SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #849 (17), Friday, March 7, 2003
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TITLE: A Woman Doing Her Job in a 'Man's' World
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: According to the Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsyklopediya, German socialist Klara Zetkin's original idea of International Women's Day, which this year falls on Saturday, was "a day for the international solidarity of women in their struggle for economic, social and political equality."
 
International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913, three years after Zetkin's proposal, and became a public holiday in the Soviet Union in 1966. Since then, it has lost most of its ideological essence, becoming, instead, a triumph of feminity and tenderness.
 The holiday's evolution notwithstanding, the struggle for equality of the sexes is far from over. Bodyguard Olga Utkina knows that a woman doing a "man's job" is still often viewed with suspicion.
 Utkina, 27, has been struggling for equality since her early school years, when she fought with boys and wrestled in sports clubs. She always wanted to play on what has traditionally been seen as a male playing field - her childhood dream was to become a police officer.
 "I know that that's atypical for women, but I felt the need to defend people," Utkina said in a recent interview. "I was simply born that way, and there was nothing I could do - or wanted to do - about it."
 Utkina's first protectees were female classmates in elementary school. She remembers being infuriated by seeing girls being endlessly tormented - pinched, pushed and kicked - by the boys. So she fought back.
 "I was amazed how quickly the boys would back off when they met with a rebuff," she said. "I looked boyish as well; people would often address me as 'boy' on the bus, for instance."
 As Utkina talked about her job, the only thing giving away her profession was the steely look in her eyes. Other aspects of her appearance - her long, brightly painted nails and long, dark, elegantly styled hair - seem to conflict with her job. Utkina disagreed.
 "Conflicts rarely grow into physical fights, but I only grow my nails on vacation, just in case," she said. "As for my hairstyle, my clients are generally wealthy women so, when I accompany them, I should blend in, rather than presenting dissonance. I should look like one of their friends or relatives, like a person from the same circles of society."
 Utkina's altruistic attitude and love of physical excerise lead her to study at St. Petersburg's Lesgaft Physical Training Institute, where she majored in the wrestling department. After graduating, she taught karate in private schools, but was already eyeing a job as a bodyguard.
 When she started as a bodyguard seven years ago, she continued for nearly half a year to tell her parents that she was still teaching karate. When she came clean, it took time for them to accept her choice.
 "They just couldn't understand," she said. "It was only very recently that they finally accepted it. They wanted me to do something 'less masculine' than bodyguarding."
 Before starting in the job, Utkina took a special course at the Divo agency - which subsequently hired her - with classes in wrestling and shooting - as well as how to dress and correct make-up. According to Divo boss Mark Sazonov, female bodyguards are not seen as an abnormality among professionals.
 "People within the industry know that women are equally good at the job," he said, adding that clients who ask for a female bodyguard are mainly women connected with business.
 "The crucial moment, when the prevailing mentality towards female bodyguards changed, came in the late 1990s," Sazonov said. "That was when 'fighters' were replaced by 'shooters.'"
 In her private life, Utkina's profession has become something of a litmus test for her male admirers. She said there are two typical reactions when they find out what she does for a living.
 "They either retreat almost immediately ... or treat me as some kind of exotic fruit," she said, adding that she finds the first reaction funny, rather than disappointing. "What both reactions have in common is that the men don't really try to find out what sort of a person I am."
 "Of course, a house-wife type wouldn't go into bodyguarding," Sazonov said. "Female bodyguards are purposeful, self-disciplined, confident and mature, and their lifestyle makes it difficult to have families, as most husbands would want their spouse to be at home more regularly."
 Utkina says she doesn't have many demands for prospective boyfriends. Unlike many women, she doesn't mention qualities like physical strength or determination as something she looks for.
 "I just want him to be kind and good-natured," she said. "It's that simple."
 Professionally, Utkina said, men tend to be skeptical on meeting her, doubting her prowess from the start.
 "They just start flirting with me, saying silly things like, 'Oh, what a cutie, she can't be a bodyguard,'" she said. "Women are surprised, as well, but it takes them so much less time to get used to it."
 Olga Lipovskaya, of St. Petersburg's Center for Gender Issues, said that Russian society is "heavily patriarchal," and that Russian men still see themselves as superior when it comes to women working in traditionally male-dominated spheres. She recalled participating in a program called "Press Klub" on a Moscow television channel three years ago.
 "It was set up with a bunch of men - journalists, actors, media personalities - around the outside, and a group of us feminists in the center," she said. "Some of the men were aggressively sexist. They literally attacked us, saying things like, 'You're mistaken if you think you can compete with men. We just allow you to play in this field - when you're not needed, we'll remove you from the competition.' Comments like that are quite impressive."
 Utkina, however, feels that the only factors dictating how long she will stay in the bodyguarding business are her skills and desire.
 "I'll carry on for as long as it's fun," she said. "I know a bodyguard who's almost of retirement age who is great at what he does. But I don't think that I'll still enjoy my job as much when I'm, say, forty. I'll need something else then."

TITLE: Russia Evacuates Citizens From Iraq
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia moved Thursday to evacuate its remaining citizens from Iraq , while a top Russian diplomat said Moscow will not budge in its opposition to a new UN Security Council resolution that could be used to authorize military force against Baghdad.
 
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Yakovenko said Russian workers and their families would be flown out of Iraq over the next few days on flights coordinated by the Emergency Situations Ministry. Russia's embassy in Baghdad will continue working, he said in a statement.
 A total of five emergency flights were to be made before Monday, Interfax reported. Yakovenko said the first plane arrived from Baghdad on Wednesday. However, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesperson Viktor Beltsov said the first flight with citizens of Russia and other former Soviet republics would arrive Thursday.
 Hundreds of Russians and Ukrainians have already returned home from Iraq over the past few weeks, but Thursday's announcement suggested that Moscow wanted to accelerate the process in expectation of an imminent war.
 Officials stressed, however, that Russia was not ordering its citizens out and it was evacuating only those who wished to leave. Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Yuri Brazhnikov told Interfax that many Russians had chosen to remain.
 Meanwhile, Russian diplomats kept up a chorus of opposition to military action against Baghdad.
 Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov talked by telephone with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday and "from the Russian side the conviction was expressed that there is now a real chance for the crisis to be resolved by political means," according to a ministry statement.
 Powell and Ivanov also made preliminary plans to meet Friday on the sidelines of a U.N. Security Council session, the statement said.
 Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov on Thursday told the ITAR-Tass news agency that "now there are no bases for adopting a resolution opening the way to war with Iraq."
 "Russia's position on this will remain unchanged," he said.
 Fedotov spoke a day after Ivanov and the foreign ministers of France and Germany vowed to block any United Nations authorization of military action against Baghdad. All three nations favor giving weapons inspectors more time and authority to complete their work.
 Fedotov said it was important not to deepen the differences that have riven the Security Council, "but to consolidate the Council and find a consensual decision."
 "Precisely such an approach by all Security Council members would meet the responsibility that they bear before the international community," Fedotov said.
 He said that the report Friday by the chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, would show that "in spite of some problems, Baghdad's cooperation with the international inspectors is proceeding successfully," Interfax reported.
 "Moreover, recently the process of real Iraqi disarmament has begun," he said.
 Another deputy foreign minister, Alexander Saltanov, said that Iraq did not pose a threat to peace, ITAR-Tass reported, "especially when the international community has restored its control over Iraq's prohibited military programs through inspections."
 He said that sanctions had taken their toll of Iraq's ability to threaten its neighbors, and called on Baghdad to normalize relations with other countries in the region.
 Also Thursday, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, issued a thinly veiled condemnation of a possible war against Iraq, saying the church opposed "one country imposing its will upon other countries and peoples by force," according to Interfax.

TITLE: Russia's Stance May Hurt Its WTO Hopes
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Showing its exasperation with Russia's growing defiance of U.S. war plans, the United States on Wednesday resorted to economic blackmail and warned Russia that it risks jeopardizing its bid to join the World Trade Organization if it vetoes a UN Security Council resolution.
 
Russia also risks having to endure the continued humiliation of Soviet-era U.S. trade restrictions and being locked out of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, said a senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview Wednesday.
 "We wouldn't want to hold the relationship hostage [to Iraq] any more than Russia, but our ability to move forward on some issues - on WTO accession, on the removal of Jackson-Vanik - could be affected at least in the short term," the diplomat said. "In no case will the damage be irreparable, but there could be damage.
 "The Russians understand that their degree of involvement in post-Saddam arrangements ... will be significantly influenced by the degree to which they are seen as supporting or not obstructing on a resolution of the crisis," he said. "I think they understand there could be negative consequences of a veto with respect to Russia's interests [in Iraq]."
 The final decision, however, was still President Vladimir Putin's to make and it was unclear which way he would go, the diplomat said.
 Wednesday's strongly worded warning reflects Washington's frustration with Russia's strengthening alliance with France and Germany, as articulated mainly by Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. Ivanov ratcheted up his opposition to a second resolution Wednesday, emerging united with his French and German counterparts after a hastily arranged meeting in Paris with a threat to block any UN resolution authorizing war on Iraq.
 "We will not allow the passage of a planned resolution that would authorize the use of force," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said at a news conference, quoting from a joint declaration signed by the three foreign ministers, Reuters reported.
 The meeting followed Ivanov's trip Tuesday to London, where he met with U.S. President George W. Bush's closest allies - British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Minister Jack Straw - but came out saying Russia would not be afraid to use its Security Council veto as "an extreme measure."
 France on Wednesday appeared to rally round that stance. When asked if their declaration meant that Paris was joining Moscow in its threat to use its veto, Villepin said: "We will take all our responsibilities. We are totally on the same line as Russia."
 Ivanov said Wednesday that he had also been assured by China - which is also a permanent member of the Security Council along with France, Russia, Britain and the United States - that it "shared our approach" on Iraq.
 The intensified diplomatic maneuvering came two days ahead of a UN Security Council meeting where chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix is due to deliver a report on efforts to ensure Hussein disarms. The United States has said it expects to bring the resolution to a vote soon after that report but no date has been set. For the resolution to pass, the United States needs to gather nine votes on the 15-member council and avoid a veto from any of the five permanent members.
 U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow met Wednesday with Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov in an attempt to further the U.S. case against a Russian veto. They talked about the stakes for the U.S.-Russia relationship, and Mamedov emphasized that there is more to the relationship than Iraq, the senior American diplomat said.
 The U.S. diplomat said Wednesday that Russia's interests in Iraq could be endangered if Russia tried to torpedo the UN vote.
 "We have said we will respect Russia's interests .... But again the attitude of the new Iraqi government and the attitude of the members of the coalition that are bearing the burden toward Russian participation is going to be affected by Russia's stance in the coming days."
 He said Russia's increasing opposition to the U.S.-backed resolution seemed a ploy to avoid voting altogether." Their preference seems to be for [military] action to come about without a second Security Council resolution," the diplomat said. He could not say whether Russia's economic interests in Iraq would still be assured if that was the case.
 "That depends on how we get to that point. We hope that the Russians, even if they can't support what we're doing, will not actively seek to oppose us," he said.
 The diplomat said the chances of a "yes" vote from Russia now appeared to be "pretty slim."
 He said Putin had a habit of playing a double game ahead of making a decision on key issues for Russia's relationship with the United States.
 "We've long seen Putin navigating ... between those who are in favor of a long-term realignment of Russian foreign policy toward the West and those, particularly in the security services and the military, that remain very skeptical of the wisdom behind that historic shift in Russian foreign policy," he said.
 "He has to keep an eye on both flanks."
 The diplomat could not say whether it seemed Putin had fallen under greater influence from those who are skeptical of the pro-Western policy. "We'll see how things develop in the coming days," he said.
 "We have been a little surprised in particular since Putin's visit to Paris [three weeks ago] that Russia has taken such a firm line. But at the same time, there has been an effort to preserve room for maneuver. After [German Chancellor Gerhard] SchrÚder's visit here, Putin made a statement designed to project a more conciliatory stance.
 "The decision on whether to abstain or veto will be taken by Putin and no one else but Putin."

TITLE: United City Left Out in the Cold
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Pro-City Hall members of the Legislative Assembly found themselves shut out in the choosing of important committee spots and the deputy speaker's seat as the chamber completed the selection process on Wednesday. But the process went anything but smoothly as the United City bloc members of the assembly's counting commission did not show up to approve the results, causing a delay.
 
Last month, United City, which is made up of members who generally support Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, drew the ire of assembly speaker Vadim Tyulpanov when its members prevented the parliament from sitting for three straight weeks by not attending the sessions, thus preventing a quorum from being formed. Tyulpanov was no happier on Wednesday.
 "This was done on purpose, of course," Tyulpanov said in an interview on Wednesday. "But we are learning, remembering things."
 But United City's Sergei Andenko, one of the five members of the counting commission, later said in the assembly that his absence was not intentional, as he just did not know where he and his colleagues were supposed to meet for the counting proceedings.
 "None of the members were there when I came over to vote," Andenko said. "They should have informed everyone where the voting was taking place at least ten minutes before it started."
 His explanation drew a derisive reply from the assembly floor.
 "You should have been drinking to celebrate your birthday some other time," replied Alexei Kovalyov, an independent deputy.
 With just one signature from the counting commission, the results of the voting were not technically valid according to the assembly's rules, but Tyulpanov tried to convince his colleagues to vote for an exception to be made so that the results could be registered, triggering another heated exchange in the chamber.
 "Vadik, show your courage! Void the voting results. We have to work together for four years!" Igor Rimmer, a lawmaker of United City bloc called out from a microphone in the hall, referring to Tyulpanov.
 Igor Artemyev, the only member of the counting commission who showed up on time, tried to defend the decision to verify the results against house rules, but ultimately also lost his temper, accusing the United City bloc of trying to undercut the Legislative Assembly's work.
 "This is pure sabotage," Artemyev said "I'm fed up with all of this screaming that something is wrong somewhere. We have to elect new members for the counting commission."
 But no one took up the offer and the question died, and Tyulpanov called for the assembly to vote again, leading to the same result as the first vote, with 29 of the members supporting a resolution to appoint the Union of Right Forces (SPS) Yury Gladkov as a vice speaker, Igor Mikhailov, an independent, as head of the Legislation Committee, Vladimir Barkanov, from the Communist Party faction, as head of the Budget and Finance Committee, Alexei Timofeyev, from the Sport Russia faction, as head of the Administration Commission, Denis Volchek, of the same faction, as head of the Industrial Commission, Alexander Redko, an independent, head of the Health Commission, Mikhail Amosov, of Yabloko, head of the Maintenance Commission, Sergei Andreyev, of United Russia, the head of the Education, Science and Culture commission, Arkady Kramarev, also of United Russia, as head of the Order and Legitimacy Commission, and Natalya Yevdokimova, of Yabloko, as the head of the Social Affairs commission.
 While there remained one deputy speaker post still to be filled, most deputies were pleased that the process was finally completed, although the nature of the battle left a bad taste in the mouth of some.
 "In 13 years of working at the Legislative Assembly, this is the first time I've seen such an openly cynical attempt to push through the preferred people [to head] the posts," said Vatanyar Yagya, a lawmaker from the Our City faction. "I have never seen anything like this."
 The United City bloc was expected to have received the second deputy-speaker spot, but it remains vacant as the faction's deputies have yet to reach an agreement with the other factions in the assembly over a suitable choice.
 Vladimir Yeryomenko, a member of United City, said that the pro-Kremlin United Russia faction and its allies in the chamber had not even asked their opponents about nominating pro-governor representatives as candidates for the commission posts.
 "There was a list that was approved by the majority and its management," Yeryomenko said in an interview on Wednesday. "This looks like a filter. The tendency has already formed here. [The pro-Kremlin deputies] act like they are allowed to use whatever methods suit them to achieve their results. This profanes democracy, which is now just a question of how much money is paid for a vote."
 Although Yeryomenko said he knows of concrete cases of legislators being paid for their votes and that this happened frequently, he declined to name any particular individuals.
 Although the United City faction received none of the chairperson spots on the commissions, City Hall didn't appear overly concerned with the prospects for getting its program passed in the assembly. Alexander Afanasyev, the City Hall spokesperson, said that Yakovlev is indifferent to the current situation at the Legislative Assembly, and that the topic did not even come up in a two-hour discussion with President Vladimir Putin last Friday.
 "[The lawmakers] even ignored a draft resolution introduced by the governor to increase the number of people holding the title of Honored Citizen of St. Petersburg from two to ten, in connection with the 300th anniversary" Afanasyev said in telephone interview Thursday.

TITLE: Authorities To Cut Down On Chechen Checkpoints
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia - In an apparent bid to win greater public confidence in the run-up to a referendum in Chechnya, the Moscow-appointed Chechen authorities announced plans Thursday to close more military checkpoints.
 
Oleg Zhidkov, the mayor of Grozny, said three federal checkpoints in the city had already been closed and seven more should be shut before the end of the month, Interfax reported.
 The closure of checkpoints in Grozny is part of a broader plan to cut their number by some 20 percent throughout Chechnya. The move followed a statement last week by President Vladimir Putin, who said that the checkpoints were inefficient and their number should be reduced. Interfax quoted Chechnya's pro-Moscow police chief, Ruslan Tsakayev, as saying that local police officers would make up for the closed federal checkpoints.
 Some Russian media described the closure of checkpoints and the withdrawal of small troop contingents from Chechnya as a propaganda stunt in preparation for a March 23 constitutional referendum, which is intended to suggest that life in the region is returning to normal. Local residents say service personnel at checkpoints extort bribes and commit other abuses.
 Colonel-General Igor Puzanov, a deputy defense minister on a trip to Chechnya, denied that the military withdrawal was timed for the referendum.
 "Both the referendum and sending some ... military units home reflect the current situation, which is stable and controllable," Puzanov said, according Itar-Tass.
 In spite of frequent official claims that the nearly 3 1/2-year-old war was winding down, rebels have continued staging daily attacks against the Russian forces. 
 At least five Russian service personnel were killed and 10 more wounded since Wednesday in rebel ambushes and land mine explosions throughout Chechnya, said an official with the Moscow-appointed civilian administration for Chechnya, who asked not be named.
 The March 23 vote, to be followed by elections later this year, is to decide on a new regional constitution that would keep Chechnya under Russian control while delineating fields of responsibility between local and federal authorities.
 Russian officials have dismissed concerns that federal troops' participation in the vote would predetermine its outcome. Puzanov said that a "maximum of 20,000" troops would cast ballots, Itar-Tass reported.
 
 
q
 Russian military courts have convicted 50 soldiers for crimes against civilians during three years of war against separatists in Chechnya, a top military legal official said on Thursday. But rights groups, dismissing the announcement as an attempt to give an impression of transparency before a March referendum on Chechnya's future, said very few soldiers have been brought to justice considering how widespread abuses have been.
 
"In the last two months alone, military courts have convicted four soldiers for crimes committed in Chechnya," Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying. He said that a total of 50 soldiers had been convicted since 1999, when Russian troops poured back into the mainly Muslim province after three years of its de facto independence.
 
 <i>(AP, Reuters) </i>

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Maybe Moving
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Vladimir Yakovlev said Thursday that he had not given any consideration to seeking a nomination to run for the same office in the Leningrad Oblast, Interfax reported.
 "I still have not even thought about such a prospect, but I promise to consider all of the information, provided there is still time," Yakovlev told journalists on Thursday.
 Earlier, the Leningrad Oblast electoral commission announced that there was no rule that prohibited the present governor of St. Petersburg from running for the main office in the oblast.
 
 
<b>No Discipline
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Military Prosecutors Office of the Leningrad military district confirmed the existence of a "conflict situation" in Nakhimov Naval Academy.
 "According to the results of investigations carried out by the Military Prosecutor's Office, some facts connected with the conflict situation at the college have been confirmed," Igor Lebed, the military investigator for the region, told Interfax on Thursday.
 According to Lebed, documents from the investigation were handed over to the 43rd department of the police of the Petrogradsky District of St. Petersburg and to the Prosecutor's Office.
 The investigation showed that a number of officers at the school had been aware of the situation there and that complaints by the relatives of a number of students there had "generated no reaction from those responsible for military training and the moral spirit of the future navy," Lebed told Interfax.
 
 
<b>Inequal Numbers
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Feminism in Russia, if it exists, is still in its infancy, the ROMIR public-opinion agency concluded from results of a recent study, Interfax reported on Thursday.
 According to the survey, which was carried out this week, only 8 percent of Russians think that men should not have to make shows of courtesy - holding doors, offering an arm, etc. - that some feminists would label belittling. An overwhelming majority of people surveyed - 91 percent - hold the opposite point of view. 
 As for gender equality, 51 percent of women think that it exists, 41 percent that it doesn't, while 4 percent believe that there is inequality in women's favor, Interfax quoted the report as saying.The majority of men - 61 percent - believe that gender equality exists. Twenty eight percent of men think that there is gender inequality in favour of men, and six percent believe that there is in favor of women. 



TITLE: Miss Army Contest Seeks Beauty, Bravery
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KALININETS, Moscow Region - Holding a leopard-skin bag in one hand, with her long blond hair cascading down her shoulders, Alla Terentyeva waited in full uniform by the T-80 tank.
 
Around her, soldiers in the elite Tamanskaya division gallantly offered hands to help the Space Forces sergeant, with her fondness for blue eye shadow, up onto the tank.
 Wednesday was an odd day at the army base outside Moscow as 16 of the supposedly brightest and prettiest of the armed forces took part in &quot;Krasavitsa v Pogonakh&quot; or &quot;Beauty in Epaulets,&quot; a beauty competition that aims to attract more women to the Russian army.
 While some were heavily made up, showing off shoulder-length dyed hair and tottering on heels so sharp they could be classified as secret weapons, the majority smartly wore their unit's uniform of paratrooper, intelligence or Space Forces with freshly polished army boots in which you could see your reflection.
 The odd mix of femininity and soldiering was reflected in the competition and the patronizing attitude of every male soldier around.
 Still, most of the contestants seemed to accept the situation.
 The Russian army has one of the highest numbers of female soldiers in the world, according to Sergei Rykov, a professor at a military university who wrote his dissertation on women in the Russian military. Eight percent of the army is female, a figure only topped by the United States and Israel, but the majority of Russian female soldiers are employed in logistics far away from the firing line.
 As of last year women accounted for 100,000 of the 1.1 million in the armed forces. More than 3,500 of those were officers, including more than 150 colonels and 500 majors. Most of the officers served in medical units, with signal corps and financial sections in second and third place. Eight hundred of the female soldiers have taken part in combat, with 200 decorated for their bravery in Russia's first war in Chechnya.
 While the 16 female soldiers Wednesday grabbed their Makarov pistols for shooting targets from 25 meters, the need for ballroom dresses loomed in the back of their minds as the next part would focus more on the woman than the soldier. Apart from their shooting skills, the women will be tested on their singing, ballroom dancing and cooking skills.
 &quot;Something like a salad,&quot; said one organizer when asked what they will be asked to cook.
 Before the shooting competition, the contestants were shown around the base's museum and allowed to clamber on tanks to pose for photographs, a rare instance for them as the Russian army does not let women drive tanks.
 Soldiers of the Tamanskya division put on a show Wednesday at their shooting range, throwing grenades as they shot their way across a range dotted with ruined buildings. As the orange and black smoke cleared from the range, the contestants lined up excitedly for a go, even if some of them had trouble holding the automatic rifles the right way.
 When asked by a reporter what a woman's role in the army was, Larisa Pogosova said, &quot;To decorate it.&quot;
 Her official job is with an elite army intelligence unit based somewhere in the North Caucasus.
 Although the women seemed happy to accept the sweet words on beauty and their feminine side that rained down from army officers, for the majority of them, the job is a career and they would like the chance to do more.
 &quot;By law you can do anything, but in reality it is different,&quot; said one, as she watched the division throw smoke bombs, &quot;Our army is not ready for us to serve on the same level.&quot;
 Tatyana Larina, the namesake of Pushkin's heroine in Yevgeny Onegin, a fresh-faced 22-year-old who works in the Signals Corps in Moscow and came second in the shooting competition, said she would love to do more in the army.
 Although the ministry's stated aim is to attract women to an army that is steadily losing male recruits, few of those at the division seemed to be keen on expanding a woman's role.
 &quot;It's not women's work,&quot; said Vladimir, a soldier who had just taken part in the demonstration. Other soldiers made fun of the way the women ran with the automatic rifles.
 &quot;Woman are a decoration,&quot; said Vitaly Gusak, spokesperson for the Moscow Military District, said.
 When asked about the number of women in the U.S. Army, he swiftly responded &quot;Perhaps there aren't enough men there.&quot;
 Unreconstructed males in the Russian army can hardly be classified as a surprise to anyone, but the prize for comment of the day went to captain Yury Nuzhdin of the Tamanskaya division.
 After reading out the results of the shooting contest, Nuzhdin handed out the prize, a small, white pennant, saying &quot;Take this pennant and hang it in the kitchen so that the food for your husband will be very tasty.&quot;

TITLE: The Long Evolution Of March 8
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Although contemporary Russia celebrates Women's Day with roses and greeting cards, the holiday has its origins in the socialist and women's suffrage movements, and many consider the first Women's Day to have taken place on March 8, 1857, when New York seamstresses took to that city's streets to protest low wages and an exhausting 14-hour work day. 
 
Decades later, in 1910, the Socialist International resolved to celebrate the feminist and suffrage movements every spring. Two years later, in 1913, Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia - on the last Sunday in February, as part of demonstrations in the capital against Russia's involvement in World War I. Four years later - on Feb. 23, 1917 according to the Julian calendar, March 8 according to the Gregorian - Russian women took to the streets in more anti-war rallies. Four days later, women had been given the vote and Nicholas II had ceded rule to the Provisional Government. In 1966, Nikita Krushchev made the March holiday official.
 But if, during the Soviet era, celebrations of Women's Day here tended to reflect the origins of the holiday, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Women's Day mostly shed its activist character. Today, mainstream observance of the holiday consists mostly of champagne toasts, mimosas and phone calls to loved ones.

TITLE: Fifty Years On, Russia Still Divided on Stalin
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As part of countrywide events to mark the 50th anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death on Wednesday, a group of about 40 mostly elderly people gathered at the statue of Karl Marx on the grounds of Smolny to mark the occasion. But, while the gathering was relatively small, a couple of polls released this week indicate that the number of Russians who feel either positive or ambivalent about the dictator's role in Russian history remains high.
 
The speeches by officials at Wednesday's meeting and comments from a number of those present showed that, for some, questions of Stalin's repressions or crimes are of little interest.
 &quot;Stalin was a great man and a great builder. He built a big and powerful state, where the vast majority of people lived a decent life, even if they were not rich,&quot; Gennady Turetsky, the Secretary of the Leningrad Council of Russia's Communist Worker's Party, which organized Wednesday meeting, said in a speech.
 &quot;The Russian Communist Party [KPRF], views the anniversary of the death of Stalin as an event that needs to be celebrated, just as we do,&quot; he said. &quot;We regard Stalin as a great political leader, who provided for the workers, for education, for medicine, and who carried out socialist reforms.&quot;
 The people who came to listen to the speeches, huddling together in the cold, proved no less supportive of Stalin's legacy than the speakers.
 &quot;Stalin is the most precious thing we had. I didn't cry as much when my mother died as when Stalin passed away,&quot; said Vera Ivanova, who was 26 years old when the Soviet leader died in 1953, clutching a placard bearing a photo of Stalin adorned with roses. &quot;I remember, when he died, I was on Nevsky Prospect. We stopped near the loudspeakers to hear how he breathed his last. Absolutely everyone was crying.&quot;
 An opinion poll carried out by the Public Opinion Fund found that 42 percent of Russians associate Stalin with &quot;dictatorship, repression and the Gulag chain of concentration camps,&quot; while 32 percent associate him with &quot;unequivocal orderliness, industrial rise and the pride of a great empire,&quot; Itar-Tass reported. 
 Another poll carried out by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research reveals that 45 percent of St. Petersburg residents think Stalin played a positive role in history, against 38 percent who assessed his role as negative, Interfax reported on Wednesday. 
 According to the human-rights group Memorial, 720,000 people were executed during Stalin's rule, while 500,000 people perished in the Gulag between 1945 and 1953. As many as 2.7 million people fell victim to repression - either arrest or execution. Although officials at Memorial are reluctant to attempt to provide an exact figure for the total of people who were executed, or died due to conditions in the camps or famine, a commonly cited figure is over 20 million.
 Analysts offer a number of explanations for the seemingly renewed interest in Stalin.
 Alexei Kulegin, the deputy director for academic research at St. Petersburg's Museum of the Political History of Russia, says that Stalin's rising popularity doesn't necessarily mean that those Russians who laud the dictator actually sympathize with the mass repression and executions that took place under his rule.
 &quot;I don't think people who have a positive view of Stalin sympathize with the horrors that were committed under him,&quot; Kulegin said in an interview on Tuesday. &quot;The phenomenon of the strong leader, and of Stalin in particular, is strong nowadays, because Russia is going through a period of crisis. People tend to look back at leaders that ruled the country in times of crisis, like Stalin, and who were able to take the country out of this crisis. That Stalin was able to do so is a myth, in my opinion, but people cling to it.&quot;
 Sergei Khakhayev, who heads Memorial's Human Rights Protection Committee, says that the feeling of admiration for Stalin stems from the fact that many Russians are nostalgic for the political and military power the country enjoyed in the soviet period.
 &quot;Today, an significant part of the population is upset by the fact that Russia has lost its status as a world power that once threatened to drop atomic bombs and was able to scare the entire world. Russia can't do any of this now, and this is why the cult of Stalin is re-emerging,&quot; Khakhayev said on Wednesday.
 He also suggested that the way the polls were carried out may not provide an accurate image of how Russians actually feel about Stalin.
 &quot;I think that one of the reasons for [the numbers indicating] Stalin's popularity is that the population is eager to please the state, or at least those who carry out surveys,&quot; Khakhayev said. &quot;The head of state is a KGB man and, under Stalin, the KGB was all-powerful, so people wonder what will happen to them if they criticize Stalin in the polls.&quot;
 The reasons the people at Smolny gave for their adoration of the late leader vary, but they generally revolve around the relatively good living conditions in the post-war Soviet Union that most elderly people have lost in post-Communist Russia, where they receive only tiny pensions.
 &quot;We had a very happy childhood under Stalin. We went to masquerades, had good kindergartens, were brought up well and had great teachers,&quot; Vera Ivanova said. &quot;Today, teachers are nowhere as good as they were then. There were no street kids either. And now, under the capitalists, you see them everywhere.&quot;
 For Yury Terentyev, a member of the KPRF, Stalin is the leader who most successfully managed to apply Marxist theories to life in the Soviet Union.
 &quot;Stalin was able to propagandize Marx's theories, to put them into practice in an ideological, revolutionary struggle that brought great benefits to the country,&quot; he said.
 People who attended Wednesday's gathering seemed to agree that the mass repressions were a fair price to pay for the construction of a system capable of giving all Russians a decent and stable life.
 &quot;Mass repressions were unavoidable, it was a period of struggle. The repressions took place so that nothing would interfere with the construction of socialism. And Stalin talked about it, he said that the class struggle would intensify with time,&quot; said Gennady Alexeyev, a 70-year-old pensioner.
 Others, like Ivanova, refuse to believe that the atrocities committed under Stalin ever took place.
 &quot;I've seen or heard nothing about mass repressions. There were no mass repressions,&quot; she said. &quot;It is enemies of the people, enemies of Stalin, who wrote about repressions in the newspapers. A normal person wouldn't write things like that. Now, people write such foul things about Stalin, things that didn't happen.&quot;
 Memorial's Khakhayev was riled by some of the comments.
 &quot;It is convenient to say that nothing happened. All these deaths are on Stalin's conscience, because he personally signed execution orders,&quot; said Khakhayev. &quot;It is a terrible thing to want to glorify Stalin today, but what is even worse is the idea that every crime can be forgiven if it is committed in the name of the state's greatness.&quot;

TITLE: U.S. May Retaliate Over Meat
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said Wednesday that Russia could face U.S. trade retaliation if it does not remove import barriers for meat.
 
Zoellick told the Senate Finance Committee that he would not shrink from that course of action, if necessary, to help persuade Russia to drop the restrictions.
 &quot;Since they're not a WTO member, there's a full range of options, including Section 301 [of U.S. trade law], and they all ought to be on the table,&quot; Zoellick said.
 Under Section 301, the United States could impose unilateral trade retaliation if, after a potentially lengthy investigation, it determined that U.S. meat exports were being unfairly restricted.
 Russia would not be able to challenge the action at the World Trade Organization because it is not a member.
 Last month, 24 U.S. agriculture groups wrote a letter to President George W. Bush urging his administration to look into retaliation.
 Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, told Zoellick that she was working with other senators on a similar letter for the U.S. president.
 At the end of last year, Russia set new quotas on foreign poultry, beef and pork, a move that was seen as retaliation for new EU limits on cheap Russian and Ukrainian wheat.
 While U.S. government and industry officials have said that imposing the quotas runs counter to WTO agriculture goals, they have been much more vexed by Russia's continuous challenges to the safety of poultry plants.
 Russia, the largest market for low-priced U.S.-chicken leg quarters, bought 1.1 million tons of the product in 2001.
 The value of poultry trade in 2002 was down about 40 percent, however, after Russia twice halted U.S. imports, citing concerns about their safety.
 The U.S. industry said that Russia's moves were simply an attempt to protect domestic poultry producers.
 Another disruption in trade could come this spring, as exporters face a May 31 deadline for getting new safety certificates for U.S. poultry plants, and Moscow has not yet indicated that the licenses will be forthcoming.
 Senate Finance Committee Chairperson Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, warned that the meat-import barriers were ruining chances that congress would pass legislation this year to establish &quot;permanent normal trade relations&quot; with Russia.
 That would require removing Moscow from a Cold War provision, known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, that linked trade to the former Soviet Union's restrictive emigration policies.
 Grassley said that Russia should reconsider its restrictions to create a more favorable environment in congress for ending the Jackson-Vanik provision.
 Zoellick's comments came the same day that a senior U.S. diplomat in Moscow told The St. Petersburg Times that Russia risked membership in the WTO if it vetoes a new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq. 
 
 <i>(Reuters, SPT) </i>

TITLE: AmCham Posts Results, Appoints New Director
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg branch of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia (AmCham) summed up the results of its activities in 2002 and announced the appointment of Yelena Berezantseva as new executive director at a press conference at the Hotel Astoria on Tuesday.
 
According to U. S. Consul General Morris Hughes, direct U.S. investment in the Northwest Region amounted to $33 million in 2002, with a total of $2.6 billion having been invested since 1997, resulting in the creation of over 36,000 jobs. 
 AmCham St. Petersburg, which was founded to promote increased trade and investment between the U. S. and Russia and unites over 80 companies in the Northwest Region, celebrated its fifth anniversary in November 
 AmCham President Andrew Somers said that the investment climate in Russia is beginning to show signs of improvement, with the growing number of corporate-bond issues and reductions in the levels of risk being the most positive changes. U.S. businesses may have eased back the pace of investment last year, but that was merely the lull before the storm, he said. 
 The new executive director of AmCham St. Petersburg, Yelena Berezantseva, previously worked for 6 1/2 years as business-development and external-affairs associate at Ford Motor Co. The executive committee of the St. Petersburg branch has also elected Maxim Kalinin, managing partner of the St. Petersburg office of Baker &amp; McKenzie, as its new chairperson.
 One of the most important events for AmCham in 2002 was the official opening of Ford's new production facility in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast, according to the 2002 AmCham Annual Report, also released on Tuesday. 
 The assembly plant manufactured 2,474 cars in 2002, the plant's general director, Murray Gilbert, said. Ford sales in Russia soared by 61.7 percent in 2002, reaching 6,669 and bringing the company's market share in Russia to 6.4 percent, compared with 5.6 percent in 2001, according to the company's own statistics.
 Another U.S. company operating in the Leningrad Oblast, Philip Morris, increased its cigarette production by 60 percent to 40 billion cigarettes in 2002, having invested $30 million in expanding its production facilities, said Guy Goeffers, the company's operations director for Russia.
 Kraft Foods Plant Manager Mikhail Sakhnov also revealed ambitious plans for development in 2003 at the press conference. The company, a leading food producer in the U.S., currently operates two plants in Russia - a confectionery factory in Pokrov, in the Moscow Oblast, and a coffee-product packaging and manufacturing plant in the Leningrad Oblast, that produces leading brands such as Jacobs and Maxwell House.
 &quot;We have seen a steady growth of 25 percent to 30 percent for the second year in a row, and have already come close to our production capacity - because of that, we are going to invest another $3 million in expanding production facilities,&quot; Sakhnov said.
 &quot;In 2002, we launched new coffee products - 'three-in-one' packets and cappuccino, and we're considering the export of coffee products to Lithuania and Ukraine,&quot; he said.
 The Kraft Foods plant began using locally-produced paper and cardboard for packaging coffee in 2002, and the company is also planning to start using locally produced cans later in the year.
 &quot;We are trying to get amendments to Russian tax legislation, so that duties on imported materials for the production of goods for export will be offset,&quot; Sakhnov said. &quot;That will allow us to increase out production by another 25 percent, thanks to the positive outlook for exports.&quot;

TITLE: NetJet To Offer Wealthy Chance To Soar Higher
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The company that flies the likes of Tom Hanks and high-powered business executives around the world has set its sights on Russia.
 
NetJets, which manages a fleet of more than 500 private jets, is courting wealthy Russians with the deal it offers thousands of clients in the United States and Western Europe: Buy a share in a jet and, within six hours, you'll have it at your beck and call to travel anywhere in the world - unless you want to fly between two Russian cities.
 &quot;We are convinced that there's a tremendous amount of business,&quot; Charles McLean, NetJets director of communications and public affairs, said at a news conference Tuesday.
 So far, NetJets has no clients in Russia, but it believes that business will take off, thanks to the economy's strong growth, McLean said.
 To get into its program, a customer buys a one-sixteenth or more share in an aircraft, and agrees to cover maintenance fees and flight costs. For example, a one-eighth share in a seven-seat Cessna Citation Bravo can be bought for $772,500, while monthly maintenance fees will be $9,437 and each flight hour will cost $2,362. A similar share in a Dassault Falcon 2000 costs $2.8 million, with $24,040 in monthly maintenance fees and $3,732 per flight hour.
 McLean said that the program has proved popular for people looking for flexibility, privacy and security.
 NetJets is owned by Warren Buffet, ranked by Forbes magazine as the second richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of $30.5 billion. Buffet bought the company in 1998, after being a customer for three years.
 NetJets might be targeting some Russian names on Forbes' list of billionaires. In the magazine's annual ranking released last week, there were 17 businesspeople from Russia. Chukotka Governor and Sibneft owner Roman Abramovich, who ranked No. 49 with $5.7 billion, has his own Boeing Business Jet. Oleg Deripaska, co-owner of Russian Aluminum with Abramovich and ranked No. 278 with $1.5 billion, is thought to have a Gulfstream-5.
 McLean said that NetJets, which took out full-page advertisements in several financial newspapers Tuesday, is looking to Russia in part because of the inroads made by those offering luxury goods.
 &quot;Luxury carmakers are targeting this market. So are we,&quot; he said.
 Russian clients might face some hiccups, as there will be no planes waiting on the tarmac in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Instead, clients will have to order planes from Lisbon, Portugal. McLean said that there will be no fee charged for bringing the jet to Russia. NetJets does not have permission to fly within Russia - meaning flights can only be between Russia and foreign destinations.
 In addition, it might prove difficult for NetJets to deliver a plane within the promised six hours. Under Russian regulations, air traffic controllers must be notified three days in advance of a flight - partially because the controllers themselves have to alert the military, which manages Russian air space. McLean said, however, that permission usually can be obtained within a day.
 Yevgeny Bakhtin, director of Aviation Commercial, which charters out foreign and Russian-made jets, said that the business-aviation market has grown 20 percent to 40 percent annually in recent years.
 About 15 Russian companies offer private flights, including Gazprom's Gazpromavia and UES' Aviaenergo, but most of them use Russian Yakovlev and Tupolev jets that are not allowed abroad due to noise restrictions.

TITLE: EBRD Backs Trans-Siberian Road With Loan of $290M
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development will lend Russia $290 million to complete the only trans-Siberian road linking the Far East to Europe, First Deputy Transport Minister Igor Slyunyayev said Wednesday.
 
The loan will be used to construct a 400-kilometer section of the 10,000-kilometer route between Vladivostok and Brest, Belarus, Slyunyayev said at Wednesday's Transportation Ministry board meeting.
 The EBRD's board of directors is expected to give final approval of the loan in June, Richard Wallis, a spokesperson for the bank, said Wednesday.
 The ministry said that it hopes to complete the route in the first quarter of 2004. The road will connect the pan-European network uniting Berlin, Warsaw, Minsk and Moscow to the far-eastern port of Vladivostok and neighboring China and Japan.
 About 120 kilometers of the remaining section, which runs from Chita in eastern Siberia to Khabarovsk in the Far East, was finished last year thanks to a $229-million EBRD loan. Part of that loan also financed projects on St. Petersburg's Ring Road, Slyunyayev was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 Transportation Minister Sergei Frank told the board Wednesday that total transport-industry investments in 2003 would be 370 billion rubles ($11.7 billion), of which 165 billion rubles, or 45 percent, will come from outside sources.
 Last year, the ministry spent $9.5 billion on the state's transportation system, with more then a third of that funding coming from the private sector.
 Russia built 500 kilometers of new federal roads and more than 2,000 kilometers of regional roads last year, Frank said. However, he noted that the pace of road-network development was not in sync with the country's economic growth.
 Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko told the Transportation Ministry that it would be important to work closely with other ministries during the development of a free-trade zone between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The presidents of the four countries on Feb. 23 agreed to create the zone to increase economic cooperation.
 Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Wednesday appointed Khristenko to head the Russian talks in the zone's creation, the government's information department reported.
 &quot;It is obvious that, for any free-trade zone, the key issue is [transportation] infrastructure,&quot; Khristenko said.
 The ministry must learn to coordinate with the new railways sector, which will soon begin carrying out sweeping reforms, Khristenko said.
 The Railways Ministry will sell off its commercial assets to introduce competition in the railroad industry.

TITLE: Another Hotel Giant Heads for Russia
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Joining international hotel operators' rush to expand their market presence, German high-end hotelier Kempinski intends to set up its own chain of three or four-star hotels in the regions, the company's chief executive said in an interview published Thursday.
 
&quot;We are considering the possibility of working under another brand, such as Key International,&quot; Reto Wittwer told Vedomosti. 
 The firm plans to open as many as three hotels in the next two years, but did not name specific sites, although Kempinski is eyeing &quot;several Russian cities,&quot; Wittwer said, adding that market analyses would be performed before any contracts are signed. 
 In the last month, a flurry of announcements have come from international operators planning to launch networks of economy-class hotels in the regions. Delta Capital Management and two Scandinavian funds are planning a national chain of Country Inn hotels in partnership with Rezidor SAS, while Menatep Group is teaming up with hotel consultants Sabre and Marriott for a national three-star chain.
 Some analysts said that Kempinski might have trouble adapting to the business landscape outside its elite-market niche.
 Scott Antel, a hospitality consultant at Ernst &amp; Young, said that the midrange market has different characteristics than the trophy properties on which Kempinski has focused at the high-end of the market.
 &quot;With a three-star brand, you have to be pretty universal - not in just one country. You want to be universally recognized in every place you go,&quot; he said.
 Kempinski Hotels &amp; Resorts operates the Baltschug Kempinksi hotel in Moscow and the Grand Europe Hotel in St. Petersburg, but does not own any stake in them. 
 Kempinski's involvement with future hotels will follow the same model, with the company as operator, not owner, Wittwer said. 
 Swiss company GHE Holding, together with other partners, will own the hotels, he said. 
 GHE now holds a controlling stake in the St. Petersburg's Grand Hotel Europe, but is under scrutiny from the Audit Chamber regarding its purchase of a 40.37-percent stake in the hotel from the St. Petersburg city government for just over $1 million.

TITLE: Market Fades for 'Gray' Phones
AUTHOR: By Larisa Naumenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Illegally imported cellular phones have been a sore subject among handset manufacturers and retailers for years, but their omnipresence has been fading as the sector matures.
 
Most phones illegally brought into Russia were previously sold to users abroad as part of a service-package deal from a specific operator. The operators lock these handsets to prevent subscribers from using them on other operators' networks. When the user resells their locked phone second-hand, it becomes known as &quot;gray.&quot;
 Motorola Marketing Manager Andrei Bychenko said that two factors prompt gray imports: the availability of cheap, locked phones from foreign cellular operators and Russian authorities' weak control over the import of such handsets.
 Gray phones can be unlocked, freeing them for use with any network, but often many of their functions are disabled in the process.
 &quot;This damages the manufacturers' image, because gray phones are often in bad condition and do not function properly,&quot; he said. &quot;This means customers lose trust in established brands.&quot;
 Officials at the Interior Ministry's &quot;K&quot; Department, which is tasked with high-tech crimes, said last week that the number of gray handsets significantly exceeds the number of &quot;white&quot; ones, certified for sale in Russia.
 But IDC Russia, a key industry watcher, disagreed that illegal phones dominate the market. Its preliminary estimates show that some 9 million handsets were sold last year, up from 4.1 million in 2001. Gray handsets constituted only one quarter of that total, a decrease from 33 percent in 2001.
 Leading cellphone manufacturers Nokia and Motorola also said that gray imports have fallen.
 &quot;The level of gray imports of Nokia handsets to the Russian market significantly decreased last year,&quot; said Nokia's CIS sales manager, Mika Toivonen.
 Motorola's Bychenko said that gray phones' share of the market has fallen from a high of 80 percent in 1999 and 70 percent in 2000. He estimated that, last year, 50 percent to 60 percent of phones costing under $120 were uncertified.
 The more expensive the phone, the fewer the illegal substitutes available, he said. Only 15 percent of phones priced between $120 to $300 are uncertified. That rate drops to 5 percent for phones that retail for more than $300.
 The market has &quot;whitened,&quot; he said, because more complicated handset technologies make it more challenging to unlock uncertified handsets, and the market has matured.
 &quot;As competition stiffens, retailers' image is hurt by selling gray phones,&quot; he said.
 Manufacturers also put pressure on retailers to sell only certified phones.
 &quot;Through various promotions, manufacturers encourage dealers to work with them,&quot; said Alexei Chebotok, marketing director at Maxus, which owns more than 100 Svyaznoi brand salons.
 But, ultimately, it is up to the customer to verify, he said, and most are not knowledgeable enough to detect the difference between gray and white phones.
 Such information is often available on manufacturers' Web sites.

TITLE: How To Avoid Losing a Potential War in Iraq
AUTHOR: By Vyacheslav Nikonov
TEXT: THE invasion of Iraq led by the United States and Britain - expected any day now - is not going to be a &quot;Russian war.&quot; The view of the public and the political elite in this country is that such a war is not justified, either from a legal or moral standpoint.
 
Russia is perfectly happy with the status quo, both for the officially stated reasons (the dangerous precedent of unilateral military action undertaken without UN Security Council authorization, and the loss of trade and economic links with Baghdad) as well as for reasons less openly expressed. Russia is quite content with the existing sanctions regime, which prevents the unfettered flow of Iraqi oil onto the world market and the attendant depression of world oil prices.
 However, the time has come to make serious decisions based on an understanding of the indisputable fact that war is inevitable, as is the downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
 Thank goodness that President Vladimir Putin, while coming out in favor of a peaceful solution to the conflict, has, nonetheless, kept all his options open, and has managed not to damage relations with any major world leader.
 The mood prevailing among the political class is very similar to the mood that reigned during NATO's operation in Kosovo. Back then, the country's entire diplomatic capital was expended on &quot;anti-Americanism&quot; and defending Slobodan Milosevich - with the result that Russia's influence in that part of the world fell to zero.
 However, while support for Milosevich then can be explained (the fraternal feelings between Russians and Serbs, historical opposition to Islamic expansion in the Balkans, etc.), the sympathies many of our politicians, including the Communists, profess for Hussein is rather mysterious. It is no secret that the Iraqi dictator butchered his own communists at the start of his reign. Kurds and Iranians - friends of the Soviet Union and Russia -were murdered by the tens of thousands using, among other things, mustard and nerve gas. Hussein has not repaid his outstanding debts to Russia, and not because he could not - debts to the French and Germans have been serviced meticulously. And, even perched on the brink of war, Hussein could not find any better way to express his gratitude to Russia for its support than to announce that Iraq is breaking off its West Qurna oil field contract with LUKoil, Mashinoimport and Zarubezhneft. Moreover, these companies were punished only because they did not stray outside the constraints set by UN sanctions.
 Many well-informed experts and politicians consider it essential to use all means to oppose the United States - if for nothing else than to form an alliance of countries to counter unipolarity and preserve the existing system of international law. While these goals may well be noble, they cannot be achieved in the immediate future.
 As events in recent weeks have demonstrated, there are no major states today that are prepared to commit themselves firmly to anti-American policies. Germany and France, due to the political balance of forces domestically, are capable of defying Washington on certain issues for a short period of time, but they will, nonetheless, remain allies of the United States. Saving face and restoring good relations with the United States are no less a concern than saving Iraq. Those Russian politicians and experts who assume that, in the foreseeable future, an alliance with Moscow - and, moreover, on an anti-American platform - is going to be more attractive than an alliance with the United States, display breathtaking naivete.
 Russia's Chinese counterparts are already surprised at the toughness of the Russian position vis-a-vis Iraq. For Beijing, it is much more important not to damage trade relations with the United States (trade volumes between China and Russia are one-tenth of those between China and the United States) than to defend Iraq, where China does not have any particular interests.
 I very much doubt that France or China will veto a U.S.-British UN resolution. Russia may find itself in the role of lone defender of Hussein's regime. To play this role would mean to relinquish all influence whatsoever over subsequent events, as well as the possibility of protecting Russia's national interests in a post-Hussein Iraq.
 And Russia is unlikely to save the international legal system - in fact, truth be told, there is not much to save at this point. In the past half-century, there have been many wars around the world but, with the minor exceptions of sending an army into Korea in the 1950s and the use of force against Hussein in the first Gulf War, they did not have UN authorization. The Soviet Union occupied Kabul, NATO bombed Belgrade etc. without paying much attention to the UN Security Council. That's not to say that UN Security Council authorization is not at the center of the international legal system. But it may prove impossible to assert the dictatorship of law and universal justice on a global scale in the coming days.
 Furthermore, there are other priorities that can be defended and should not fall victim to anti-American sentiments.
 First is the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Hussein has, for some time, possessed chemical and biological (but not nuclear) weapons in ample quantities. And there are no grounds to believe that, over the past four years, having kicked out UN inspectors, he has been actively engaged in secretly destroying his cache.
 Second is the war against international terrorism and Islamic extremism. Hussein openly sponsors, for example, Palestinian terrorists.
 Third is the maintenance of good relations with the world's leading powers, including the U.S.
 Finally, surely a major priority is the preservation - as far as is possible - of Russia's commercial interests in Iraq after the war. If Russia does not reach an agreement with the United States now about the rules of the game after the war, it will lose its commercial presence altogether.
 Moreover, time is not on Russia's side. When the first U.S. rocket hits Iraqi soil, Russia's negotiating position will also take a major hit.
 What can realistically be done, and what cannot?
 First and foremost, it is not in Russia's interest to undertake any actions at the UN Security Council that could marginalize Russia and keep it from participating in major issues of international politics.
 Russia needs to maintain a permanent dialogue with all the major players in the Iraq crisis - not only with those opposed to military action, but also with the future victors. It is clear that Russia will not be able to retain its position in Iraq completely intact - losses are inevitable, and we should not have any illusions on this count, but every effort must be made to minimize losses. If Russia cannot preserve all its contracts with Iraq, it must attempt to save the most important ones, the oil contracts in particular. Talks are no guarantee of success but, without them, Russia will, surely, get nothing.
 Upgrading the level of negotiators on the Russian side may improve the chances of reaching an acceptable agreement (certain issues can only be decided by the highest echelon of state officials), as would the precise formulation of Russia's position - i.e., what specifically Russia wants to stake a claim on in postwar Iraq and on what conditions. No one else is going to help Russia formulate its national interests, or assist in realizing these interests.
 Russia is not capable of preventing a war. But it is still capable of not losing out in the war.
 
 <i>Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Fond Politika think tank, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Russia's Nationalists a Waning Force Abroad
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: LOOKING at the results of last weekend's parliamentary elections in Estonia, it seems that most of the 170,000 ethnic Russians who have the right to vote there no longer see themselves as Russian nationals, but are thinking of themselves as Estonians, instead.
 
Whereas, in the last elections in 1999, Russian nationalist parties won six seats in the Estonian parliament, this time around, they failed to garner even one. This is a real sign of a positive trend of Estonia's ethnic Russians finally coming to the conclusion that they are now part of another country that they are choosing to make their home.
 The situation now is similar to that of immigrants in, say, the United States or Canada. Whether Asian or African-American, members of ethnic minorities in the two North American countries would rather vote for candidates who campaign on platforms that deal with practical issues reflecting everyday life. This is because most of these immigrants call themselves American or Canadian, rather than Sudanese or Algerian, say, even if they only got their citizenship within the last 10 years.
 To be honest, I find it quite hard to imagine that a nationalist party - for the sake of argument, let's call it the United Chinese People's Party - campaigning in elections in the United States would have any chance at all of winning a single seat in the Senate.
 I want to believe that this is exactly what is happening in Estonia.
 You could argue that the country's ethnic Russians just didn't bother to show up at the polling stations, because they thought that their representatives wouldn't make a noticeable difference within the Estonian majority in parliament. You'd be wrong.
 In a total turnout for the elections on March 2 of 491,000 - roughly 60 percent of the electorate - the 170,000 ethnic Russians could have influenced the result, and did influence it, in one of two ways - by either coming to vote, or by ignoring the whole shenanigans and staying at home.
 You could, like the Russian nationalists, argue that another 120,000 people living in Estonia have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship since 1991, and that the Estonians have infringed these people's human rights by not letting them vote. You'd be wrong again.
 These 120,000 will next be able to vote in December this year - in the Russian State Duma elections - and March next year - to pick a successor to or, more likely, re-elect President Vladimir Putin.
 They've voted before, as well, in the State Duma elections of December 1999 and the presidential vote of March 2000, at the Russian Embassy in Tallinn, and at mobile and stationary consulate offices opened by the Russian authorities in towns across Estonia.
 The biggest problem is a further 180,000 people who have neither Estonian nor Russian citizenship and, therefore, can't vote, but I am sure that it is just a question of time before this is resolved and they are able to express their views officially. Moreover, I believe that this question would be settled more quickly if Russia stopped trying to interfere in Estonia's affairs.
 Russian state-controlled television and the pro-Kremlin United Russia party have been disrupting this process by convening demonstrations and broadcasting reports of human-rights demonstrations in the Baltic states - many of which, coincidentally enough, appeared on television in the few weeks in the immediate run-up to last weekend's elections.
 Watching state-controlled Russian television in the last month or so, I got the impression that journalists here are unable to find work reporting on violations of any kind happening in their own country. It's far more important, of course, to broadcast damp-eyed footage such as the clip on the Rossia channel on Feb. 26. that showed Viktor Andreyev, a former deputy of the United People's Party in Estonia, complaining about &quot;just six Russian deputies having seats in the parliament.&quot;
 This time, Andreyev's party has no seats at all.
 Not even political assistance from Moscow helped. The assistance took the form of State Duma deputy Lyubov Sliska - of United Russia, surprisingly enough - who arrived in Estonia just a few days before the elections. Local analysts say that the visit had absolutely the opposite effect to what was intended - it just scared ethnic Russian voters away from a party that, now, appeared to be supported by Moscow.
 As a result, the United People's Party garnered just 2.1 percent of the votes cast. Its colleagues in the Russian Party of Estonia fared even worse, picking up a measly 0.18 percent - or 911 votes.
 The Kremlin merely said the results of the elections were &quot;expected.&quot; Hearing this, I thought that the Moscow bigwigs had at last understood that their sphere of influence is limited by the deep waters of the Narva River.
 Watching Rossia television, however, makes me think I'm still wrong.

TITLE: new ballet is a royal let-down
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Mariinsky International Ballet Festival has come a long way in a short space of time. This year's festival, which wrapped up at the Mariinsky Theater on Sunday, was a genuine treat. Its guest stars, such as Royal Ballet principal dancers Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg, and New York City Ballet's Maria Kowroski, performed with spark and imagination, bringing new colors to classics like &quot;Giselle&quot; and &quot;Swan Lake.&quot;
 
Cojocaru's sincere, fresh and spontaneous take on &quot;Giselle&quot; was something quite new for the Mariinsky stage, on which the heroine is usually danced as a femme fatale who forsees her future. Cojocaru was remarkably unconstrained for a classical ballet, yet, in technical terms, she was absolutely impeccable. Her ease of movement was enviable, and provided a salutory lesson that certain Mariinsky dancers would do well to study.
 The foreign dancers did not appear alien in the Mariinsky's productions. Rather, the shows seemed to be enriched, and the performers oozing with inspiration. How ironic, then, that the discordant note - in more ways than one - was the Mariinsky's own offering, the world premiere of the one-act ballet &quot;Princess Pirlipat,&quot; directed by renowned emigre artist Mikhail Shemyakin and choreographed by Kirill Simonov.
 The plot of &quot;Princess Pirlipat&quot; comes from of E.T.A. Hoffmann's story &quot;The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.&quot; In 1891, choreographer Marius Petipa commissioned Tchaikovsky to write the music for a ballet based on the tale. The work that resulted, &quot;The Nutcracker,&quot; omitted the story of Princess Pirlipat, an omission that Shemyakin hoped to redress with the new ballet, which he conceived as a prologue to be shown with his own 2001 rendition of &quot;The Nutcracker&quot;, also choreographed by Simonov.
 The ballet starts with the rat cardinal, Kryselieu, giving the newborn Princess Pirlipat (danced last week by Yelena Kondaurova) a nutcracker doll, which scares her and is, therefore, returned. The rats then steal sausages from the banquet being thrown by the king to celebrate Pirlipat's birth. The king, furious, sentences the rat aristocrats to death. The remaining rats launch a vendetta against the king and Drosselmeyer (Anton Adasinsky, from the Derevo Theater), who told the king that the rats stole the sausage.
 Sixteen years later, the rats get their revenge by putting a spell on Pirlipat and turning her into a nutcracker. However, Drosslemeyer and his nephew (Andrei Meruriyev) steal a magic nut, Crackatook, from the rats, and break the spell. However, as Pirlipat dances with Drosselmeyer's nephew, to whom she is newly engaged, the groom accidentally collides with the rat Krysilda, who curses him and turns him into a nutcracker.
 Shemyakin wrote the libretto for &quot;Princess Pirlipat&quot; himself, as well as designing the sets and costumes and directing the show. The music was written specially by prominent local composer Sergei Slonimsky, who refrained from drawing on Tchaikovsky's themes. The result is somewhat hit and miss - tuneful organ solos work well to draw the young, generous character of Drosselmayer's nephew, but the idea of trying to include painfully loud passages of computer music similar to a destroyed electric guitar was ruinous and destructive. The music, however, was not the main problem.
 When Shemyakin and Simonov took on &quot;The Nutcracker&quot; two years ago, Shemyakin was in charge of everything apart from the choreography - direction, libretto, sets and costumes. However, his Hoffmannesque sketches and drawings for the ballet make it clear that the artist was already suggesting the dancer's movements. With &quot;Princess Pirlipat,&quot; this has become more obvious; the 45-minute work was more of a puppet show or, at best, a pantomime than a ballet. 
 However, it would be a mistake to blame Simonov for the lack of choreography, as a person can only be held responsible for something they have actually done. Absurd as it may sound, it may have been more honest to credit Shemyakin with the choreography as well. Simonov's presence in the ballet is mere convention - the real problem was the depth of Shemyakin's interference.
 Simonov was limited from the start, as the ballet's concept and direction came from Shemyakin, a hugely talented artist, who started from an artist's point of view. Ballets must start with the movements, rather than the sets. Shemyakin, however, dressed almost all of the dancers in heavy crinoline costumes, and further hampered their movements by making them perform with giant masks and richly decorated hats. The luxurious costumes dictated, suggested and limited the movements all at once.
 For example, a transvestite queen as tall as a grenadier - and with about as much grace - looked preposterous, although the idea may have been for her to appear amusing. During the scene in which the king and queen see their daughter turn into a monster, the couple maneuvered across the stage like battleships trying to avoid mines. What little there was of Simonov's choreography - when it wasn't hopelessly overwhelmed by the sumptuous sophistication of Shemyakin's sets - was not as original as it could and should have been.
 When Simonov works independently, the results are noticeably different. For example, his 25-minute &quot;Come In!&quot; which premiered at the Mariinsky's Evening of Contemporary Choreography last year, brought a fresh interpretation to the theme of love, and Simonov's style - smooth, unfolding, melting movements - could be clearly seen. With each repeat of the main theme of Vladimir Martynov's music, the ballet's main theme repeats and evolves as well - love &quot;comes in&quot; to the dancers in about as many different ways as is possible among human beings. Perhaps because the piece's purpose was so well defined, the dancers were confident, and the ballet showed off well synchronized work by the corps de ballet. It was indicative in &quot;Princess Pirlipat&quot; that the corps de ballet lacked this sense of confidence.
 Unfortunately, working with Shemyakin is not good for Simonov. &quot;Princess Pirlipat&quot; seemed - ironically - foreign to the Mariinsky's stage, looking like a guest performance that had chosen the wrong venue. Maybe the major problem with Shemyakin's theatrical experiments is that his ambition won't let him consider producing a puppet show or a cartoon, even if it brought him an Oscar. Shemyakin needs the fame of the Mariinsky and its artistic director, Valery Gergiev, and just being a set designer is not enough. Perhaps his next step would be to stage a comic opera.

TITLE: they fought the law, but did they win?
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Dead Kennedys, who play their first-ever St. Petersburg show this weekend, are a legendary punk band without a legendary punk.
 
Today's Dead Kennedys consist of only three of the band's four original members; famed frontman and songwriter Jello Biafra left when the band split in 1986. The band reformed - without Biafra - in 2001, after guitarist East Bay Ray (real name: Ray Peperrell), bassist Klaus Fluoride (Geoffrey Lyall) and drummer D.H. Peligro (Darren Henley) won a lawsuit against Biafra (Eric Boucher) in 2000. Biafra was found guilty of defrauding his former bandmates of more than $76,000 in royalties.
 Although Biafra is currently appealing the verdict, the decision also allowed the trio to control the band's back catalog, power formerly in the hands of Biafra's Alternative Tentacles Records. Ray, Fluoride and Peligro eventually reissued five remastered Dead Kennedys albums on Manifesto Records. Statements on Biafra's label's Web site strongly advise fans against purchasing the CDs.
 In a telephone interview from Pisa, Italy last week, Ray said the band would exclusively perform classic Dead Kennedys songs for the whole of the tour.
 &quot;We'll play a mix of some of the classic songs, like 'Holiday in Cambodia,' 'California Uber Alles' and 'Let's Lynch the Landlord,' and we'll play some of our favorites, 'In-Sight,' 'Forward to Death' and 'Buzzbomb.' About 20 songs or so,&quot; he said.
 Although critics of the reformed Dead Kennedys might disagree, Ray said that the band did not get back together in order to capitalize on the current trend for nostalgia chic in the music industry.
 &quot;It actually happened by accident,&quot; Ray said, when Peligro suggested the trio perform some Dead Kennedys songs at the launch party for the live album, &quot;Mutiny on the Bay,&quot; which they had culled from live 1980s concert material and released in 2001 without Biafra's consent.
 &quot;We weren't advertised to play. We rehearsed at a rehearsal studio and people heard the sound of the Dead Kennedys coming out, loud and large,&quot; he said. &quot;The rumor hit the street and the record release party was sold out three weeks in advance - 700 people, with 200 or 300 outside the door that night hoping to get in. About two thirds of the audience was younger people who hadn't seen us before.&quot;
 Biafra, who now focuses mostly on spoken word performances and albums, as well as running Alternative Tentacles, said in a telephone interview from San Francisco this week that he reacted to the news of the reunion with disbelief.
 &quot;They did it out of greed. Ray and Klaus don't really like the music anymore, as far as I can tell,&quot; Biafra said. &quot;At least, [judging by] the way they acted over the last several years. You know, they bragged on stage that they don't even bother to rehearse and, at least in America, they charge very high ticket prices and play a lot of sort of oldies by, I guess, bands like Quiet Riot and Great White.&quot;
 &quot;I can't really speak for them,&quot; he continued. &quot;Because of the way they have treated me and treated our fans over the last several year, I can't really trust that their motives are good ones.&quot;
 In addition to these accusations, Biafra said the trio has intentionally avoided official mentioning that the band performs without its famous former frontman.
 &quot;That's very deliberate on their part to try to disguise that as much as possible,&quot; he said. &quot;Many times in America, their shows have had advertisements with my picture in them, even if I'm not there - or advertised as a full reunion tour with all the original members.&quot;
 During the band's heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Biafra was an outspoken, very visible presence as frontman. Ray, however, says that the band's new vocalist - Brendan Cruz, frontman of another veteran U.S. punk band, Dr. Know - is a worthy replacement.
 &quot;Brendan, the lead singer, is actually more athletic than Biafra,&quot; he said. &quot;He works out, does skateboarding, does surfing, does snowboarding, so he's in very physical condition. ... The way of looking at it is: The message stays the same, just the voice has changed.&quot;
 Cruz first entered the public eye at the age of six when he starred in &quot;The Courtship of Eddie's Father,&quot; a situation comedy that ran on U.S. television network ABC in the early 1970s.
 &quot;I didn't write these lyrics, but I believe every f***ing word of them,&quot; he was quoted as saying of Dead Kennedys songs in The New Yorker in 2002.
 Biafra, predictably, is not impressed.
 &quot;[Cruz] says the band meant so much to him, my lyrics meant so much to him, and then he never memorizes the stuff, so he gets them wrong again and again on stage. And he doesn't care,&quot; Biafra said.
 &quot;You know, now that we've taken your money, what's the matter, we can just run off to the next town or the next country,&quot; he said.
 Although Biafra is listed as author or co-author of nearly all the band's songs, Ray claims to have been its intellectual driving force.
 &quot;I'm the intellectual of the band,&quot; he said. &quot;[Biafra] was the one who could write the good lyric to express the idea, but the ideas ... didn't originate with him.&quot;
 Biafra, not surprisingly, denied these claims, attributing them to the fact that the court ruling allows Ray, Fluoride and Peligro legal control the songs.
 &quot;They say it's finally democracy, but it's more like Russia under the oligarchs, where I'm never told what is going on and I'm hardly paid anything now,&quot; Biafra said.
 The clash between the former members of the Dead Kennedys began, Biafra said, when he wouldn't agree to allowing &quot;Holiday in Cambodia&quot; to be used in a Levis' jeans commercial. Ray disagrees.
 &quot;It was about royalties,&quot; Ray said. &quot;Biafra was running a record label. He was picking money that was supposed to go to the Dead Kennedys and spending it on himself. Someone working at the label told us about this. We went to Biafra and spent a year trying to negotiate with him, and he would not acknowledge the issue. So we went to a trial.&quot;
 As a result of the trial, Biafra, as owner of Alternative Tentacles, which controlled the rights to the Dead Kennedys' songs, was ordered to pay damages of nearly $220,000 to the four band members. The sum includes damages for &quot;failing to promote&quot; the band's back catalogue.
 Biafra denies ever witholding royalties from the band, and blames the situation on an accounting error that he says Alternative Tentacles disovered, and rectified.
 &quot;There was no stolen money,&quot; he said. &quot;They made this story up in an attempt to ruin me and steal the rights to Dead Kennedys so they'd never have to pay me again.&quot;
 
 <i>
Dead Kennedys play LDM at 7 p.m. on Saturday.
 Links: www.deadkennedys.com, www.alternativetentacles.com </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: This week's most talked-about event is a party hosted by the <strong>Desperate Sound System, </strong>the name under which two former members of Brit-pop band Pulp - frontman Jarvis Cocker and bassist Steve Mackey - play as a DJ duo.
 
With the band's current state described as &quot;dormant&quot; on its official Web site, www.pulponline.com, the two entertain themselves by spinning vinyls around the globe.
 Despite producing hits such as &quot;Common People&quot; and &quot;Disco 2000,&quot; Pulp is currently without a record deal, after splitting with its label, which suggested reconsidering the band's contract after the commercial failure of last year's compilation, &quot;Hits.&quot;
 Cocker and Mackey originally started Desperate as their own club night in May 2001. The idea, which stemmed from what the pair saw as a lack of good nights out, was to have a flexible live roster, plus live bands and guests.
 &quot;I think we're quite bothered about whether people dance or not,&quot; Cocker has been quoted as saying. &quot;You have to play stuff you like, but the point of it is [that] you want people to have a good time. Hopefully they'll hear some stuff they've never heard before, rather than 'Heart Of Glass' or something.&quot;
 &quot;I can't mix,&quot; he said. &quot;I can vaguely get the records at roughly the same speed, but I'd never dare crossfade. But at least when the next record comes on it's in the same ballpark&quot;.
 There may be no &quot;Heart of Glass,&quot; but Cocker and Mackey do play Kim Wilde, Britney Spears and the Stone Roses, as well as less well-known stuff, according to fans' reviews on the Web.
 Desperate Sound System is scheduled to take the stage at midnight, after a set by Italy-based duo <strong>Gabin, </strong>which consists of jazz bassist Max Bottini and Filippo Clary, one of Rome's top DJs.
 Named after French actor Jean Gabin, the group is influenced by street folklore and the cabaret tradition. It first became famous for its house version of Duke Ellington's &quot;It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).&quot;
 The party, at the Bosse Palace on Saturday, is by invitation only, so press a scenester you know for the pass. See Gigs for location information.
 Saturday happens to be International Women's Day, one of Russia's favorite holidays. Not entirely coincidentally, perhaps, there are plenty of other events going on to lighten the public's wallets.
 The reformed <strong>Dead Kennedys </strong>will play LDM, but without former frontman Jello Biafra. The local punk scene is divided over whether today's Dead Kennedy's are &quot;real&quot; or not, but the band's audience has become broader than it was in the golden days of California punk in the late 1970s.
 &quot;The shows now are much better,&quot; guitarist East Bay Ray said in a telephone interview this week. &quot;I mean, there's women in the audience now, and everybody's taking care of each other, which is our ideal.&quot; See article, opposite page.
 Other attractions also include pop-rock band <strong>Multfilmy </strong>at Red Club, and urban-folk act <strong>La Minor </strong>at Boom. La Minor showcased a new set of songs in January, and now plays both its old and new sets in the same concert, making it twice as long.
 Unfortunately, <strong>The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review </strong>will not play at PAR.spb club on Saturday as advertised, due to differences between the band and the venue.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: estos tres amigos estan locos
AUTHOR: by Eric Bruns
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: We should have known it would be an evening of contradictions and surprises before we even took a step inside - two Americans, one celebrating a birthday, in St. Petersburg, going to a Mexican restaurant. Tres Amigos itself, which opened recently on Ulitsa Rubinshteina, seemed to recognize the peculiarity of the situation, and ran with it. The place's pseudo-Aztec style consists not only of sombreros, cacti, bright Central American placemats, and ceramic sun visages, but also includes Miller Time ashtrays, a neon Holsten beer sign, standard Russian furniture and magazine stands. Our truly authentic Mexican server wore a baseball cap and T-shirt with another reference to Miller Time, while the radio played Roxette's &quot;Listen to Your Heart&quot; in Spanish.
 
Even though it is not on the menu, we were compelled to ask for a round of margaritas, which, we found out later, cost 150 rubles ($4.75) each. But, in this curious slice of Latin America, we were surprised to find that you'll get the strawberry version by default, unless you specifically ask for the &quot;classic&quot; lime flavor. The crystalline white condiment gracing the rim of the strawberry variety's glass further piqued our interest, defying considerable effort at identification. Being neither salt nor sugar, despite a slightly sweet taste, our best guess - Nutrasweet - only amused us further. All in all, the strawberry variety was a bit too frothy for my taste and seemed more like a daiquiri. The &quot;less common&quot; lime concoction proved more authentic, with salt trimming (oh, yes), finely crushed ice and a smooth blend of sour lime, triple sec and tequila.
 We then proceeded to order two appetizers and two main courses but, apparently, that is another aspect of traditional dining that does not apply to Tres Amigos. You may think you ordered a couple of starters but, in reality, you didn't. We were immediately brought the main dish, never again hearing from the &quot;composite nachos&quot; or &quot;composite kesadia&quot; that intrigued us so much, the latter's relationship to a quesadilla interesting me as much the condiment on my glass.
 Passing over the &quot;spaghetti con carne&quot; and &quot;french fries&quot; on the &quot;children's menu,&quot; I ordered a &quot;burrito vegetariana&quot; consisting of a wheat tortilla with rice, beans, Chinese cabbage, pieces of tomato, cucumber, onion and cheese for 160 rubles ($5.05). It was entirely satisfying, not only in terms of freshness and taste, but also quantity. It absolutely filled my plate and, where there was any spare room, beans and Spanish rice (with bits of corn, carrots and peas) took over. A touch of heavy cream was somewhat surprising, but the cheese had a wonderful, slightly smoky flavor. It didn't make me want to move to the neighborhood, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.
 The birthday boy ordered the &quot;crackling fahitas mix&quot; consisting of pieces of marinated beef sirloin, chicken breast, shrimp, pieces of tomato, sweet pepper and onion for 290 rubles ($9.20). It came out of the kitchen hot and sizzling, leaving a trail of steam behind our efficient server. The meat was tender and juicy, the vegetables fresh and tasty, and we both had the impression of eating straight out of the pan - which, of course, we were doing. It came with a side of &quot;guakamole&quot; that proved as interesting as the spelling. It was obviously crafted from avocados that day, which, if you love the stuff as much as I do, is a reason unto itself for visiting Tres Amigos. The fajitas also came with two tortillas, sour cream and salsa that, if unremarkable, rounded off the dish well.
 Having unintentionally skipped an appetizer, we completed our meal by ordering the fried &quot;banana fritos&quot; and custard &quot;flan.&quot; We didn't fare any better with the desserts, however, as after a 15 minute wait, we discovered that what we took as our server's acknowledgement of our order was just his way of nodding while collecting the menus. It must be said that he was consistently energetic, helpful and (unnaturally?) happy. It's only that, in bouncing around the restaurant with a vigour and delight I have seldom witnessed in this city, he missed a few measure-defining beats.
 The restaurant's eccentricity might be best summed up by the payment system, which in our case included a credit card, rubles and Euros. We received a printed bill for the burrito and fajitas (450 rubles), which we could pay with a credit card without any difficulty. The margaritas (600 rubles), however, were charged separately with a hand-written note, for which the manager refused to accept electronic payment, presumably to avoid documentation and, in all probability, taxes. We did not have that many rubles on hand but, just as it appeared we would get a discount on our drinks to prevent charging them, we managed to agree upon an exchange rate for the Euros hidden away in my dining companion's wallet. We had an amusing time at Tres (Locos?) Amigos, never knowing quite what to expect - nor do I have the impression the staff knows, either.
 
 <i>
Tres Amigos. 25 Ul. Rubinshteina. Tel.: 314-1721. Open daily, noon until the last guest leaves. Russian and English menus. Major credit cards accepted(for food). Dinner for two, with alcohol: 1,050 rubles ($33.25). </i>

TITLE: the changing face of books
TEXT: Dom Knigi, the main bookstore in a city renowned around the world for its literary heritage, is one of St. Peterburg's most important institutions. In 2002, it sold some 4 million volumes - or 70 percent of all the books sold in the city - for a turnover of $11 million. Daily, up to 50,000 people visit the shop, buying a total of 25,000 books on average - although the fiction department alone claims to sell 45,000 on some days.
 
The store's premises, at 28 Nevsky Prospect, on the corner of Kanal Griboyedova, are a city landmark, easily identified by the glass globe in its roof that was a symbol of America's Singer Sewing Machine Co., which was headquartered in the building from its construction in 1904 until the revolutions of 1917. Dom Knigi took over the building two years later.
 For the past 25 years, the director of this unique establishment has been Galina Samokhvalova. A St. Petersburg native, Samokhvalova began working at Dom Knigi over 30 years ago, immediately after graduating from the St. Petersburg Polygraphic and Printing Institute. As Samokhvalova told </i><strong>Larisa Doctorow </strong><i>in a recent interview, &quot;Dom Knigi is my biography.&quot;
 </i>
 
q:<i>What has changed at Dom Knigi since the fall of the Soviet Union?
 </i>a:Everything. We've become independent. For the first time in our lives, we could go to a Western country and see their bookstores.
 
In 1994, we went to London, made a videotape of the Dillon's bookstore there, and studied it back at home. Then we bought the same technical systems they have, and created our IT department.
 Another result of Perestroika and what followed it is that our book selection has changed. We sold the same authors for 80 years and, suddenly, were exposed to all kinds of literature - Russian and Western, classic and modern.
 
 
q:<i>Was it a shock when you saw that flood of literature?
 </i>a:The real shock was the lack of books in the first two years after the fall of Soviet Union. Our publishing houses collapsed, and we were left with empty shelves.
 
The works of Lenin, for example, were either sold out or written off as unwanted, which was another decision we deeply regretted later, as people kept on asking for them.
 With Perestroika, another problem appeared - we had to buy our own trucks to bring books to the city from Moscow. Until about 10 years ago, 10 percent of the books sold in Dom Knigi were produced in St. Petersburg; now, the figure is about 6 percent.
 At present, our store has about 45,000 titles. We have a problem finding enough space - we have just over 4,000 square meters of trading space, which isn't much. I asked for another building, but was turned down. In comparison, German firms have about 400,000 titles, while the British have 500,000 titles in print.
 
 
q:<i>Have you noticed any changes in reading trends?
 </i>a:Not really. Fiction, for example, constitutes 12 percent of all the books bought, as as the case in the past. The sale of foreign literature in its original language has increased sharply, which is also true of dictionaries, textbooks, and books on economics and law.
 

 
q:<i>What about censorship? Do you experience any ideological pressure?
 </i>a:We're absolutely free. Our watchdog is the city's Printing Committee, and we haven't had a single instance of something being banned. We sell everything. Last year, for example, the Estonian prime minister visited the store. He was curious to see what we sell. When he saw [Adolf Hitler's] &quot;Mein Kampf,&quot; he said &quot;Now, I understand everything.&quot;
 
We do two things, though: We cover erotic books with discreet &quot;camouflage,&quot; and we don't sell literature on &quot;national questions&quot; [i.e. nationalist literature].
 Every book has its readers, and I don't have the right to restrict people. People have the right to buy and read what they want.
 In terms of children's literature, we sell more expensive books. &quot;Women's novels&quot; [cheap paperbacks, usually romances] are sold in kiosks; our customers buy more intellectual literature.
 
 
q:<i>Would you say that people read a lot in Russia?
 </i>a:I can't talk about the country as a whole, but people in St. Petersburg read a lot. I also feel that schoolchildren read more now than previously.
 

 
q:<i>What about shoplifting?
 </i>a:There's almost none. Certainly, we have electronic protection and video cameras, and our customers know about that.
 

 
q:<i>Do you sell St. Petersburg authors?
 </i>a:Yes, we maintain close links with local authors. We not only sell their books, but we try to promote and support them. A writer's existence is difficult nowadays. I don't think that authors get royalties that correspond to the work they put into a book. A collection of poems can't be completed in one month. Writers have a hard time. We pay our writers stipends, and try to help them in different ways.
 

 
q:<i>How many people work in Dom Knigi?
 </i>a:We have 430 in total. I want to explain one thing about our building - it has a special aura. Two thirds of our employees have worked here for more than 15 years. Nobody rushes home after hours; our people feel at home here.
 

 
q:<i>What about the building's facade, which is currently being repaired?
 </i>a:We think that the scaffolding will be removed in time for the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations.
 
The building is unique: At the beginning of the 20th century, it was decorated with a rotating glass globe that held a 100-cover restaurant; On top of the roof there was a double-headed eagle; the building was painted almost white. To return it to its original state would cost about $18 million, which is certainly not realistic. We've found some investors, who may try to do something. We'll see.
 
 
q:<i>What will happen to the building if it is restored?
 </i>a:I don't know. That's a question for the city's governor. But the bookstore will stay here, because we have a lease for 49 years.

TITLE: pianist breaks the ice
AUTHOR: by Jennifer Davis
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Lynn Hilton is no stranger to the cold, but the Chicago native hasn't spent a winter in her hometown for years. As a jazz vocalist and pianist of some renown, Hilton has toured far and wide for the last ten years in the Caribbean, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. When her agent in the United States found an opening at Borsalino restaurant at the Angleterre Hotel, she decided to revisit old man winter in a city famous - or infamous - for its snow and ice.
 
&quot;I usually spend the winter working someplace warm. I did some Internet research about St. Petersburg, and knew it gets really cold here,&quot; Hilton said this week. &quot;However, when I arrived in January, it was negative 30 degrees. I was a bit shocked.&quot;
 Hilton accompanies herself on piano and a synthesizer programmed with customized backing tracks that she arranges herself. Her repertoire consists of jazz and blues standards, original material and her own interpretations of pop songs, from Tracy Chapman's &quot;Talkin' About a Revolution&quot; to Bob Marley's &quot;No Woman, No Cry.&quot;
 The relaxed, laid-back atmosphere of Borsalino provides a fitting backdrop to Hilton's hypnotic vocals and elegant playing style. Her witty stage banter and friendly demeanor makes her a favorite with hotel staff and guests alike.
 &quot;Let me introduce you to my son,&quot; she says jokingly as a young waiter brings her a glass of water. As if on cue, her &quot;son&quot; dutifully sets down the glass and replies &quot;For you, mama.&quot;
 &quot;You never know what's gonna happen here,&quot; Hilton said. &quot;Sometimes, the whole crowd is dancing. Other nights, a fellow jazz musician and friend might drop by and sit in for a couple of songs.&quot;
 Hilton has integrated herself into the local jazz scene, thanks to an introduction by a Borsalino bartender to other jazz musicians who play next door at the Hotel Astoria. On her free days, Hilton can often be found enjoying the local club scene at places like Che, JFC, and Sunduk. 
 &quot;The gig scene here is wonderful,&quot; Hilton said. &quot;Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I feel like I'm back home in Chicago or the Village in New York.&quot;
 &quot;The musicians I have been privileged to meet here are very special in terms of their proficiency, education and level of professionalism,&quot; she said. &quot;I expected nothing less. I had met many Russian musicians during my travels.&quot;
 After St. Petersburg, Hilton will take a long-anticipated respite from the cold in Casablanca, Morocco. However, Borsalino's hospitable Italian manager, Mirco Zanini, has made Hilton feel at home here, and she hopes to return to the Angleterre Hotel this summer.
 &quot;I'm all for it,&quot; she said. &quot;Playing music is an art which removes borders. It is an international language and a means of communicating your innermost spirit to others.&quot;
 
 <i>
Lynn Hilton plays Borsalino at the Angleterre Hotel every evening except Sunday, from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. through March 27. </i>

TITLE: a coming of age on screen
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: How angry is Eminem, the brooding dark prince of perpetually aggrieved sensitivity? Let us count the ways.
 
Angry enough to sell 30 million albums, a record for rap. Angry enough to outrage guardians of public decency and allow every disaffected teenager in the United States to slipstream on his inextinguishable hostility. And angry enough to attract commercially savvy producer Brian Grazer and Curtis Hanson, one of the most adept and sophisticated of directors, to make &quot;8 Mile,&quot; a major studio release based loosely on the first steps in the up-from-the-underclass journey Marshall Mathers took to become one of the rulers of rap.
 But, just as &quot;8 Mile's&quot; story is book-ended by battles, one-on-one gladiatorial rap contests in which the audience picks a winner, so the film itself is a battle between God's angry man and the boa-constrictor Hollywood system, willing and able to swallow anything whole and make it fit a predigested mold. Remarkably, however, that did not happen with &quot;8 Mile,&quot; a fascinating, surprisingly entertaining stand-off that has adroitly managed to satisfy both of its constituencies, allowing all sides to legitimately claim victory.
 &quot;8 Mile&quot; is very much an old-fashioned somebody-up-there-likes-me kind of story, replete with traditional plot devices (will the hero have to work on the night of the climactic battle?) that are decades old. This venerable structure in effect facilitates the mainstreaming of rap, enabling civilian audiences to feel the safety and security of familiarity that's simply not in the cards when listening to Eminem's earlier, more nasty and threatening work.
 Yet, though you can see &quot;8 Mile&quot; and not really know exactly why the man aroused passion pro and con across the United States, you certainly get a strong hint. Eminem has such intense presence that even in the film's somewhat denatured form, he and his music have undeniable power and integrity. In fact, Eminem's seething fury, impossible to even think of disguising, is the most real thing in the film and the heart of its appeal. His hostility, savagery and disgust as well as his undeniable musical gifts come from too deep a place to be completely blanded out the way Elvis' talents notoriously were, and fans who come to ride this particular whirlwind will also not be disappointed.
 Given the past history of rock-star movies, it was far from certain that this particular marriage of sensibilities would work. Two interlocking factors were key in frankly enabling us to forget how formulaic &quot;8 Mile&quot; is. One was Eminem's genuine presence and on-screen charisma; the other, director Hanson's filmmaking gifts, including an ability to get memorable performances from his lead actors.
 With deep-set, out-from-under eyes and an eight-mile stare, Eminem is someone the camera likes from the moment he steps on screen. With his tattoos covered by a hooded sweatshirt and his piercings on hiatus because of the film's 1995 setting, the actor has something of the quality of an updated James Dean, and he carries the picture like it's second nature.
 Eminem plays Jimmy Smith Jr., a.k.a. Bunny Rabbit, an aspiring Detroit rapper with a genuine gift for language but an uncertainty about what to do with his life. When &quot;8 Mile&quot; begins, he's carrying everything he owns in a black plastic trash bag and is about to move back in with his impecunious mother, Stephanie (Kim Basinger), and her loutish boyfriend, Greg (Michael Shannon).
 Jimmy and his friends dream of rap stardom, and in fact two different people insist that they are Bunny Rabbit's ticket out. One is his pal Future (Mekhi Phifer of 1995's &quot;Clockers&quot; and 2001's &quot;O&quot;), who wants Jimmy to persevere in the rap battles he hosts; the other is neighborhood entrepreneur Wink (Eugene Byrd), who insists, &quot;I'm building my empire, and I'm taking you with me.&quot;
 With a guy as good-looking as Jimmy, romantic entanglement is also inevitable. He runs into the attractive Alex (Brittany Murphy), an aspiring model, at the car-bumper factor where he works. At the same factory, Jimmy has &quot;8 Mile's&quot; most curious scene, a rap battle where he comes to the defense of a maligned gay fellow worker, a sequence that feels like it has more to do with the star's well-publicized difficulties with the gay community than furthering the film's plot.
 Though Jimmy has run-ins with rival rappers, Eminem has such an overpowering presence that the only involving conflict his character has is with himself. Like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, he is royalty in mufti, wrestling with inner demons before feeling the confidence to declare himself the heir apparent, if not the king.
 Though some of &quot;8 Mile's&quot; realistic touches get wearing - there's more use of &quot;dog,&quot; as in &quot;yo, dog&quot; than in the annual meeting of the Westminster Kennel Club - the film is never more real than when Jimmy unloads his anger on someone close to him, a frequent occurrence. Eminem is an actor with a rare gift for rage, and movie careers, even big ones, have been built on less.
 
 <i>
&quot;8 Mile&quot; shows through March 19 at Mirage Cinema. </i>

TITLE: nothing in vietnam was my fault
AUTHOR: by Robert K. Brigham
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: This book, the product of years of writing and thinking on the Vietnam War, is by far Henry Kissinger's most comprehensive defense of the administration of then-President Richard Nixon policies in Indochina. Drawing on four of his previously published works and adding new material, Kissinger argues that Nixon pursued the diplomatic and military strategies he did in Indochina because there were no other options.
 
The Nixon White House faced one basic problem in constructing its withdrawal strategy: how to secure from Hanoi the release of American prisoners of war in exchange for a U.S. troop withdrawal before Congress cut funding for the war. Nixon also needed to give South Vietnam time to develop its military capabilities in the face of an inevitable challenge from the communists.
 There were also some delicate matters of domestic political perception. The Nixon administration's goal was to withdraw from Vietnam as a matter of policy, not because of domestic pressure, and without threatening other national obligations. This was accomplished, Kissinger writes, through skillful diplomacy and the application of military force. He implies that by using a stick as well as the carrot of American withdrawal and postwar reconstruction aid, Nixon forced concessions from Hanoi that led to an honorable peace.
 If there were failings in Vietnam, Kissinger concludes, they were not his own. He is, however, quick to blame others. The reckless liberalism of Kennedy and Johnson did just enough to get America deep into the quagmire of Vietnam, but not enough to make a difference militarily. Congress, too, was at fault: By the time Nixon took office in 1969, Kissinger writes, war-weary senators introduced resolutions on an almost daily basis to limit American involvement in Indochina, moves that undercut administration objectives and challenged principles of U.S. foreign policy. One of Kissinger's favorite targets is the liberal press, which he claims was biased against Nixon, launching unfair attacks that played into North Vietnam's hands by creating a hostile climate at home and abroad. Kissinger also finds fault with the North Vietnamese, who refused to compromise in Paris. U.S. allies in Saigon were also to blame for prolonging the war unnecessarily. When it was time to negotiate with Hanoi, they balked. Even Nixon is at fault, because flaws in his personality allowed domestic politics - namely Watergate - to interfere with his important foreign-policy agenda. But Kissinger saves his harshest attacks for the antiwar movement. In a bizarre passage blaming college students for much that went wrong in Vietnam, he writes that protesters were &quot;encouraged by modern psychiatry and the radical chic rhetoric of upper middle-class suburbia.&quot;
 Critics will line up against this book in droves. Some will challenge Kissinger's conclusion that expanding the war into neutral Laos and Cambodia and intensifying the bombing of North Vietnam &quot;speeded the end of the war and saved lives.&quot; Others will dismiss Kissinger's &quot;peace with honor&quot; claims, suggesting instead that the United States abandoned its South Vietnamese allies. The 1973 Paris Peace Agreement that Kissinger signed left nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. The agreement therefore provided little more than an interval between the American withdrawal and the communist takeover in South Vietnam. Many - myself included - will condemn Kissinger's suggestion that Congress should simply go along with the president during foreign-policy crises. And almost all readers will find Kissinger's racial stereotyping offensive. Of North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, he writes, &quot;His Vietnamese heritage expressed itself in an obsessive suspicion that he might somehow be tricked.&quot;
 It is difficult to see past the mean-spirited nature of much of this book, but if readers give Kissinger a chance, there is a great deal to learn here about Nixon and how the president constructed his Indochina policy. Kissinger's analysis of the secret negotiations in Paris is valuable, as is his discussion of U.S. relations with China and the Soviet Union. It may take decades before an American audience is ready for a dispassionate critique of the Nixon administration's role in Vietnam. Until then, as this book makes clear, scholarship on the Nixon years will remain an extension of the war itself. 
 
 <i>
&quot;Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War.&quot; By Henry Kissinger. Simon &amp; Schuster. 563 pp. $18
 

 
Robert K. Brigham is professor of history at Vassar College and author of &quot;Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War.&quot; He has also co-authored, with Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight, &quot;Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.&quot; </i>

TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: by Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: Razvlechenie, zabava, vesele, udovolstvie, shutkazh: </i>fun.
 
One of the first words Russians pick up in America is &quot;fun.&quot; After about the third day in New York or Peoria, a well-spoken Russian with two higher degrees in linguistics will cheerfully tell you <i>My byli na vecherinke i bylo fan! </i>(We were at a party, and it was fun!). I'm not sure why this is, since Russian has many perfectly good words to describe various kinds of fun. My theory is that, first, Russians pick it up because Americans use it constantly (for Americans, everything is fun, from shopping to sex) and, second, because it puts in one simple, easily pronounced word a number of concepts that are expressed by different words and expressions in Russian.
 For example: Let's do this just for fun! <i>(Davaite sdelayem eto prosto radi udovolstviya!), </i>or I said that in fun <i>(Ya eto skazala v shutku), </i>or He's fun to be with <i>(S nim vecelo, s nim ne soskuchishsya </i>- literally, with him you never get bored). <i>Zabavno </i>means fun in the sense of funny, entertaining, amusing. <i>Ya videl ochen zabavny film </i>(I saw a very funny film.)
 The most common verb you use for having fun in Russian is <i>razvlekatsya, </i>which can be translated as &quot;to be amused, to have a good time, to entertain oneself.&quot; To my ear it's this last whisper of connotation that differentiates <i>razvlekatsya </i>from &quot;to have fun.&quot; In English, having fun can be a passive activity: You sit on your couch and have fun watching TV. In Russian you'd be more likely to describe that pleasure as <i>mne bylo veselo. Razvlekatsya </i>implies that you are entertaining yourself - it's a more creative process. <i>On takoi chudak! Sam stroit sebe samolyot. Tak on razvlekayetsya. </i>(He's such an oddball! He's building himself an airplane. That's how he has a good time.)
 Another way to have fun is <i>veselitsya. My tak veselilis, chto razbudili sosedei! </i>(We had such a good time that we woke up the neighbors!) <i>Rasslabitsya </i>can mean to relax tense muscles, but it can also mean &quot;to relax and have a good time,&quot; usually with the help of something alcoholic. <i>Vchera vecherom moi muzh passlablyalsya s druzyami. Ya ne mogu ego uprekat - on mnogo i napryazheno rabotayet - no segodnya on stradayet s pokhmelya. </i>(Last night my husband kicked back with his friends. I can't give him a hard time - he's been working a lot, and there's pressure at the office - but today he's got a hangover.) If we increase the wattage from kick back to let it rip, you can use the word <i>gulyat, </i>which is having fun with lots of alcohol: <i>Posle podpisaniya kontrakta oni gulyali po-chyornomu tri dnya. </i>(After signing the contract, they went on a real binge for three days.)
 Other slang expressions for having a rip-roaring good time are <i>otvyazyvatsya, otryvatsya, ottopyritsya, </i>and <i>ottyagivatsya.</i> All are cheerfully nonstandard, mostly youth slang, and totally inappropriate for what are called in Russian <i>svetskie razgovory </i>- civilized conversation. <i>Mne tak nuzhno bylo otdokhnut. Ya poyekhal v Antaliyu i ottyanulsya po polnoi programme. Potratil za odin vecher tysyachu baksov, ne znayu na chto, I prosnulsya v drugom gorode. Vo ottyag! </i>(I really needed a break. So I went to Antalya and really cut loose. In one evening I spent a thousand bucks, don't know on what, and I woke up in another city. Was that a bender or what?)
 This is okay for the dorm room, not okay for the board room - that is, unless your business partners are childhood friends or prone to the same kind of wild partying. Or unless you think they took the thousand bucks.
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: U.S. Bombers Reach Guam in Korea Crisis
AUTHOR: By Sang-Hun Choe
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - A group of long-range bombers, deployed as a show of U.S. military might, have landed in Guam and more bombers were scheduled to arrive Thursday as tensions increased in the standoff over North Korea's nuclear programs.
 
North Korean state radio on Thursday condemned the reinforcement as a preparation for invading the communist state, said South Korea's national Yonhap news agency.
 Meanwhile, Russia and China both urged Washington to hold direct talks with Pyongyang to defuse the standoff peacefully, saying that they opposed military or other pressure on the isolated country.
 The Pentagon ordered the deployment of 12 B-1 and 12 B-52 bombers last Friday to deter conflicts that could arise in the West Pacific, said Lieutenant David Faggard at the U.S. Pacific Air Force headquarters in Hawaii.
 Lieutenant Tom Wenz, a public-affairs officer at Guam's Andersen Air Force Base, confirmed the landing of the first group of bombers.
 Tensions over North Korea's nuclear program heightened over the weekend, after North Korean fighter jets briefly intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan. Guam is about 3,200 kilometers from North Korea.
 The deployment of heavy bombers &quot;was designed to show countries throughout the region that we don't have all our eggs in one basket,&quot; Faggard said, referring to the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region.
 &quot;These moves are not aggressive in nature. It's a prudent measure to bolster our defense posture,&quot; said Andersen spokesperson, Lieutenant Kim Melchor.
 After the interception, U.S. President George W. Bush said that diplomatic efforts to defuse the tension were in progress but that the military option was on the table as a last resort.
 The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that Moscow &quot;noted with concern&quot; that Washington doesn't exclude military means for solving the problem. China said that it also opposed any sanctions.
 &quot;We believe it would only lead to further problems or complications of the situation,&quot; said Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan.
 In Seoul, South Korean Prime Minister Goh Kun urged the United States to maintain its military strength in his country, saying that U.S. troops should serve as a &quot;trip wire&quot; against North Korean provocation.
 In a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Thomas Hubbard, Goh stressed that planned talks between the two allies on reconfiguring the U.S. troop presence in South Korea should not affect the U.S. military's ability to deter the communist state. He suggested that the talks be postponed while nuclear tensions continue.
 &quot;We should never weaken the deterrence capabilities of the U.S. military. The trip wire should remain,&quot; Goh was quoted as saying by his office. Many of the U.S. troops are stationed near the North Korean border, where they would quickly become involved in any serious conflict.
 The prime minister's post in South Korea has been largely a ceremonial one with little decision-making power. But President Roh Moo-hyun, sworn in last month, has promised to delegate more power to his prime minister.
 Seoul and Washington plan to launch formal consultations in April to reshape the U.S. military presence. Possible agenda items include relocating the headquarters of the U.S. 8th Army out of Seoul and a reduction in the U.S. military strength, South Korean officials said.
 Pentagon officials have said that no firm plans are in place, but serious thought has been given to reducing the size of the U.S. forces in Germany and South Korea.
 The United States and South Korea agreed last year to reduce the number of U.S. troop installations in South Korea from 41 to 25 over the next 10 years, without cutting the number of U.S. troops.

TITLE: Sinn Fein Holds Key to Deal on Peace in Northern Ireland
AUTHOR: By Shawn Pogatchnik
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUBLIN, Ireland - The prospect that Sinn Fein politicians could be kicked out of any future Northern Ireland government, as punishment for Irish Republican Army aggressions, emerged Wednesday as the issue that could make or break any new peacemaking deal.
 
To Sinn Fein's dismay, both Britain and Ireland backed Protestant demands for this reassurance during negotiations that concluded Tuesday night at Hillsborough Castle, outside Belfast. Britain also announced that elections to Northern Ireland's legislature would be postponed for four weeks until May 29 to permit more time for a breakthrough.
 Two days of talks produced substantial progress, negotiators agreed, chiefly involving British commitments on a vast range of issues, including troop cutbacks, police reform, a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights and the prospect of appointing more Catholic judges.
 But efforts to resurrect Northern Ireland's suspended Catholic-Protestant administration - the key achievement of the 1998 peace accord - foundered on the question of whether Sinn Fein would accept a new so-called &quot;sanctions&quot; system, demanded by the major Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists.
 As currently proposed, a new Verification Commission involving diplomats from Britain, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States would publish occasional reports on whether the IRA was abstaining from all threatening activities.
 The verifiers could rule that the IRA was undermining its 1997 cease-fire by, for instance, gathering intelligence on potential targets, smuggling in fresh weapons supplies or attacking criminal opponents within its Catholic power bases. The IRA has continued all these activities, despite its truce.
 If that happened, lawmakers could ask Britain to impose one of a range of &quot;sanctions&quot; against Sinn Fein. The most severe sanction would be to eject Sinn Fein from the four-party coalition until the IRA started correcting its transgressions.
 But Sinn Fein insisted that it could not accept any new restrictions on the party's right to hold office. It insisted that it was separate from the IRA, a view dismissed by other parties and the IRA's own field manual, the Green Book, which describes the need for Sinn Fein to remain under &quot;army control.&quot;
 Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whom police and history books identify as a veteran member of the IRA's seven-member command, protested that sanctions would be &quot;aimed at us, for something that another organization [the IRA] may or may not be responsible for. That's totally unacceptable.&quot;
 Sinn Fein could be ousted only if majorities on both the Catholic and Protestant sides of Northern Ireland's legislature supported the move.
 The new proposals would switch the final say to Britain's governor, Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy. He currently wields the power only to take control away from the entire administration, as has happened four times since its formation in December 1999.
 Significantly, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern agreed Wednesday with his British counterpart, Tony Blair, that the power-sharing experiment needed some form of sanctions to reassure Protestants to resume work with Sinn Fein.
 Ahern said that, &quot;If all that we have achieved and are working to achieve works effectively, we won't have to use any sanctions. The real question is that we hope it will not be necessary.&quot;

TITLE: Kocharian Re-Elected As President In Armenia
AUTHOR: By Bagila Bukhabayeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: YEREVAN, Armenia - Incumbent Robert Kocharian easily won re-election in a presidential runoff seen as a test of Armenia's democracy, but the opposition and international observers said that the vote had serious flaws.
 
With votes from all but one of the 1,865 electoral districts counted, Kocharian had 67.5 percent and challenger Stepan Demirchian had 32.5 percent, Central Election Commission officials said Thursday.
 Wednesday's runoff was forced when Kocharian fell just short of the 50 percent he needed to win a Feb. 19 election outright. Demirchian was the second-highest vote getter.
 The opposition cried foul.
 &quot;The second round proceeded under a scenario prepared by the authorities, with legal violations, intimidation and violence,&quot; Demirchian said yesterday. &quot;The outcome of this election has nothing to do with the people's choice.&quot;
 Demirchian campaign chief Grigor Arutyunian accused the election commission of violations, includingremoving opposition representatives from local election commissions and ballot-box stuffing. The opposition alleged that 400 soldiers were used to cast multiple ballots in various precincts, and that its representatives were kicked out during the count.
 Some 200 election observers confirmed many cases of ballot-box stuffing, and said that the period between the first round and the runoff did not meet international standards for an open campaign, according to a statement from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
 &quot;I am disappointed; we had hoped for better,&quot; the OSCE's Peter Eicher said in the statement. The observer mission was run under the auspices of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
 Eicher said that, as well as ballot-stuffing, there were many instances of opposition activists being detained ahead of the vote.
 But the observers also faulted the opposition for failing to maintain a dialogue with the authorities and for inflammatory statements.
 Election commission spokesperson Nune Ovanissian said that the commission had received 50 complaints, including those concerning insufficient access for opposition representatives and allegations of opposition representatives' exceeding their authority.
 Observers had also charged that the first round on Feb. 19 was flawed by ballot-box stuffing and intimidation.
 Demirchian, 43, ran on an anti-corruption platform and also tried to attract voters using the political image of his father, Soviet-era Communist leader Karen Demirchian - Kocharian's main rival in the 1998 presidential contest and a victim of a 1999 shooting spree in parliament that left eight people dead.
 The opposition blames Kocharian, 48, for about 30 unresolved deaths in recent years that it claims were political killings, and for the widening gap between rich and poor in the Caucasus Mountains country of 3.3 million people.
 For some voters, one of Kocharian's strongest points was his contribution to the victory in the war of 1988 to 1994 between neighboring Azerbaijan and the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

TITLE: Colombia Bomb Explosion Kills 7, Injures 20
AUTHOR: By Susannah Nesmith
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOGOTA, Colombia - A bomb set off by suspected rebels ripped through a shopping center in northeastern Colombia on Wednesday, killing seven people, injuring at least 20, and setting the complex on fire.
 
Television images showed shocked survivors wandering around the shopping stalls, blackened Ash Wednesday marks still on their foreheads.
 Government officials said that the attack in Cucuta, on the border with Venezuela, was part of an attempt by guerrillas to bring the country's long-simmering war to Colombia's cities.
 Defense Minister Martha Lucia Ramirez said that the urban offensive is a response to government offensives in the countryside. &quot;Unfortunately, that is the risk we have to run,&quot; she said.
 After the bombing, President Alvaro Uribe appointed a police general to find rebel infiltrators in Cucuta government offices. The state news agency identified the prosecutor's office as one government agency at which people got jobs because of pressure from rebels.
 &quot;The police are conducting an internal investigation and will do everything necessary in Cucuta and North Santander [state],&quot; Uribe said, according to the State News Center agency.
 Cucuta Mayor Manuel Guillermo Mora said that seven people were killed.
 Police General Luis Alfredo Rodriguez said that the National Liberation Army, or ELN, was responsible for the attack. The bomb was left next to a car in the basement parking lot, police said.
 Firefighters, rescue crews and police officers hustled through the smoke into the shattered complex as frightened passers-by looked on.
 Family members of shopping center employees gathered nearby waiting for word of their relatives.
 The ELN and the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, are battling outlawed paramilitary groups for control of Cucuta. The city has one of the highest murder rates in Colombia.
 Colombia is torn by a 38-year civil war that pits the leftist rebels against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups. About 3,500 people, mainly civilians, are killed in the fighting each year.

TITLE: Kobe Becomes Youngest to 10,000 Mark
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - Before Robert Horry ended the game with a vintage Robert Horry moment, Kobe Bryant set an NBA standard by becoming the youngest player to score 10,000 points.
 
Bryant hit the plateau in the third quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers' 97-95 victory over the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday night, a game won on Horry's 6-meter shot at the final buzzer.
 The crowd of 18,997 gave Bryant a standing ovation when he scored his 14th point of the game. At 24 years, 193 days, he supplanted Bob McAdoo as the youngest player to reach that milestone.
 &quot;I really can't grasp what it means right now. I had no idea the crowd was going to stand up the way they did. It was a little embarrassing, but it was a good feeling,&quot; said Bryant, who finished with 20 points.
 Shaquille O'Neal, who had 26 points and 11 rebounds, was impressed.
 &quot;It's an accomplishment, especially for a guy that came out of high school right away,&quot; said O'Neal, who is third on the youngest-to-10,000 list. &quot;He's going to be a Hall of Fame player. I'm just glad he's on my team.&quot;
 The Lakers led by 17 early in the third quarter, then fell behind in the waning moments, before Derek Fisher scored on two drives and Horry won it.
 Coach Phil Jackson was back on the bench after missing three games following a procedure for a kidney stone.
 &quot;That was one we pulled out of the fire,&quot; Jackson said. &quot;I felt pretty good. I have another procedure tomorrow and hopefully this will be over and done with and we can move on.&quot;
 The 57-year-old Jackson, who underwent the kidney stone procedure on Feb. 24, had not missed a game previously in 13 years of coaching in the NBA, spanning 1,249 regular-season and playoff contests.
 Bryant, who missed some practice time this week because of sore knees, hit the scoring plateau with a hanging jumper in the lane. However, he saw his streak of 16 consecutive games with 30 or more points end.
 Bryant came into the league straight out of high school and played his first NBA game when he was 18 years and about two months old. McAdoo made his debut at 21, and was 25 and about five months when he hit 10,000.
 The loss, the Pacers' eighth in their last nine games, dropped them into a tie with Detroit for the top spot in the Central Division. Indiana (38-23) also is tied with the Pistons and New Jersey for best overall record in the Eastern Conference.
 Jermaine O'Neal scored 28 points for the Pacers, who took the lead late in the game after trailing 59-42 two minutes into the third quarter. Ron Artest added 17 points.
 &quot;In the first half, we were afraid to play,&quot; Indiana coach Isiah Thomas said. &quot;Then I thought we started playing with energy and effort. They're the champs, and any time you have a chance to beat the champs on their homecourt and don't, it hurts.&quot;
 Fisher, who scored 19, tied it at 95 with 0:31 remaining. Bryant then appeared to put the Lakers up when he hit a running 10-meter shot with 0:02.8 left. But the basket was waved off because Artest had been called for a foul before Bryant got the shot off.
 After a timeout, the Lakers inbounded the ball, then Horry - as he did in the Lakers' dramatic playoff victory over Sacramento last year - was in the right place at the right time, with a pass into O'Neal deflected right to him.
 &quot;I'm just very, very blessed. I had good looks on our last three possessions before that,&quot; Horry said. &quot;I'd missed two [3-pointers] and turned it over, so I was pretty mad at myself. I just let everything go and focused.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Sacramento 96, Minnesota 95. </strong>Chris Webber had 25 points and 11 rebounds and put the Kings ahead for good in overtime Wednesday night, helping Sacramento defeat the Timberwolves.
 
He made a jump hook in the lane over Kevin Garnett, putting the Kings ahead for good, 89-87. Following a shot clock violation by Minnesota, Webber backed Garnett down again and made a similar shot on the left side for a 91-87 lead with 1:24 remaining.
 Garnett had four points in overtime and finished with 27 and tied a career-high with 24 rebounds. But he missed 18 of 29 shots.
 Stojakovic made all 10 of his free throws and had 20 points and 11 rebounds for the Kings, who won their sixth straight home game and have taken seven of eight overall to open a three-game lead over Portland in the Pacific Division.
 Divac had 16 points and 10 rebounds, while Doug Christie scored 14 points and Bibby had 11.
 Szczerbiak and Hudson both scored 16 points, while Rasho Nesterovic added 14 points and 15 rebounds for Minnesota, which has lost two straight after winning 13 of 14.
 
 <i>
(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>

TITLE: End of an Era in San Jose as Nolan Moves On to Toronto
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Owen Nolan, the San Jose Sharks' franchise scoring leader and their captain since 1998, was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday night.
 
The Sharks acquired center Alyn McCauley, highly regarded prospect Brad Boyes and a first-round draft pick from the Maple Leafs, who shook their reputation for trading timidity with an expensive pickup for their playoff run.
 The deal, rumored for weeks, marks the end of an era in San Jose, where general manager Dean Lombardi built his team around the moody power forward. With Nolan as their captain, the Sharks improved their points total in every season until their disappointing current campaign.
 Lombardi went to Nolan's house Wednesday night to break the news. They have known each other since Nolan was an 18-year-old prospect and Lombardi was an assistant general manager in Minnesota.
 &quot;It's a tough decision emotionally when you've been with a player through a six-year rebuilding process and we're not where we hope to be,&quot; Lombardi said. &quot;Given a contract with $13 million on it, we're not getting the play to reflect the contract. There's just a few teams interested in a top player. This was the best deal we could get ... and it's a good deal.&quot;
 Since arriving in San Jose in 1995 in a deal with Colorado, Nolan has become the Sharks' franchise leader in goals, assists and points. He is second to defenseman Mike Rathje in games played.
 Nolan, who grew up in Ontario and played for the gold medal-winning Canadian Olympic team in Salt Lake City, has 22 goals, 20 assists and 91 penalty minutes in 61 games this season. In 836 career games - 568 with the Sharks - he has 323 goals, 352 assists and 1,474 penalty minutes.
 &quot;He's disappointed like everyone else that he didn't reach the next step in his maturity here,&quot; Lombardi said. &quot;Hopefully, he'll do it in Toronto.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Calgary 5, New Jersey 4 (OT). </strong>Martin Gelinas, proved wearing a cast on his left hand to protect a broken thumb is not necessarily an impediment.
 
Gelinas' second goal of the game, at 1:54 of overtime, gave the Calgary Flames a 5-4 come-from-behind victory Wednesday night over the New Jersey Devils.
 &quot;I have only four fingers to hold my stick with my bottom hand right now, but I'm so used to it now.&quot; he said. &quot;I don't remember how it feels to have five fingers on that hand.&quot;
 He carried the puck down the left wing and into the corner where his attempted pass to Jarome Iginla banked off the back of defenseman Scott Stevens' leg and past goaltender Corey Schwab.
 Gelinas, who now has 17 goals, extended his point streak to eight games.
 &quot;Our game is skating and going to the net and tonight we got rewarded for it,&quot; said Gelinas, who has three goals and eight assists during his streak.
 Calgary tied the game 4-4 with 1:25 left in the third period when defenseman Robyn Regehr intercepted a clearing attempt at the New Jersey blue line and fired a quick shot that was deflected in by Oleg Saprykin.
 &quot;You have to give Calgary credit,&quot; New Jersey's Scott Gomez said. &quot;Instead of just saying that's it when we got the late lead, they came back and get the overtime winner on us.&quot;
 &quot;We showed some character coming back but at the same time we let up. &quot;Against a young team like that who are fighting to end the season on a good note, you can't do that.&quot;
 Chris Drury and Rob Niedermayer also scored for Calgary. The Flames won consecutive games for the first time since Jan. 18-20.
 Scott Stevens, Brian Rafalski, Patrik Elias and Jamie Langenbrunner had goals for the Devils.
 
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(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>

TITLE: Lazio Beats Wisla, Goes To Quarters
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: KRAKOW, Poland- Striker Enrico Chiesa struck early in the second half as Lazio came from behind to beat Wisla Krakow 2-1 on Wednesday to secure a UEFA Cup quarterfinal berth.
 
Lazio, held 3-3 by Wisla in the first leg of the fourth-round tie in Rome, made a nightmare start on a dreadful Krakow pitch, when Wisla's Marcin Kuzba scored in the third minute after a brilliant run by Kalu Uche.
 But Lazio, which now faces Turkish league leader Besiktas, kept its nerve and equalized in the 20th minute with a header by Portuguese defender Fernando Couto.
 After the break, Lazio began to take control and Chiesa neatly volleyed the ball home from just outside the penalty box after 54 minutes.
 After grabbing the lead, Lazio shored up its defence and was rarely threatened.
 &quot;Wisla certainly started off well, but we turned out the better. Lazio deserved to advance, we showed our class in the second half,&quot; Lazio coach Roberto Mancini said. &quot;I am only sad the pitch was such [bad] condition. That is why I had to make several changes in the squad, I was afraid of injury.&quot;
 The pitch was frozen solid last week, forcing UEFA to postpone the game, before a combination of salt, sand and hot-air blowers under makeshift tents defrosted the ground.
 
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England. </strong>Manchester United stayed close to Arsenal in the Premiership title chase on Wednesday with a 2-1 home victory over Leeds United.
 
A late goal from Mikael Silvestre secured the win and moved Manchester to 58 points, five behind Arsenal.
 Manchester went ahead when Lucas Radebe scored an own goal after 20 minutes. Mark Viduka headed Leeds into a tie after 64 minutes off Ian Harte's cross.
 But just when it seemed Manchester would have to settle for a tie, Silvestre sneaked into the box to nod home David Beckham's free kick.
 Newcastle, which was tied for second with United, remained eight points behind Arsenal after losing 1-0 at Middlesbrough on a goal by Cameroon's Geremi. Newcastle had not lost in two months.
 
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Spain. </strong>Recreativo Huelva reached the King's Cup final after an exciting draw in its semifinal, second leg game on Wednesday. Spain's longest-established club, secured a place in the final for the first time in its 114-year history by coming back to draw 2-2 at Osasuna.
 
Trailing 2-0 at halftime, the Primera Liga basement club scored two goals at the start of the second half to claim a 4-2 aggregate win at a rain-drenched El Sadar. Osasuna's Australian striker John Aloisi struct from close range midway through the first half and, two minutes before halftime, midfielder Moha scored a low shot from the edge of the area.
 But Recreativo came out with all guns blazing in the second half to restore its aggregate lead. Speedy striker Xisco broke through two minutes after the restart and chipped into the net over a despairing Juan Carlos Unzue.
 Osasuna barely had time to recover before the Andalucians struck again. Midfielder Ignacio Benitez steered a powerful right-foot drive inside the near post after picking up a neat pass from Xisco on the edge of the area to leave Osasuna needing to score three times to turn the tie around.
 <i>

 (Reuters, AP)</i>
 

 <i>
(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>