other ministries need to be involved in the design and implementation of a comprehensive program. But, most important of all, there needs to be high-level commitment on the part of the political leadership to make the struggle against HIV/AIDS a priority - this has proven to be a key factor in the programs that are successful around the world.
 Countries that have contained the spread of HIV/AIDS have done so largely through active programs with high-level backing to increase awareness, de-stigmatize the disease and treat those infected.
 And what if we don't learn from other countries' experiences?
 Unfortunately, the AIDS problem is not simply going to go away. And neither will the epidemic be limited to the current high-risk groups. Although 90 percent of new cases of HIV are transmitted through injecting drug use, there are increasing numbers of cases being recorded of transmission to the general population through sexual contact. Only major, targeted action can prevent Russia from going the same way as countries such as Botswana and Zimbabwe, where more than a third of the adult population has HIV/AIDS.
 Thanks to the delayed start of the epidemic in this part of the world, Russia still has a window of opportunity if it acts fast. Major action needs to be taken on the part of the government and NGOs to use the experiences available inside and outside of Russia to avert disaster. The AIDS epidemic is a tragedy that can be prevented.
 
 <i>Rian van de Braak, the general director of AIDS Foundation East-West, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Military Reform as Paradoxical as Intelligence
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: IT has become a tradition that all military-reform plans in Russia always consist of three stages. Since 1992, three different defense ministers have introduced three major military-reform plans. The first stage of each plan lasted about two years, and was successfully completed.
 
The first stage of each plan differed in nature: In 1992, it was the completion of the withdrawal of forces from Germany and elsewhere; in 1997, the merger of the Space Forces with Strategic Rocket Forces; and, now, an experiment to create one volunteer airborne division. However, all these reform plans had something in common: The first stage was always modest and did not fundamentally change the basis of the Soviet-style military machine.
 Each time, the first stage of military reform was successfully completed, and a more ambitious second stage was initiated with lots of fanfare. The main objective of the second stage has always been essentially the same - a serious overhaul of the military and the creation of a much more modern, battle-ready, mobile and professional fighting force.
 The third stage of military reform has always involved proclaiming a full or partial wind-up of compulsory conscription and the creation of a &quot;dream-team&quot; military, armed with the most modern precision-guided weapons - on a par with that of the United States and other major Western powers.
 But, in Russia, the third stage of military reform has never happened - it always fizzles out at stage two. The defense minister who initiated the reform plan is then dismissed and transferred to a different government job. A new minister takes over, states that Russia urgently needs military reform because its armed forces are disintegrating, the folks in the Defense Ministry put together a new three-stage plan - and the merry-go-round starts all over again.
 Will Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov's reform package that was officially put forward last week follow the same fatal pattern? Without forceful political intervention from the Kremlin, the answer is a resolute yes.
 The military top brass do not want to &quot;reform&quot; the present Soviet-style military - instead, they want a 10-fold increase in defense spending, to take a fifth of GDP or more, as in Soviet times.
 Most generals argue that Russia is a very rich country, with lots of oil, gas and other natural resources, but that, after the demise of the Soviet Union, Jewish oligarchs stole this wealth. Most uniformed members of the military expect President Vladimir Putin to confiscate the oligarchs' &quot;illicit&quot; wealth and spend it on a new Soviet-style major military buildup.
 With such unrealistic expectations still widespread, its very hard to believe that the Defense Ministry will ever stop sabotaging genuine reforms that could create an effective, much smaller military. Last week, Ivanov stated that the draft will never be abolished and that the present two-year term of compulsory service may be cut to 1 1/2 years, but only after 2007 or 2008.
 Today, there are some 800,000 conscripts in active service, about 600,000 in the Defense Ministry, with the rest enlisted in other armies - the Interior Ministry, Border Guards, etc. There are also more than 130,000 &quot;contract&quot; soldiers in the Defense Ministry forces.
 This relatively large number of contract soldiers is spread throughout all branches of the military, and does not significantly increase overall battle readiness. Last week, Ivanov announced plans to concentrate the contract soldiers in 92 front-line army, airborne and marine units by 2008 to create a ready-for-action, more disciplined and capable force.
 This plan - the core of the announced &quot;second&quot; stage of military reform - seems to be entirely rational. But what happens if, as currently is the case, in the absence of a centralized contract-soldier recruiting service, these front-line units get bums and bigots as volunteers?
 Last month in Chechnya, a company of contract soldiers went on strike and staged a noisy demonstration in Grozny, brandishing weapons, refusing to obey orders and demanding the Defense Ministry pay them money the men believed was due. Ivanov ended this protest action by promising to personally look into the men's grievances.
 No one was disciplined. The volunteer soldiers returned to their regular activities: Marauding, extorting bribes, drinking vodka, using heavy drugs, and torturing and killing Chechens at random. Is this Ivanov's idea of an ideal army? With such volunteers, it's hardly surprising that the generals sabotage reforms, believing conscripts are better.
 
 <i>Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst. </i>

TITLE: fresh feet on local dance scene
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Phil LaDuca's first students in St. Petersburg were all about their bodies.
 
When the American modern dancer and choreographer first came to the city to give a masterclass in Broadway jazz dance in 1998, there was only a group of nightclub-show dancers waiting for him.
 Now, LaDuca is back in town, and the difference is drastic. The dancers eagerly absorb LaDuca's skills, devouring his every step with their eyes, and dreaming of artistic careers. 
 &quot;The people who are at the workshop now are younger dancers, who aren't professionals yet but like to dance and want to become professionals in musical theater,&quot; he said in an interview this week. &quot;Whereas musical theater, as such, was virtually non-existent when I was here last time.&quot;
 Both of LaDuca's visits have been sponsored by Cannon Dance, St. Petersburg's first - and so far only - private studio focusing on modern dance, and jazz dance in particular. LaDuca's first visit was the studio's first project, so the acclaimed choreographer is virtually seen as Cannon Dance's godfather. 
 LaDuca started out as a classical dancer and, from personal experience, he says that all forms of dance are based on ballet. &quot;Ballet is a necessity; you need it as a good foundation for whatever you are doing in terms of choreography,&quot; he explained. &quot;If you want to be a wonderful musical-theater dancer, you have to be a wonderful ballet dancer.&quot;
 LaDuca's relationship to dance isn't limited to choreography, teaching and performance. In addition, he designs dancing shoes - his flagship store is nowhere else than Manhattan, New York.
 LaDuca has been dancing professionally for over 26 years. Having performed on Broadway as the original understudy to Gene Kelly in &quot;Signin' In the Rain,&quot; he has since appeared in &quot;Brigadoon,&quot; and &quot;The Pirates of Penzance,&quot; the international tours of &quot;Camelot,&quot; with Richard Harris, and with the &quot;American Dancemachine,&quot; featuring Ann Reinking. 
 As a teacher, LaDuca works with the Broadway Dance Center and STEPS in New York, and Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago. He has given masterclasses and workshops in Berlin, Rome, Montreal, Paris, Budapest, Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Los Angeles, Warsaw, Denmark, Helsinki, Moscow, Hawaii, Las Vegas - and now St. Petersburg.
 The fifty-odd dancers at the workshop vary in age from 10-year-old girls making their first steps in Broadway jazz dance to 30-year-old professionals.
 &quot;We are all at different levels, but it doesn't matter,&quot; said Alexandra Fedotova, 17. &quot;We all have something to learn.&quot;
 Fedotova left St. Petersburg's renowned Vaganova Ballet Academy several years ago after five years of classes because she wanted to try modern dance.
 &quot;I didn't know about Cannon Dance when I left ballet school, but I already knew what I wanted to dance,&quot; she said. &quot;Classical dance makes you stiff, technical elements prevail over expression, and there is much less to express emotionally.&quot;
 According to Fedotova, the most difficult things to pick up are the rhythm and the sense of the dance - and that is what LaDuca teaches her. &quot;At the workshops, we are rehearsing a fragment from the musical 'Chicago,'&quot; she said. &quot;It's great fun - something I haven't done before.&quot; 
 Joining locals at LaDuca's masterclasses are some of their counterparts from Novgorod, Riga, Arkhangelsk and Salekhard. 
 &quot;We live in the Far North, so it takes quite a while for cultural trends to reach us, but we know musical theater is booming in Moscow,&quot; said Veniamin Taragupta, head of the Next Generation modern-dance children's studio in Salekhard, which brought five young dancers to the masterclass. &quot;Our town is so small we don't even have a theater. All the obstacles notwithstanding, I am sure the first musical will be staged in our town sooner or later, because we very much want it to happen.&quot;
 The dancers want to get into musical theater, instead of becoming casino or nightclub dancers. They are sharper and much more attuned to what LaDuca says and does than the class of 1998.
 &quot;There's a great atmosphere at the workshop,&quot; he said. &quot;I feel the excitement in the air, they give me a lot of respect and energy, which helps me a lot.&quot;
 LaDuca teaches the artists to do everything with passion. &quot;Love what you are doing, and the audiences will love that, too,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;'Don't fake it, don't pretend you are smiling,' I tell them. 'That's not musical theater,'&quot; he said. &quot;Unfortunately, too many people think that it is. Just be true to the music, to the steps, and the audiences will love it.&quot;
 LaDuca has an explanation for the growing popularity of musical theater in Russia. Like most entertainment, he says, it is of heightened importance at times of crisis. With the current climate of war and terrorism - which rocked the world of musical theater so tragically in Moscow in October - people need escapism more than ever.
 &quot;Musical theater has always been a great escape, so it is actually very important right now for the people to get away from the stress and the horrors of the state of politics in the world,&quot; he said.
 According to LaDuca, the most vicious stereotype about Broadway jazz dance is that it is a weak dance form. &quot;It's very, very difficult,&quot; he said, pointing at his sweating dancers. &quot;The problem with musical theater is that everybody thinks they can do it, because we make it look so easy. But when they try to do it, they realize how difficult it is - and then to sing on top of it!&quot;
 LaDuca, who has choreographed shows around the world, may soon be coming to Russia for another show. A prominent local theatrical director has invited him to choreograph a production of Bernstein's &quot;West Side Story.&quot;
 &quot;I gave them my price, they were happy with it,&quot; he smiled. &quot;Let's see what's gonna happen.&quot;
 
 <i>
LaDuca's masterclasses run through Friday on the fourth floor of the Pervoi Pyatiletki House of Culture, 34 Ul. Dekabristov, and culminate with a gala show on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the same venue. Tel.: 114-2027. Links: www.laducashoes.com </i>

TITLE: as good as it gets - birthday cake and moloko
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Over the past six years, student-oriented basement venue Moloko has built up a reputation as St. Petersburg's finest underground rock club - and the club celebrates its sixth birthday in unusual style on Friday.
 
Called &quot;Tequila Kunst Markscheider Jazzz,&quot; the party will bring together two of the city's most popular club bands, Tequilajazzz and Markscheider Kunst, on the same evening.
 Both bands started their music careers at the seminal, now sadly defunct, TaMtAm Club, some of the approach and spirit of which has been inherited by Moloko, which was launched only a few months after its legendary predecessor shut down.
 It was Moloko's founder and director Yury Ugryumov who came up with the idea of celebrating the club's sixth birthday with a joint concert by two of the venue's most popular bands.
 &quot;Can you imagine Markscheider Kunst and Tequilajazzz playing in one concert?&quot; he exclaims. &quot;They are super groups, the city's best club bands. There hasn't been anything like this before.&quot;
 The club has changed its appearance considerably over the past 18 months, rebuilding its interiors, reconstructing its bar - which has been brought closer to the entrance - and adding a cloakroom. The most recent addition is a new lighting system, which the club started to install this week.
 &quot;Technically, many things are changing; it's just that a person who comes to the club constantly won't notice it immediately,&quot; says Ugryumov. &quot;But those who haven't been here for two years are, of course, overwhelmed.&quot;
 &quot;We are trying to keep the spirit, while evolving,&quot; he says. &quot;We can't see a future for ourselves without a change.&quot;
 Moloko's audience and repertoire has also changed somewhat recently. After the closure of the &quot;extreme&quot; club Poligon in early August, some heavy alternative bands normally associated with Poligon started to appear on Moloko's schedule.
 &quot;Honestly, we were a bit cautious about Poligon's crowd, but we didn't see any change at all in the club's atmosphere,&quot; says Ugryumov. &quot;At least we don't see any real extremism. Our club permits extreme music, to a certain extent but, as far as behavior goes, there can't be any rowdiness here; there are limits, everything is under control.&quot;
 As well as regular gigs, Moloko has recently hosted special programs put together by outside promoters, such as &quot;The Other Culture,&quot; a monthly evening of experimental electronic music, or &quot;Club Sputnik,&quot; which brought various Finnish bands to St. Petersburg.
 Local bands frequently praise the sound quality at Moloko and the work of its sound engineer, Anna Timofeyevskaya, describing it as the best venue in which to really listen to the music, not just to hang around.
 &quot;We came to Moloko naturally; first as members of the crowd, and then as performers,&quot; says Yevgeny Fyodorov of Tequilajazzz, which has made a tradition of playing at Moloko twice a year, in summer and winter and, in 2000, released a double CD called &quot;Moloko&quot; that was recorded at its 1999 summer concert at the venue.
 &quot;Moloko has a very delicate approach to its repertoire; the people try to follow an independent musical ideology. I doubt whether any extreme heavy metal or commercial rapcore will ever get in there,&quot; he says. &quot;It's a hippy place in a good way - just as TaMtAm was a punk place in a good way. It has a little bit of hippy spirit - just at the right level, before it starts to become irritating.&quot;
 Although the two bands differ greatly in their styles - Markscheider Kunst plays an Afro-Carribean blend, while Tequilajazzz concentrates on guitar-driven alternative rock - Fyodorov admits they have a common ideology. 
 Due to the lack of rehearsal time, the bands failed to prepare a cover of one of the other group's songs - Markscheider Kunst chose Tequila's &quot;Piratskaya&quot; (&quot;Piratical&quot;) while Tequilajazzz planned to play &quot;Korabli vo Ldakh&quot; (&quot;Ships in the Ice&quot;). There will, however, be an element of interrelation between the two.
 &quot;There will be some improvisation, for sure,&quot; says Fyodorov. &quot;Some of us will be playing with them, and some of them will be playing with us; a party with an element of a jam session.&quot;
 Apart from fans, a lot of local club musicians will come to the concert. Vasya Vasin of the band Kirpichi, which plays at nearby Red Club the same night, says he is planning to attend the celebration before his own concert.
 &quot;Our friends, Markscheider Kunst and Tequila[jazzz], will play, and we'll come to see them and then take them to our show,&quot; he says.
 According to Vasin, Moloko has a special international quality. &quot;It's a great underground club with the European approach - it's rock and roll, it's a rock club like they have in Germany or elsewhere,&quot; he says. &quot;Music itself defines the style.&quot;
 Due to the popularity of the two bands playing on Friday, there is a question as to whether the club will be able to hold all the musicians and fans who want to come.
 &quot;It's the main question, actually,&quot; says Ugryumov. &quot;We've raised ticket prices a little [to avoid overcrowding]. It will be 200 rubles, unlike the usual 70 or 100. But I think people should still come earlier, to get in before the doors close.&quot;
 
 <i>
Tequilajazzz and Markscheider Kunst in Moloko's Sixth Anniversary Concert at 7 p.m. on Nov. 29. Links: www. molokoclub.ru; www.tequilajazzz.spb. ru; www.wadada.net/kunst </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Moscow folk-rocker <strong>Inna Zhelannaya, </strong>who postponed her series of club concerts in St. Petersburg last week, has now cancelled them completely - without giving an explanation. Instead, a member of her band, <strong>Sergei Starostin, </strong>will come to fill in for her.
 
Folk virtuoso Starostin, a frequent visitor to the city who often plays solo and with various groups, will perform alone at JFC on Friday and with local art-rock band Volkovtrio at Red Club on Saturday.
 However, even without Zhelannaya, this Friday night still offers plenty of worthwhile events.
 Probably the best known Tuvianian band, <strong>Yat-Kha, </strong>has confirmed its concert at PORT club on Friday. The gig will be only its second performance here, after a low-profile festival slot in 1996.
 The Russian world-music scene is miniscule - Peter Gabriel's WOMAD site, www.womad.org, lists only one Russian band as taking part in the most famous festival of world music. (For some reason, it's a somewhat kitshchy St. Petersburg band, Terem, which entertains crowds by performing classical music on balalaikas.)
 Though technically part of Russia, Tuva's folk acts are much more high-profile on the international scene, due to their total originality and otherworldliness. 
 Folk-rock band Yat-Kha, which was awarded BBC Radio 3's Award For World Music in January, now features its founder, Albert Kuvezin, who sings in a traditional Tuvinian throat-singing style and plays rock guitar, as well as drummer Zhenya Tkachov, bassist Mahmoud Skripalshchikov and yet another throat singer, Radik Tiuliush. All the band's members play traditional instruments, such as the <i>yat-kha, </i>the <i>kengyrgy </i>or the <i>igil.</i>
 Of course, the joint concert by <strong>Tequilajazzz </strong>and <strong>Markscheider Kunst </strong>to celebrate Moloko club's sixth anniversary will draw the biggest crowd on Friday (see article, page ii).
 And, later the same night, <strong>Kirpichi, </strong>the popular club band that blends hip-hop and guitar rock, will play at Red Club.
 &quot;We'll play heavy stuff at Red Club,&quot; says the band's Vasya, fresh from a tour around the Ural Mountains that included Yekaterinburg, Perm and Tyumen.
 &quot;We don't want to play any hip-hop numbers,&quot; he said. &quot;We want to play a rock concert, totally. We'll play with a second guitarist, heavy stuff and lots of it - 24 songs.&quot;
 Vasin says his band will play seven songs from its most recent album &quot;Sila Uma,&quot; (&quot;Mind Power&quot;) released in October - but with no computers or samples. Other tracks will come from the band's earlier three albums. 
 The set will be identical to that performed on the recent tour, which &quot;went smoothly; people like rock,&quot; according to Vasin.
 Vasin says Kirpichi's first stadium concert at the Yubileiny Sports Palace's Malaya Arena on Nov. 3 drew around 3,000 fans, although the venue's acoustics are of poor quality.
 &quot;The concert was OK, but the sound was very poor - not focused,&quot; says Vasin. &quot;The venue is intended for playing hockey, not holding rock concerts.&quot; 
 The concert at Red Club will start at the unusual time of 11:30 p.m., rather than midnight, because Kirpichi has to head to Moscow the same night.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: was it really worth the wait(er)?
AUTHOR: by Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: To keep in tune with the frenzy of French wine-drinking that seems to have seized every self-respecting venue in St. Petersburg since the arrival of the beaujolais nouveau last week, I decided to spend Sunday afternoon in a place that answers to the modest name of Wine Salon and Grand Cafe Club Chateau. 
 
Club Chateau, divided into a wine shop on the left and a restaurant on the right, is the brainchild of one of St. Petersburg's largest wine importers, Graft Trading. I had already paid a visit to the shop when it opened and had been impressed by both the tasteful presentation and the range of wines offered.
 However, I found the restaurant, with its fake castle stones and Bacchus-like face carved into the wall, to be somewhat less of a stylistic success, and the predominance of a creamy, salmon-pink color gracing the walls, the napkins, the curtains - even the floor - only adds a final kitsch touch. 
 The suspicions raised by the decor, and by the rather indifferent reception afforded by the wait staff, dissipated rapidly as we browsed over the dozens of mouth-watering dishes described on the menu. The restaurant has both a permanent and a temporary menu, and - surprise, surprise! - the latter menu is currently devoted to the Burgundy region of France, to celebrate the arrival of the beaujolais nouveau. Closer inspection, however, showed that a number of the dishes had little to do with Burgundy, an example being the tarte tatin, a dish native to the Loire valley. 
 Even closer inspection revealed a few unfortunate translations, which yielded such curious dishes as &quot;cock in yellow wine,&quot; for coq au vin.
 For starters, we settled on salads, one with balsamic dressing for 130 rubles ($4.10), one with a mysterious &quot;Gordon Blue&quot; dressing and tuna fish for 190 rubles ($5.95). Both salads, which came as two heaps of vegetables shredded into tiny strips, were generous and very fresh, and provided the extra entertainment of guessing what went into them. Our combined efforts lead to a final guess of cucumber, pepper and Chinese cabbage. 
 More adventurous diners can try such extravagant starters as &quot;smoked quails with spicy fruit confit,&quot; for 230 rubles ($7.25), or even &quot;wine snails in field mushroom cap with creamy champagne sauce with Roquefort,&quot; for only 250 rubles ($7.85). This last choice made me wonder what exactly a wine snail is, but I sensed our sullen waiter would fail to appreciate my curiosity. 
 While I was pondering this and jotting down a few dishes from the menu, I was apprehended by the waiter in question, who dryly asked me what I was writing, and proceeded to explain the pointlessness of my notes, advising me to ask the chef should I have any questions. Having received no answer to his query about my employer, he turned on his heels, and left a heavy silence behind him. I was glad I didn't ask about the snails. 
 The main courses came shortly afterwards, and I caught myself wondering if anyone had spat on the food. But, remembering my reviewing duties, I bravely dug into my main course, duck brisket in fruit sauce with cooked fruits and nuts (435 rubles, $13.65). Here again, for those who read the English translations, the choice of words might lead to confusion, as brisket is meat taken from &quot;the breast of a quadruped animal&quot; - at least according to our office dictionary. At Club Chateau, however, brisket is definitely duck and, moreover, very tasty duck, if slightly overcooked. The potato gratin (65 rubles, $2.05) proved to be a perfect side dish. 
 My dining companion also seemed to enjoy his main course, Alsace beef and pork sausages in a Dijon mustard sauce (330 rubles, $10.35), although he was at first taken aback by the sausages' appearance, having subconsciously expected to be served the barbecued Australian sausages of his childhood. Club Chateau's sausages are strongly flavored, although a little on the fatty side. The potatoes fried in garlic (50 rubles, $1.55) were also deemed tasty. 
 My dining companion washed down all this rather heavy food with a glass of white Bordeaux Chateau Timberlay (80 rubles, $2.50), which was surprisingly soft and fruity. My glass of red wine, also from Chateau Timberlay (120 rubles, $3.75), was perfectly decent, although nothing to write home about. For diners who have more money to spend on wine, Club Chateau's wine list is extensive and surprisingly democratic, with prices ranging from 60 rubles to 200 rubles ($1.88 to $6.30) a glass, the delicious Lheraud Pineau des Charentes leading the pack. All the other wines are sold by the bottle and there is a wide selection of both red and white from different countries.
 To end the meal in style, my companion talked me into sharing profiteroles (100 rubles, $3.15), although, by then, we were flirting with indigestion - portions at Club Chateau are very generous and filling. The profiteroles turned out to be a real treat, with fresh, light pastry and delicious fudge ice-cream.
 Our digestive process, however, was disturbed once again by Club Chateau's unsavory staff. When I presented my credit card, I was asked to show my passport - an irritating practice that I thought had been stopped. Fortunately, we had enough cash to pay the bill, which rapidly disappeared, together with our waiter and the receipt. We were finally handed said receipt by a less-than-courteous cashier, who grudgingly retrieved the crumpled and stained paper from the garbage. We shuffled out wondering what we had done wrong, and agreeing that good food does not necessarily make a good restaurant.
 
 <i>
Club Chateau. 8 Malaya Morskaya Ul. Tel.: 312-6097. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Menu in Russian and English. Credit cards accepted (grudgingly). Lunch for two, with alcohol: 1,585 ($49.85). </i>

TITLE: 'fallen woman' reinstated
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Mariinsky Theater is asking a French director to remodel an old favorite for its latest premiere.
 
&quot;La Traviata,&quot; one of the world's most popular operas, has been a frequent guest at the Mariinsky and, on Dec. 15, the theater will premiere its latest interpretation of Verdi's famous work. Rehearsals are currently in full swing, under the watchful eye of Charles Roubaud, who made his Mariinsky debut this summer with a successful take on Puccini's &quot;Turandot.&quot;
 Roubaud began his career as opera director back in 1986, when he produced Massenet's &quot;Don Quixote&quot; in his home town, the southern French port city of Marseilles. Early on in his career, Roubaud focused mainly on works by French and Italian composers, working in both countries, before moving on to try his hand at German operas, inspired by his love of Richard Strauss, whom he ranks with Verdi and Puccini as his favorite composers. In 1993, he staged an award-winning production of Strauss' &quot;Die Frau ohne Schatten,&quot; in France. Currently, Roubaud's productions can regularly be seen at such acclaimed musical venues as the Arena di Verona, Parma's Teatro Reggia, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and France's oldest music festival, the annual Choregies d'Orange, in the south of the country.
 Roubaud says that his conception of &quot;La Traviata,&quot; or &quot;The Fallen Woman,&quot; will be quite a departure from traditional approaches to the opera, although several major principles will remain unchanged - for example, the opera will stay in its historical epoch.
 &quot;Currently, this is a very realistic story, and its duality should reveal itself in every movement, in every scene,&quot; says Roubaud. &quot;The most important thing to show is that the heroine exists in two worlds simultaneously. Part of her belongs to high society, where the other people reject her.&quot; 
 &quot;It is known from the libretto that [principal female character] Violetta dies from tuberculosis, but we'd like to stress that she is suffocating not only from her illness, but also from the stifling morality of 19th-century society,&quot; he adds. &quot;The hypocritical bourgeousie and its fake, rotten values are killing Violetta.&quot;
 Singing the part of Violetta, the &quot;fallen woman&quot; of the opera's title, will be one of the Mariinsky's brightest rising stars, soprano Anna Netrebko. 
 Born in Krasnodar, Southern Russia, Netrebko received her vocal training at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, from which she still hasn't graduated, instead leaving to pursue her career. In 1993, from she took first prize at Moscow's Glinka Competition, before making her debut at the Mariinsky the following year in the role of Susanna in Mozart's &quot;The Marriage of Figaro.&quot; Among other important roles that Netrebko has performed with the company are Amina in Vincenzo Bellini's &quot;La sonnambula,&quot; Antonia in Offenbach's &quot;The Tales of Hoffmann,&quot; Rosina in Rossini's &quot;The Barber of Seville,&quot; and Natasha Rostova, in Prokofiev's &quot;War and Peace.&quot;
 Remarkably, Netrebko is scheduled to make her debut at the renowned Vienna State Opera on April 2 next year in the role of Violetta. On top of this, the exciting young soprano has recently signed an exclusive recording contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label. Her first album, which will be recorded in 2003, will highlight the roles of Gilda, from Verdi's &quot;Rigoletto,&quot; and Juliette, in Gounoud's &quot;Romeo and Juliet,&quot; just two of the growing number of roles that Netrebko has sung with resounding success at venues throughout Europe and the United States.
 For director Roubaud, &quot;La Traviata&quot; is not merely a love story, nor does he see it as a story of betrayal. &quot;This opera is about sacrifice,&quot; he says.
 &quot;There are so many approaches to 'La Traviata,' so it is a great challenge for me to offer my own interpretation,&quot; says Roubaud. &quot;I see it as a social story.&quot;
 Traditional interpretations of the opera do not cast Alfredo, the lead male role, as a positive character and, when he falls in love with Violetta, she &quot;hires&quot; him for his position and money. When Germont, Alfredo's father, pleads with Violetta to break off the relationship to preserve the family's reputation, Violetta realizes that, money notwithstanding, she will never be able to integrate herself into high society. Her personality is usually portrayed as more dignified, pure and honest than those of Alfredo and Germont, even though she comes from much lower social stratum.
 While staging 'Turandot,' Roubaud, at the Mariinsky's request, worked with four different casts - a departure from his usual practice. &quot;Typically, I stage for one cast. 'Turandot' marked, in fact, the first time I worked with several casts,&quot; he says. &quot;What is special about it? Doing the same job four times over the same period, I suppose.&quot;
 Roubaud's credits include one Russian opera, Borodin's &quot;Prince Igor,&quot; although it was not staged in Russia. Now, however, the director - who was fascinated by Yury Alexandrov's rendition of Prokofiev's &quot;Semyon Kotko,&quot; and dazzled by Viktor Kramer's version of Mussorgsky's &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; - says that he would like to stage a Russian work for Russians, perhaps even at the Mariinsky - but not until he learns the language.
 That may not be far away. &quot;I barely speak any Russian at the moment,&quot; says Roubaud. &quot;But, if I keep coming here so often, I will eventually learn it.&quot;
 
 <i>
&quot;La Traviata&quot; premieres at the Mariinsky Theater on Dec. 15. Links: www.mariinsky.ru </i>

TITLE: aiming for the stars
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With its new show, &quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot; (&quot;Star Factory&quot;), Channel One is trying to recreate the success enjoyed last year by &quot;Za Steklom&quot; (&quot;Behind the Glass&quot;). This time, however, there's a twist: The contestants are all wannabe pop stars.
 
The show follows 16 young people, 24 hours a day, as they learn to sing, dance and act in daily lessons in their purpose-built house, performing both for their teachers and the television audience, both of whom vote house residents off the show one by one.
 &quot;The winner will get fame, love and contracts with recording studios,&quot; says the show's Web site, stars.yandex.ru. &quot;The losers will get nothing.&quot;
 Like the wildly popular &quot;Za Steklom,&quot; which aired on now-defunct TV6, &quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot; viewers choose which contestants stay on the show and which go home. But the similarities end there. &quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot; has plenty of the same ennui of &quot;Za Steklom&quot;'s first season, but none of the sex, booze or ambition. While &quot;Za Steklom&quot; aired an erotic shower scene in its first week, the highlight of &quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot;'s first seven days was when one contestant's mother called to remind him to change his socks and underwear every day.
 Every Tuesday, the teachers nominate three contestants whose talents are &quot;doubtful.&quot; Viewers vote for their favorite of the three, who is announced Friday and allowed to stay. The other contestants then choose which of the remaining two nominees gets to stay.
 The only real drama on &quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot; came with the departure of Jam, a 23-year-old Nigerian whose real name is Shefir Musa. After being nominated to leave, Jam said he wanted to leave because another participant had repeatedly called him a &quot;nigger.&quot; The other contestants convinced Jam to stay, but confessed in private on-camera interviews that they felt he only threatened to leave to win viewer sympathy. That Friday, he was voted off anyway.
 
 <i>
&quot;Fabrika Zvyozd&quot; airs at 11:05 a.m., 3:15 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. every day on Channel One, and around the clock on Kosmos TV. </i>

TITLE: potter spawns parody part II
AUTHOR: by Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - First came &quot;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.&quot; Then, as if by magic, appeared a Russian version, &quot;Tanya Grotter and Her Magic Double Bass.&quot;
 
Now, another Russian twist in the tale is set to join Harry and Tanya. &quot;Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher,&quot; a deliberate parody of the bestselling J.K. Rowling books, is set to hit bookstores at the end of the week.
 Belarussian authors Ivan Mytko and Andrei Zhvalevsky are behind the book, which turns Harry Potter from a child with magic powers who lives among ordinary humans to a child with no powers who lives among magicians and has to use technology to survive.
 In the first chapter of the book, instead of using a wand - as Harry Potter would to face off against his archenemy Voldemort - Porri Gatter uses a more human mortar to ward off his archenemy, Mordevolt.
 With the publishers of &quot;Tanya Grotter&quot; facing a lawsuit after being accused of plagiarism, it might at first sight seem foolish to publish another Harry Potter-based book.
 &quot;We're not scared - it's a good parody,&quot; said Alla Gladkova, the director of Vremya, the firm that is publishing the Porri Gatter book. &quot;We're giving them [Harry Potter] free promotion.&quot;
 &quot;We read Rowling with great pleasure,&quot; Mytko said in a telephone interview. But he said that there were lots of moments in the book ripe for parody.
 Natalya Dolgova of Rosmen, the Russian publishers of Harry Potter, said she had read portions of the Porri Gatter book and had no plans to sue. &quot;It's a parody,&quot; she said.
 The initial print run for the book, which will be officially presented on Wednesday, is 7,000. But the publishers are already planning another 50,000 copies, confident that Porri Gatter, even without the magical powers of his bestselling rivals, will be able to conjure up brisk sales.
 The Tanya Grotter books have sold more than 100,000 copies in Russia, while the Harry Potter series has sold 1.2 million copies.
 Lawyers for J.K. Rowling, the Russian publishers and Warner Bros. - which owns the film rights to Rowling's books - threatened court action against the publishers of Tanya Grotter if the book was not withdrawn by Nov. 10. Lawyers in London are currently considering their next move, Dolgova said.

TITLE: war film won't woo viewers
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: Finally, inevitably, John Woo has gone to war. Starting with Hong Kong classics like &quot;A Better Tomorrow&quot; and &quot;Hard-Boiled,&quot; and continuing into Hollywood extravaganzas &quot;Face/Off&quot; and &quot;Mission: Impossible 2,&quot; Woo is his generation's pre-eminent orchestrator of violence, someone who truly loves the smell of napalm in the morning.
 
So his attraction to the astronomical bullet and body count of World War II was just a matter of time. The resulting &quot;Windtalkers,&quot; however, is not all it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's usually anything but. Woo takes off from one of the great true stories of that conflict: how the impenetrability and difficulty of the unwritten Navajo language turned it into a Pacific-theater combat code that the Japanese were unable to break. That secret was so valuable that, at least according to the script, the Marines assigned the speakers bodyguards instructed to &quot;protect the code at all costs,&quot; which meant killing the speaker if capture was imminent.
 In &quot;Windtalkers,&quot; star attraction Nicolas Cage plays a Marine faced with that assignment and, eventually, with that moral challenge as well. Woo approached the filming of the &quot;Windtalkers&quot; combat scenes (with the Hawaiian island of Oahu and parts of Southern California standing in for Saipan and the Solomon Islands) with his usual gusto.
 But although the director remains both an enviable stylizer of balletic violence and a fine creator of mythic sequences like the film's opening journey through a misty Monument Valley, &quot;Windtalkers&quot; does not make the kind of visceral impression previous Woo films have almost taken for granted. &quot;Windtalkers&quot; feels behind the curve visually - and that's the last thing you'd expect to say about a filmmaker with Woo's bulletproof panache. The battle scenes seem a tad formulaic, as does the film's story. Initially, &quot;Windtalkers&quot; follows two narrative threads. We see a pair of young Navajos, Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) and Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie, the film's only featured Navajo) as they learn to talk the code talk.
 We also spend quality time, such as it is, with a stoic, sullen Marine named Joe Enders (Cage). Enders wasn't always that grumpy but, after a firefight in the Solomons that killed 15 of his buddies and left him with hearing and balance problems and an ear that looks like Mike Tyson has taken a crack at it, Enders is tormented by his part in all of those deaths.
 With the help of sympathetic nurse Rita (Frances O'Connor), Enders gets another combat assignment, and is chagrined to learn it's to be the guardian-assassin of Yahzee. Another Marine, Ox Henderson (Christian Slater), gets the same job for Whitehorse and, although Enders knows neither he nor Ox should get too friendly with their charges, the closeness of combat makes it inevitable.
 It has no shortage of violent situations, but &quot;Windtalkers&quot; also seems to have its eye on being thoughtful and character-driven. However, Woo doesn't have the best touch for this, and the standard-issue war movie script isn't any help. 
 Although most Woo movies have made violent action almost exhilarating, the level of bloodshed in &quot;Windtalkers&quot; has the opposite effect. With a body count at computer-game levels, the combat sequences are more numbing than exciting, an exhausting display of senseless firepower. Even John Woo, it seems, can fall victim to carnage overkill.
 
 <i>
&quot;Windtalkers&quot; is currently showing at Aurora and Mirage cinemas. </i>

TITLE: portrait of an all-too-human poet
AUTHOR: by Timothy C. Westphalen
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: From the moment Prince Andrei Kurbsky posted his first missive from Poland to Ivan the Terrible, emigre literature has been a fact of Russian literary life. Throughout the 19th century, literature written abroad entered into and enriched the literature at home by engaging it in a discourse about the relation between culture and power, between moral right and political legitimacy. It includes not only works by political exiles, but also works like &quot;Dead Souls,&quot; which Gogol wrote in Rome. As a result, when, in 1933, Ivan Bunin became the first emigre Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize, his triumph affirmed the relationship of emigre literature and that written at home.
 
The relationship changed in Bunin's lifetime. By the 1930s, the Soviet government had nearly succeeded in isolating emigre literature and relegating it to the margins. A class-based ideology motivated Soviet officials in no small measure: They sought to silence the gentry. Bunin, born in 1870, represented a unique challenge. Once the Soviets renounced Modernism in favor of Realism, Bunin became important to them not only because of his friendships with such writers as Anton Chekhov, but also because he emerged as the preeminent Realist. Though attracted to Bunin because of his kinship to the classics, the Soviets were repulsed by his origins: the culture of the landowning gentry.
 Bunin ran counter to Soviet norms. His resistance to Bolshevism and opposition to ideologically driven art has made him an attractive figure since the demise of the U.S.S.R. The reappropriation of his work into the mainstream in the last 10 years has been as much a political and cultural phenomenon as a literary one.
 In &quot;Ivan Bunin: The Twilight of Emigre Russia, 1934-1953,&quot; Thomas Gaiton Marullo makes available a great deal of material that contributes to reassessing Bunin, and he deserves enormous credit for his effort. He has successfully adapted into English a genre more commonly encountered in Russian, the chronology of a writer's life and times. It is rendered in primary sources, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and official documents.
 Marullo's ambition is broad, but he can deliver only in part on the promise of his subtitle: This book is less a study of the &quot;twilight of emigre Russia&quot; than of the twilight of Russia's gentry culture in exile. Those in search of the so-called &quot;Paris note,&quot; which Georgy Adamovich identified in the literature of emigre Russians in Paris, will be frustrated. Major players in emigre Paris literature, such as Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov, and their archrival, Vladislav Khodasevich, play tangential roles. Instead, this, the third volume in Marullo's &quot;chronological portrait,&quot; follows the writer and his milieu through his last twenty years.
 This is the story of Bunin's life and career after the Nobel Prize. He struggles with his new notoriety, squanders his prize money and struggles against pressures from both the emigre community and the U.S.S.R. that threaten to curtail his artistic freedom. It becomes the story of Bunin's integrity in the face of abject poverty. Although tempted by official promises of wealth and adulation at home, Bunin resisted, insisting on artistic freedom at a ravaging price - financial and psychological - that was exacted not just from him, but also from his wife.
 Given that human cost, it is easy to understand why Marullo's commentary sometimes borders on hagiography. His repeated reference to Bunin as a &quot;man-god&quot; is hyperbole that recurs a bit too often. The term invites comparison with philosopher Vladimir Solovyov's notion of &quot;Godmanhood,&quot; to which Bunin would have objected. Likewise, Marullo's characterization of Bunin's second, common-law wife as a Solovyovian Sophia, the living manifestation of divine wisdom, seems more appropriate to Symbolists like Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, who were both influenced by Solovyov, than to Bunin, who was not.
 This attitude blinds Marullo to the faults of Vera Muromtseva-Bunina. For example, how would Bunin, an implacable enemy of Bolshevism, have reacted to the news that, after his death, his widow sold his archive to the Soviets? Like Marullo, the reader will sympathize with Muromtseva-Bunina, whose suffering was monumental, but this sympathy should be leavened with a healthy dose of skepticism. Marullo's hagiographic tendency also distorts Bunin's relations with other women. For example, the departure of Bunin's longtime mistress Galina Kuznetsova is relegated to a footnote. This is a lost opportunity, since Bunin, at roughly the same time, is consumed by the composition of his last important work, the stories that make up the collection &quot;Dark Avenues.&quot; Here, as everywhere in Bunin's oeuvre, the twin obsessions of eros and thanatos possess his work. Death and sex, for Bunin, are intimately bound: Lovers fall in love, only to lose one another in death.
 Despite its shortcomings, the rewards of this volume are great, and Marullo shines in his selection of material. As opposed to Marullo's own commentary, the portrait that emerges in quotations from diaries, memoirs and letters is detailed and unsparing. Bunin's weaknesses become as apparent as his strengths, in particular his insecurity as a poet. Bunin seethes with envy towards poets like Blok, whose talent outstripped his own. Many of the most moving passages, in fact, center on Bunin's struggle with doubt and mortality, a question that torments him until the very end. What begins as dry chronology is gradually transformed into a very human document.
 
 <i>
&quot;Ivan Bunin: The Twilight of Emigre Russia, 1934-1953: A Portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning Writer and of Russians in Exile, Drawn from Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs.&quot; Edited with an introduction and notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. Ivan R. Dee. 436 pages. $35.
 
 Timothy C. Westphalen is Associate Professor of European Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the author of &quot;Lyric Incarnate: The Dramas of Aleksandr Blok.&quot; His translation of Blok's lyric dramas is due in January. </i>

TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: Obrezaniye: </i>circumcision.
 
We can thank President Vladimir Putin for continuing to broaden our linguistic range last week. But it was news for me when the president recommended <i>sdelat operatsiyu takim obrazom, chtoby u vas uzhe nichego ne vyroslo </i>(to do the operation so that nothing will ever grow back). Who knew that anything could?
 The statement became a hot topic largely thanks to the translation, which left out a good deal of the salty Russian original. We heard the panicked stammering of the first interpreter, followed by the clatter of the microphone being grabbed by the second, who said, &quot;... if you'd like to get a circumcision, please come to Moscow ... You are welcome and everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow.&quot; Journalists criticized the interpreters. But should they have? Interpreters are trained to judiciously edit in most situations, especially to cut out &quot;improper&quot; words.
 This is partly because each language has its own norms. If a French person says <i>merde, </i>you'd never translate it with the five-letter Russian word for excrement. Similarly, an American might say &quot;Yeah, I read it. It was a f***** lousy article.&quot; The literal Russian would be vastly stronger than the English, so you might instead say <i>da, chital. Statya byla chertovsky plokha </i>(back-translated as &quot;it was a hellishly bad article&quot;). This comes under the heading of &quot;translate what they mean, not what they say.&quot;
 Another reason is that interpreters are charged with &quot;cultural facilitation,&quot; so you edit out <i>nenormativny leksikon </i>(non-standard language) and, afterward, pull the speaker aside and explain what you did and why. Even when the interpreter is charged with giving a literal rendering of the speaker's text, it is psychologically very difficult to let loose insulting language in front of an audience of distinguished officials.
 I've done my share of editing. A classic example is the traditional toast <i>za krasivykh dam, kotoriye ukrashayut nash stol. </i>The guy giving the toast might have a mother in the cabinet, a wife who is chief doctor of a major hospital, and a daughter studying to be an astrophysicist. He may not be sexist at all; he is fulfilling his duties as host. But try telling a table of ardently feminist businesswomen that they are &quot;beautiful table decorations!&quot; My standard cheat is &quot;I raise my glass to the brilliant women gracing our table.&quot; Everyone's happy, and I've conveyed the intent of the toast, if not its exact meaning.
 The book &quot;Mir Perevoda&quot; by Andrei Chuzhakin and Pavel Palazhchenko quotes Minyar-Beloruchev, who once translated for Nikita Khrushchev. In one particularly fiery speech about the betrayal of Albania, Khrushchev ranted about its leader: <i>etot chelovek obosral nas c nog do golovy, tudy ego mat! </i>(that man shat on us from head to toe, the f***er!) The interpreter translated it into French as something like &quot;that man heaped dirt on us from head to toe,&quot; and promptly got scolded for daring to edit the general secretary. But, 10 minutes later, he was told that Khrushchev had asked his interpreter be thanked - he hadn't wanted his crudities to be heard in every language.
 What would I have done last week? I would have gulped and translated Putin literally. In private conversations, editing is permissible - even advisable - but not, to my mind, for a head of state, and not in public. For one thing, you'll get caught. When only half the journalists are laughing or gasping, the half that isn't is sure to poke around until they find out what was so funny. If the interpreters had translated it all right away, the protocol folks could have shrugged and said: <i>On govorit, chto dumayet. </i>(He calls it as he sees it.)
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: Paris Stage Is Set for Davis Cup Showdown
AUTHOR: By Michael McDonough
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS - France faces off against Russia this weekend in hopes of winning a second-straight Davis Cup title for the first time since 1932.
 
The defending champion lacks the raw talent that Russia has in Grand Slam champions Marat Safin and Yevgeny Kafelnikov. Instead, France will rely on team spirit and the home crowd during the best-of-five-match series from Friday through Sunday.
 &quot;The Russians are stronger than us on paper,&quot; French captain Guy Forget acknowledged. &quot;I'm lucky to have guys on my team who are ready to give everything on court to pull off a surprise.&quot;
 &quot;Their team spirit, their friendship, their respect for each other ... That's our strength,&quot; he added. &quot;From that point of view, we're much stronger than the Russians.&quot;
 Sebastien Grosjean, Nicolas Escude, Fabrice Santoro, Arnaud Clement and Paul-Henri Mathieu make up France's squad. Grosjean, almost certain to play singles, is ranked 16th in the world - the highest among the French. Yet even he is expected to struggle against the Russians, who are seeking their first Davis Cup title. France is trying for its 10th.
 &quot;Sebastien is intelligent enough to know that he might not be able to produce with a racket what Safin does,&quot; Forget said. &quot;He has to surpass himself to catch Safin.&quot;
 While France's Davis Cup team has won eight-straight encounters, none of its players has won a major title. Only Clement has reached a Grand Slam final, at the 2001 Australian Open.
 Kafelnikov, on the other hand, has won titles at the French Open and Australian Open, plus an Olympic gold medal. Safin, ranked No. 3 in the world, won the 2000 U.S. Open and was runner-up at the Australian Open in January.
 Kafelnikov and Safin will most likely play both singles and doubles. Mikhail Youzhny and Andrei Stolyarov are the other Russian players.
 &quot;Who plays first will be very important,&quot; the 28-year-old Kafelnikov said. &quot;I think it would be to our advantage if Marat plays first because he's playing much better now. He's a lot more confident than I am. And then, of course, my job would be a lot easier, because I won't be under too much pressure.&quot;
 &quot;I'm doing everything to play my best tennis these three days,&quot; said Safin, adding he was playing better now than when he reached the French Open semifinals in June. The French is the only Grand Slam played on clay.
 France could benefit from the home-court advantage and from playing on clay. A clay court was installed in Bercy at the request of the French team, which had the choice of venue and surface.
 Meanwhile, Kafelnikov said Tuesday he will have a varicose vein removed from his left leg on Monday, but said his condition will not detract from his play. 
 The 28-year-old Russian, a Davis Cup runner-up in 1994 and 1995, has said he will retire if his country wins its first Davis Cup.
 &quot;I'll keep my promise,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Mavericks One Game From Record After Beating Detroit
AUTHOR: By Dennis Waszak Jr.
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Looking to match the best start in NBA history, the Dallas Mavericks aren't taking anything for granted.
 
&quot;It's better than being 0-14, but the Lakers started 16-1 [last season] and didn't finish with the best record in the league, so you can't make too much of it,&quot; Dallas owner Mark Cuban said. The Mavericks beat Detroit 102-82 on Wednesday night to improve to 14-0. They were set to aim for league history by matching the mark set by Washington in 1948 to 1949 and Houston in 1993 to 1994, when they played at Indiana on Thursday night.
 &quot;We'll have our hands full in Indiana,&quot; Mavericks coach Don Nelson said. &quot;If we get beat, it's no big deal.&quot;
 While Dallas continued its impressive start, Denver struggled at the beginning of its game against San Antonio.
 The Nuggets set an NBA record by scoring just three points in the first quarter of a 99-68 loss.
 &quot;It was crazy. It was a brutal first quarter,&quot; Denver's Juwan Howard said. &quot;We couldn't score, we couldn't hit shots.&quot;
 In other games, it was: Orlando 112, L.A. Lakers 102; Milwaukee 112, Cleveland 80; New Orleans 106, Atlanta 94; Boston 80, Chicago 64; New York 87, Toronto 81; Philadelphia 83, Miami 74; Memphis 117, Seattle 99; Minnesota 90, Sacramento 74; Phoenix 82, New Jersey 75; and Houston 91, Golden State 84.
 At Auburn Hills, Michigan, Michael Finley scored a career-high 42 points against the league's best defensive team.
 &quot;When you come into an environment like this, you have to play aggressive and play championship-type basketball,&quot; said Finley, whose previous high was 39. He shot 13-for-28 from the field and 15-for-17 from the line, while adding 10 rebounds, two assists and two steals. Dirk Nowitzki added 22 points and 15 rebounds.
 &quot;This was a disappointing effort, but that is a great team,&quot; Detroit coach Rick Carlisle said.
 Ben Wallace had a season-high 24 rebounds for the Pistons, who lost at home for the first time this season.
 
 <strong>
San Antonio 99, Denver 68. </strong>In San Antonio, Texas, Stephen Jackson scored 22 points and Tim Duncan had 20 points and 14 rebounds for the Spurs, who snapped a two-game losing streak.
 
Denver missed 14 consecutive shots after taking a 2-0 lead, and trailed 21-3 after one period. The three points broke the previous first-quarter record of four, scored by Sacramento on Feb. 4, 1987, against the Los Angeles Lakers.
 &quot;Not much you can say,&quot; Denver coach Jeff Bzdelik said.
 The three points also tied the mark for the second-lowest quarter in NBA history.
 After shooting 1-for-16 in the first, the Nuggets hit only nine of 38 first-half shots and tied a franchise record for fewest points in a half with 22.
 &quot;I've never seen anything like it before,&quot; San Antonio's David Robinsonsaid. &quot;It wasn't pretty.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Orlando 112, L.A. Lakers 102. </strong>In Orlando, Florida, Tracy McGrady had 38 points and nine assists, and Mike Miller added 22 points as the Magic broke a seven-game losing streak against the Lakers. Kobe Bryant had 38 points and 10 rebounds for the Lakers, who lost their seventh-straight road game. Shaquille O'Neal had 28 points and nine rebounds in 36 minutes, his most in four games since returning from toe surgery last week.