SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #853 (21), Friday, March 21, 2003
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TITLE: VOX POPULI
TEXT: After the United States launched missile attacks on Iraq early Thursday morning, provoking a barrage of worldwide condemnation, Staff Writer Irina Titova took to the streets of St. Petersburg to find out how city residents are reacting. Photographs by Sergey Grachev.
Valentin Mikhailov, 17, student
"The situation in the world is getting worse. I think this war could threaten to provoke a third world war, involving the whole world."
Svetlana Berezina, 64, pensioner
"I'm scared, because all world wars have to start from something. At the same time, I don't have any idea myself of what could be done to settle the situation with Iraq, and with terrorism in general, in a peaceful way."
"I understand that the United State can hardly forget the terrible aggression against the country on Sept. 11, [2001], just as we can't forget the explosions in Moscow and other cities [in 1999]."
Larisa Churilova, 29, salesperson
"This war may split the world into two parts - those who are for the war, and those who are against. I've never liked the United States for its position as the global police officer, and now my attitude to that country has just become more negative."
Vladimir Emdin, 60, professor
"I'm against any war, because all wars cause casualties among innocent people. I think this war may have unpredictable consequences. The whole Muslim world may rise up against the rest of the world. I fear a repeat of [the attacks of] Sept. 11 [2001]".
"George Bush has never smelt a war, never seen real trouble, which is why he unleashed this war."
Denis Usov, 29
"It's clear that this war is about oil. It's also clear that the real terrorist is the United States, which is the center of international terrorism. The war in Iraq is another proof of that."
"I think Russia should express its position on the war more strongly. For example, we could close all branches of McDonald's in Russia."
Ilya Sverdlov, 28, journalist
"The United States is rudely dictating its will to the rest of the world, ignoring the opinion of the United Nations, the international community, and even of common American citizens."
"I think the start of this war will become the beginning of the end for the U.S., and they'll see it soon."
"I don't think relations between the U.S. and Russia will change much, because we don't have the economic strength to pressure the U.S.; our economy is very dependent on the U.S."
Vladimir Timofeyev, 37,
unemployed
"I still can't work out what the war is about - is it against terrorism, or is it for oil? Different sources give different information, and it's hard for us to judge what is true from here."
Valery Mishin, artist
"This is the end of the United States. That country broke the basic principle of democracy. The notion of democracy comes from the word demos - people [in Greek] - and not only the American people but the people of the world oppose this war. The US is now killing its idea of democracy."
TITLE: City Prosecutor Reassigned to Post in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg City Prosector Ivan Sydoruk was reassigned from his position in the city to work as an assistant in the federal Prosecutor's Office on Tuesday, according to an order signed by federal General Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov.
Since being appointed to head the City Prosecutor's Office in 1997, Sydoruk had been at odds with a group of anti-governor lawmakers in the Legislative Assembly who said that he was unprofessional and were concerned about his reliability in relation to City Hall.
Political analysts said that Sydoruk's reassignment was another step by the Kremlin to limit Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's power.
"[U.S. President George W.] Bush could learn how to enforce a blockade [like the Kremlin is doing in St. Petersburg], with a constantly tightening noose [around Yakovlev]," said Leonid Kisselman, a political analyst at the Sociology Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "If he had done it [with Iraq] as has been done here, no war would have been necessary."
"It looks pretty clear: First, they take out a pawn, then another, then a rook, then the queen," he said, referring to chess pieces. "What kind of nerves must [Smolny] have to withstand this?"
Sydoruk's problems with the anti-governor lawmakers began when he had difficulty being approved as City Prosecutor by the Legislative Assembly.
"When [the Legislative Assembly] voted to approve his candidature, just one lawmaker voted for [Sydoruk]," said Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the Yabloko faction in the assembly, in an interview on Wednesday. "But, afterward, over 20 [members] came up to him saying it was their vote."
One of the latest examples of the City Prosecutor's Office's activity in relation to anti-governor lawmakers was the criminal case against Alexei Kovalyov, an independent legislator charged in April 2002 with misappropriation of government funds. Investigators maintained, in 1996, that Kovalyov organized a kickback scheme to bilk the city budget of 2 billion rubles ($390,000) by forcing construction companies he contracted to hand over from 10 percent to 15 percent of the city-budget money they received to repair and maintain various cultural landmarks in the city.
Although Kovalyov was arrested and jailed for a short period of time, none of the contractors or City Hall officials linked to the case was prosecuted. Kovalyov's allies said the case was political, pointing out that it started a few months before the start of campaigning for last year's Legislative Assembly elections.
"The City Prosecutor's Office activity in relation to me was marked by a high level of unprofessionalism," Kovalyov said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "If the City Prosecutor can get away with such things, it means he can do anything he wants, even if he is not allowed to [by law]."
The next hearing in Kovalyov's case is scheduled for Aug. 13. Kovalyov said that he had been denied access to investigation papers that he has the legal right to see. The City Prosecutor's Office could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Former city police chief Arkady Kramerev, a lawmaker from the pro-Kremlin Unity faction in the Legislative Assembly, said that Sydoruk's past and future should be a matter for calm debate.
"It's the General Prosecutor's business whom to appoint and whom to fire," Kramerev said in a Wednesday interview. "I don't think there's any abuse of power involved, but let's not speculate about it."
"[Sydoruk] did a lot and was objective, despite the tough conditions [in the city's political environment]," he said.
It also seems as though Yakovlev has cooled on his former ally.
"[Sydoruk] has got an important appointment, but there's no doubt that politics was involved," Yakovlev's spokesperson, Alexander Afanasyev, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "It's just that some people can't work out whose side they are on, and just do what someone else tells them to do."
Anonymous sources within the Legislative Assembly mentioned just one possible replacement - Sydoruk's former deputy Nikolai Vinichenko, deputy presidential representative to the Northwest Region. The Presidential Representative's Office would neither confirm nor deny the rumors, saying only that "there is no information on the matter yet."
TITLE: Chechnya Gears Up For its Referendum
AUTHOR: By Timur Aliyev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: GROZNY - Chechnya's top election official said Thursday that final security measures are in place and hundreds of polling stations are ready for Sunday's constitutional referendum.
Human-rights activists warned, however, that many of Chechnya's 540,000 eligible voters are confused about the poll, and that turnout might fall below the minimum 50 percent required to validate the referendum.
"All 414 polling stations have been equipped with ballot boxes, communication facilities and transportation," Chechen election-committee head Abdul-Kerim Aslakhanov said at a committee meeting Thursday. "We have also provided special security measures for the organizers of the vote and the voters."
The special measures include the deployment Monday of 8,500 Chechen police officers and federal troops to guard polling stations until the end of the vote, Chechen Interior Ministry spokesperson Ruslan Atsayev said.
Chechen rebels have threatened to carry out attacks to protest the vote.
"Up to 10 police officers are stationed at each polling station," Atsayev said. "Anyone entering a station is a subject to a careful search and document check."
Sappers with specially trained dogs will examine all polling stations and nearby vicinities early Sunday morning, he said.
In another security step, Chechen schools have been closed for the past week.
"Almost all polling stations are located on school premises, and we couldn't put the lives of the children at risk," Chechen Education Minister Lyoma Dadayev said in a telephone interview. "Moreover, some of the teachers are working as referendum monitors or members of election commissions."
Voters will be asked three questions in the referendum: Do you accept the Chechen constitution? Do you accept the law on Chechnya's president? Do you accept the law on Chechnya's parliament?
Eligible voters include residents over the age of 18, as well as 23,000 federal troops stationed in Chechnya. Refugees in Ingushetia also will be allowed to participate, officials said. Karachayevo-Cherkessia President Vladimir Semyonov said Thursday that the 60 Chechen refugees registered in his republic will be provided with shuttle buses to go to Chechnya to vote, Interfax reported.
President Vladimir Putin urged Chechens to vote for the Kremlin-drafted constitution earlier this week, saying Moscow is ready to provide the republic with "a broad autonomy" within the boundaries of federal law. The Kremlin says the approval of the referendum, which will pave the way for parliamentary and presidential elections, is a first step toward bringing peace to Chechnya.
The Memorial human-rights group said a survey it conducted recently found that more than half of all voters would not cast ballots Sunday.
"People don't understand the correlation between the upcoming vote and the promise of stability in Chechnya," said Memorial activist Usam Baisayev.
He said Memorial has witnessed numerous violations of the election law in the run-up to the vote, including agitation by the authorities, and officials using their positions to promote the referendum.
q
MOSCOW (AP) - Two helicopters with four crew members on board went missing in Chechnya on Thursday, and the military sent rescue crews to locate them, the Defense Ministry said.
The two Mi-24 helicopters were escorting two transport helicopters in dense fog in the mountains of southern Chechnya, said Colonel Vyacheslav Sedov, a ministry spokesperson. They were ordered to increase altitude to climb above the clouds, and radio contact was immediately lost, Sedov said.
The Defense Ministry said communication was lost at 10:36 a.m. About two hours later, rescuers headed to the area where the Mi-24s were flying when they last contacted the base.
The Mi-24s disappeared near the border between the Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt districts of Chechnya, an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said on condition of anonymity.
TITLE: Anniversary Officials Facing the Axe
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Following a long meeting with St. Petersburg's law-enforcment and security bodies on Wednesday, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov announced that the city was poorly prepared to ensure the security of foreign leaders and residents during its upcoming 300th-anniversary celebrations, and threatened to fire the heads of departments responsible for security in the city, if they failed to meet the goals set at the meeting.
Gryzlov told journalists on Wednesday that the meeting, which lasted five hours instead of three, had revealed a severe lack of preparation for the 300th anniversary on the part of the Interior Ministry Administration, or GUVD, in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast.
"Unfortunately, serious faults concerning preventative measures and the work of the criminal police were established in various services," he said. "There is also a lack of coordination and, most importantly, the concrete tasks that were set at the last meeting [on Feb. 11] have not been fully carried out."
The criticisms were addressed particularly to the heads of the GUVD's different branches, including its public-security department, he added.
Gryzlov, who expressed dissatisfaction at the GUVD's work during the Feb. 11 meeting, said little progress had been made since, and that the work that had been carried out was of low quality.
"Measures have been taken to find illegal migrants in the city and the oblast, and the criminal police is working on finding criminals," he said. "I can't say that no work is being done, but I'm not satisfied with the quality of the work."
A special 14-member federal Interior Ministry commission has been working in the ministry's St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast department and, according to Gryzlov, the report that it has compiled is far from positive.
"[The commission] studied the situation concerning the celebration festivities thoroughly , and presented a report which was relatively critical," he said.
Gryzlov also announced that heads of departments whose efforts to organize security in St. Petersburg were deemed unsatisfactory at next month's planned meeting would be fired.
"I warned the department heads of the personal responsibility they had in their respective domains, and told them that negligence in carrying out their duties before such an event verges on the criminal," he said. "Those who will have failed to carry out the task they were given will be fired."
Stressing the unprecedented significance of the Russia-European Union summit and the G-8 summit, scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg toward the end of May, Gryzlov said the Interior Ministry had a duty to ensure the security of the 45 foreign leaders planning to visit St. Petersburg at this time.
Due to the conflict that is currently unfolding in the Middle East, the Interior Ministry is planning to increase security in the whole of Russia, and particularly during the festivities in St. Petersburg.
"The attack on Iraq means security around consulates and other foreign representations will be reinforced," Gryzlov said. "We are working on this, and extra security measures will be taken."
The increasing number of cultural events also compromises the security level in the city, Gryzlov said, asking that the final list be submitted in a week.
However, Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's spokesperson, Alexander Afanasyev, said that the program had been ready for a long time. "Nothing has been added," he said Thursday. "Maybe there will be an extra street celebration here and there, but nothing more."
The press service of the Interior Ministry Adminstration for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast could not be reached for comment.
TITLE: Mother of Academy Cadet Hospitalized
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The mother of one of the three Nakhimov Naval Academy cadets at the center of allegations of physical abuse at the academy was attacked last Thursday in the village of Taitsy, near St. Petersburg, by a group of people she says were academy cadets.
Marina Soboleva, who suffered a concussion and a broken nose in the assault, said that four young people in Nakhimov Academy uniforms attacked her at around 10 p.m. when she left her house to collect coal from a communal storage.
"One of them approached me and hit my face with a long metal object," she said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "I lost consciousness. When I came round, I saw all four kicking me."
Soboleva and her husband were one of three families who filed a complaint to the academy, as well as to the human-rights organization the Soldiers' Mothers' Committee and the Leningrad District Military Prosecutor, after their teenage sons were allegedly systematically assaulted by a group of their classmates.
Soboleva's 15-year-old son, Vladimir, Sergei Karyazin, 14, and Andrei Papulov, 14 - all first-year Nakhimov students - said they and some of their other classmates had been beaten up, suffered insults, had money extorted from them and were even sexual harassed by a group of their classmates since fall 2002.
A federal Navy Commission that investigated the allegations at the end of February found nothing to substantiate the claims. However, an investigation by the Military Prosecutor's Office found what it described as a "conflict situation" at the academy, and pledged to punish those responsible.
After the case received wide media attention and inspections were initiated at the academy, Soboleva, one of the most high-profile campaigners in the case, said she received malicious phone calls threatening violence.
"One of the cadets' mothers called me and said my face was seen too frequently on television, and that something should be done about it," Soboleva said.
Ella Polyakova, the co-chairperson of the St. Petersburg branch of the Soldiers' Mothers' Committee, said that one caller told Soboleva that "people who get involved in army cases should think about the fate of journalist Dmitry Kholodov."
Kholodov was murdered in a 1995 bomb attack after writing about corruption in the Russian Army.
The Gatchina Regional Police Department, or RUVD, has opened an investigation into the attack, based on Soboleva's evidence. However, RUVD head Vladimir Kurnosov said there are doubts about the evidence.
"We are taking the case seriously, given the strange nature of the attack," he said. "However, so far, we have found that much of Soboleva's evidence does not add up."
Kurnosov refused to elaborate, citing the secrecy of the investigation.
Another Navy Commission came to St. Petersburg last week to launch a new investigation. The results of the new investigation were not available Thursday.
Soboleva, who still receives anonymous calls, said she is not scared.
"I'm just angrier," she said. "If the navy does its best not to confirm that abuse is happening at the academy, so be it. But, in a year, their cadets, many of whom already have various injuries, will start dying."
TITLE: Shtandart Suffering Lack of Financing
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although a parade of boats to mark St. Petersburg's status as the birthplace of the Russian Navy is scheduled to form an important part of the city's official 300th-anniversary celebrations in May, the participation of a replica of the navy's first vessel, the Shtandart, is under threat due to a lack of funding.
According to the captain of the Shtandart, Vladimir Martous, not only are 3 million rubles (about $95,500) needed to complete repair work on the boat, but the City Administration, which drew up the list of boats taking part in the parade, failed to inform him that the Shtandart was one of them.
"I first found out that the Shtandart is scheduled to take part in the celebrations from the newspapers," he said. "But not one person from the administration has ever wondered if the boat needs any repairs, or what state it is in."
Martous said that one of the frigate's two engines often malfunctions, and that its paintwork is in a poor state of repair.
"The Shtandart hasn't been painted since being built in 1999," he said. "We can do something by ourselves without any funding. For example, we can paint the boat like they did in the 18th century, by turning it on its side, painting one side, then turning it over and painting the other side."
Martous added that the crew does not have the money to repair the engine.
A spokesperson for the City Administration's Committee 300, which was created specifically to coordinate preparations for the anniversary and which listed the Shtandart as due to take part in the parade, said that the committee does not undertake fundraising for the celebrations.
"We develop the program, but the [St. Petersburg 300] fund gets the money," the spokesperson said, referring to a fund linked to, but not run by, the committee that was set up in order to raise money for anniversary events.
St. Petersburg 300's PR Manager Tatyana Demenyeva said that the fund is not engaged in raising money for projects such as repairing historical boats.
"We only provide fundraising for specific events," she said, without naming any events in particular.
Peter the Great ordered the Shtandart to be built on Jan. 22, 1702, at the height of the Northern War with Sweden. The ship was partly responsible for repulsing the Swedish naval assault on St. Petersburg in 1705, and was the first component of what later became Russia's Baltic Fleet.
Boasting 28 cannons and 10 sails attached to three masts, the 30-meter-by-7-meter replica of the Shtandart was lowered by crane onto the Neva River behind Smolny Cathedral - the same spot from which original was launched in 1703 - in summer 1999.
The Shtandart replica was built using 18th-century technologies in a replica 18th-century shipyard constructed specially for the project. Martous recreated, with 10 professional shipbuilders and 30 students, what originally took the combined efforts of 3,000 workers.
The British government contributed $1 million to the project in 1994, although the 40 local volunteers had been working on the project long before.
Martous said that his inspiration came from seeing a model of the Shtandart at the State Hermitage Museum's Menshikov Palace in 1987, while he was building a yacht with his father.
"I fell in love the moment I saw it," he said. "My whole life has been built along this path."
Although the original plans for the Shtandart no longer exist, Martous said the model in the Menshikov Palace was so precise and detailed that, with the help of a researcher, he was able to draw up his own.
The Shtandart spends its summers sailing around Europe while, in winter, it is moored in St. Petersburg, and acts as a museum targetting schoolchildren interested in Russian history. The City Administration's Youth Affairs Committee has supported the project financially for the past two years.
"The project is very much in line with the government program of patriotic education," said Pyotr Tishchenko, head of the committee's Patriotic Education Department. "I would even call the Shtandart one of the flagships of the local patriotic program."
Although the committee provided 540,000 rubles for the program in 2002, Martous said that the money did not even cover fuel costs this winter.
"My job is really to build ships and sail them," he said. "I have had enough of running around asking people for money, and so has my crew. I'm afraid some people may be forced to leave."
TITLE: Churches Meet To Heal Schisms
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VATICAN CITY - The Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church held high-level talks aimed at ending a rift keeping Pope John Paul II from visiting Russia.
The Vatican said Cardinal Walter Kasper, the official in charge of relations with other Christian denominations, met Wednesday in Geneva with Metropolitan Kyrill, chairperson of the department for external relations of the Moscow Patriarchate.
"In an open conversation, they agreed to hold further consultations aimed at resolving the problems which exist between the two churches," a Vatican statement said, without elaborating.
Ties between the churches are strained over Russian accusations that Roman Catholics are trying to convert people who would have been Orthodox were it not for decades of Soviet atheism.
The Roman Catholic Church contends it has a right to be active in Russia, which had Catholic communities before the 1917 revolutions. Orthodox leaders have said they will not agree to a papal visit unless relations improve and Catholics stop their alleged proselytizing.
TITLE: Ilim Pulp Claims Victory, Heads for NYSE
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Top timber company Ilim Pulp on Thursday claimed victory in an ongoing ownership war, by announcing plans to consolidate its four main mills into one company and pursue a New York Stock Exchange listing, part of a five-year, $1-billion investment plan.
"I am happy to announce that our distraction with this illegal assault is now ending," the statement quoted Ilim Pulp Chairperson Zakhar Smushkin as saying.
For more than a year, Ilim has been going head-to-head with Kontinental Management, partly owned by Oleg Deripaska's powerful Base Element holding and St. Petersburg banker Vladimir Kogan, in dozens of court battles and armed standoffs for control of two key assets. In January, it launched arbitration proceedings in London against Deripaska.
Ilim says that it owns 92.85 percent of Kotlas and 85.3 percent of Bratskkomplexholding. Last spring, a 61-percent stake of Kotlas and an 82-percent stake in Bratsk were seized and sold through the Russian Federal Property Fund as a result of lawsuits brought by minority shareholders on behalf of Deripaska, Ilim says.
However, Ilim's rivals have yet to acknowledge anything but their own right to the assets.
"We continue to maintain that we are the legal owners of those stakes that are considered disputed," said Igor Yadroshnikov, spokesperson for Kontinental Management. "We are ready to go to the highest courts, and hope they will confirm that we are right and the rightful owners of these shares."
Nonetheless, Ilim said that it would complete the restructuring of its shares in the plants by the end of the year, and then look to float up to 15 percent of the new company on the NYSE, but gave no target date for the long-planned listing.
Ilim said that it would trade shares in its four main mills - the disputed Kotlas and Bratskkomplexholding plants, and Ust-Ilimsk and Bratsk - for those of a newly created company, Ilim Forest Product Enterprises. Four other subsidiaries will remain outside the company, Ilim's statement said.
"The goals are to achieve a leap in business transparency and management efficiency, set the stage to place level-three American depositary receipts, and provide a basis for future double-digit growth," the company said.
Level-three ADRs are backed by new shares and thus raise fresh capital.
Ilim plans to invest $1 billion in upgrading its assets and spend an additional $550 million acquiring new assets over the next five years.
"One third of total investments will be supplied by company profits, while the remaining share will be raised as project finance or on capital markets," Ilim said. The company posted revenues of $970 million in 2002.
Ilim has set aside a mere $7 million to buy out minority shareholders, meaning the company is valuing itself at roughly $200 million, according to local media reports.
TITLE: Tours Take A Hit From Iraqi-War Concerns
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The outbreak of war in Iraq is already taking a toll on Russia's tourism industry.
"There has been a flood of rejections, especially on popular destinations like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates," Irina Tyurina, spokesperson for the Russian Tourism Union, said Thursday.
Agencies polled Thursday said that the volume of packaged-tour sales to top destinations began to wane as America's war rhetoric rose over the past several weeks, but have dropped by as much as 50 percent since Tuesday, when U.S. President George W. Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave the country or be bombed.
"We have had a huge number of cancellations - but people don't mind paying the penalties," said Kseniya Buzlaeva, who handles Egyptian tours for East Line.
Buzlaeva said that airlines are not refunding tickets because force-majeure circumstances do not apply.
Dmitry Arutyunov, director of ArtTour, which specialized in travel to the Emirates, said that bookings are down by half this week.
"The phone has been almost silent for the past two to three days," said Alexander Osintsev, general director of TourEnergoService, which services Egypt.
Tourist companies are entering what normally would be their busiest season, running from students' spring break, which begins this year on Friday, through the May holidays.
"We planned to add extra flights but pulled that decision and expect to cut the number of weekly flights to Egypt from six to four or even three," said Osintsev.
"The war scares off some people, but others think it's a good time to take advantage of discounts tourist agencies are offering," Osintsev said, adding that his company booked 50 tours within two hours of announcing a special fare for Saturday flights earlier this week.
"There is very little booked for April, and people are in no hurry to book their May holidays, " Arutyunov said.
"There are no obvious reasons for fear, but we understand our clients' concern," Arutyunov said, adding that there has been a surge in demand for "safer" destinations such as the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean.
Agencies say that it is too early to gauge the long-term effect the war will have on business.
"If it evolves according to the Afghanistan scenario, Russian travelers will soon calm down and resume travelling," Arutynov said. "We do have losses, but hotels are willing to cooperate and minimize our expenditures."
The government is not planning to warn the public not to travel to the Middle East, said Anatoly Yarochkin, first deputy head of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry's tourism department.
Flagship carrier Aeroflot said Thursday that it has no plans to cancel flights to Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut or Tehran. The airline did, however, suspend flights to Jordan last week because of decreased demand, said company spokesperson Lev Koshlyakov.
He said that there had been some drop-off in traffic to Middle Eastern destinations, but it was not considerable.
TITLE: Car Industry Tries To Attract Western Auto Manufacturers
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The car industry is trapped inside a vicious circle: Both top automakers and suppliers are waiting for the other to be the first to commit to full-scale domestic production, sector leaders said at a conference Wednesday.
Automakers are looking for assurances of reliable supply for potential local plants, while part makers are holding out for guaranteed demand. And while they demur, the auto industry, badly in need of revitalization, continues to atrophy.
"Without a functioning components industry, the Russian auto industry will die," said Eugene Pruss, vice president of the U.S.-based Venture, a multinational auto-components producer and designer.
"It's a Catch-22," he said. "Makers of components won't come until the auto giants start producing here, because they need volume to justify their investment, but the car companies won't come until they have reliable component makers available."
A year ago, the aging industry expected to be invigorated by the entrance of two major international players to the market - Ford and GM - both of which opened production facilities in Russia in 2002. The predicted flood of Western automakers never materialized, although some projects have begun to trickle in.
"We only started seeing a lot of opportunities in the past half year," said Van Gestel, the local head of Lear, a global producer headquartered outside Detroit, Michigan that makes seats for No. 2 automaker GAZ.
Nevertheless, Gestel said, "there is a great deal of competition."
That competition comes from fast-growing companies like SOK, long the dark horse of the Russian auto industry because of its opaque ownership structure and questionable acquisition practices. The company started out as a car-dealership enterprise before snapping up auto factories in a cherry-picking spree in the late 1990s.
Today, the Samara-based SOK produces 30 percent of the locally-made car components and is rumored to be owned by the management of No. 1 automaker AvtoVAZ, many of whose facilities are now part of SOK.
SOK also owns IZh-Avto, the second largest passenger car factory in Russia in the Volga city of Izhevsk.
Venture is working with SOK at its Plastik plant in the Samara region town of Syzran to help it design and produce high-quality bumpers that may be used at Ford's plant in Vsevolozhsk, outside St. Petersburg.
Venture is also in negotiations with SOK to win a contract to restyle the IZh Oda sedan, SOK First Vice President Vyacheslav Sheyanov said Wednesday.
But the number of industry players who congregated to speak with Sheyanov after he spoke at the conference suggests that Venture may not be the only company hoping to work with SOK.
Both Russian and foreign automakers are looking for ways to entice more components producers to enter the market because the deficit in quality parts is gaping.
AvtoVAZ is offering to rent out space on its immense factory grounds in Tolyatti in a bid to attract much-needed income as well as much-needed supplies. Part-making firms seeking proximity to customers in central Russia, where the domestic car industry is concentrated, will be able to rent production territory on the 33,000-square-meter technological park.
Some were skeptical about the prospect.
"The project is stupid," said Venture's Pruss. "They're charging too much. That will knock up the prices of components produced there and take away Russia's competitive advantage, which is cheap labor and resources."
On Tuesday, AvtoVAZ board Chairperson Vladimir Kadannikov said space at the park would be available for $110 per square meter per year.
But Tolyatti Mayor Nikolai Utkin, after a 10-minute conversation with Pruss, told The St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday that the price could be "knocked down to $80."
Like automakers, the international financial community also hopes to spark development of the auto parts industry.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Duncan Senior said that the bank was looking to increase its support for components manufacturers.
The bank would be willing to partner with firms to invest into the sector and share risk, he added.
TITLE: Local Firms Pitch to Investors in Cannes
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: From March 4 to March 7, nine of St. Petersburg's most promising investment projects journeyed to Cannes, France, to take part in the MIPIM-2003 trade fair, holding a press conference on Wednesday, together with the City Administration's Construction Committee, to discuss the results of their work.
Alexander Vakhmistrov, head of the Construction Committee, said that St. Petersburg delegation had taken part in the international forum for the sixth time, though the city's exhibition stand had grown to 130 square meters this year, almost double last year's size.
MIPIM attracted a total of 1,800 companies in 2003, the majority being financial institutions and pension funds looking to invest resources in projects presented by construction companies, developers and consultants.
Major St. Petersburg development plans included the Ring Road and Lower Road projects. The Ring Road will be 120 kilometers in length, with a capacity of 60,000 cars per day, while the Lower Road will create a new, high-speed connection between St. Petersburg and Peterhof.
Arsenal Real Estate presented a "City Garden" housing project, with plans to develop a 200-hectare site in the Primorsky district, creating a range of facilities, including parks, a business zone, a sports center and shopping facilities. At the investment forum, Arsenal was seeking $50 million in financing for the project.
The Nevsky Syndicate investment and construction group presented a hotel and business-zone development project entitled Novaya Okhta. Investment of $56 million is required in order to develop the group's 30,000-squre meter site in the Okhta district opposite Smolny Cathedral.
For the second year in a row, Nevaland presented its ambitious District 700 project, which intends to develop a 4.5-hectare site with three business centers, a hotel, a retail complex, a sports center, and three apartment blocks, at an estimated cost of between $40 million and $60 million.
Peterburgstroi-Skanska is planning to create Nova Park - an industrial and technology park sited on a 56-hectare site in the Rzhevka District for companies establishing or expanding their operations in the city.
Kts Piter presented its Sennaya Ploschad Trade Complex, which it hopes will incorporate 60,000 square meters of store premises. The firm has already begun preparatory work on another shopping complex in the Moskovsky District.
Of the St. Petersburg projects, the forum's jury voted Nevsky Syndicate with its Novaya Okhta project the most promising, while Arsenal Real Estate, with its City Garden project, and Nevaland's District 700 also won recognition, according to Vakhmistrov.
The majority of St. Petersburg's participants in MIPIM-2003 were positive about the response that their projects had drawn. Dmitry Kiselyov, chairperson of Nevaland, said that the company had held numerous talks with consulting, investment and finance companies which would be working with the District 700 project in the future.
Lev Pukshansky, head of the investment department at Baltic Financial Agency, said that the forum had given him the opportunity to meet with most of the key players in the market and gain valuable information and experience.
"For example, we've learned the difference between Russian and foreign systems for the provision of credit to large projects," he said. "Abroad, real estate is considered to be a low-risk asset so, if a developer has a construction site and preliminary agreements with investors, credit organizations are eager to provide the financing for the project in the full volume needed. We, however, need to work out special schemes to match our current economic infrastructure and environment in order to meet the requirements of international banks," Pukshansky said.
Yulia Burovtseva, a lawyer with the St. Petersburg branch of the Salans law firm, which organized a conference entitled "Investing in Russia - the Present and the Future" at the forum, was positive in her assessment of the participation of local firms.
"It's too early to say what the concrete business results will be, as contracts aren't usually concluded at the exhibition itself," Burovtseva said. "Nevertheless, most participants got to know potential investors. At least most investors now know where St. Petersburg is on the map."
Within the framework of the forum, Vakhmistrov also held negotiations with the French Chamber of Trade and Industry on the planned construction of a Fragonard perfume factory in St. Petersburg and a number of Provence enterprises that have shown an interest in setting up wine production in the city.
TITLE: IKEA Faces Protective Measures
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Leaders of the country's furniture industry expressed confidence Tuesday that the government commission on protective measures in foreign trade next month will raise import tariffs on furniture.
Local producers saw their share of the market atrophy 13 percent since 1999, slipping to just half of all sales after import tariffs were slashed by 60 percent, said Valentin Zverev, president of the Russian furniture association. The market was worth $1.67 billion last year.
Meanwhile, the association says local production has been humming, with output soaring by 40 percent and exports rising by 92 percent since the tariff cut took effect. Despite such achievements, Zverev said local producers need several years of more protection in order to entrench their ability to compete with foreign heavyweights like Sweden's IKEA.
Five government bodies, from the Antimonopolies Ministry to the State Customs Committee, have said they support the association's arguments, he added. Representatives from the five are members of the commission headed by Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, which is expected to decide during the first week in April whether to approve a proposal to divide imports into two groups.
The tariff on furniture valued at more than two euros per kilogram should be set at 20 percent, while for furniture valued at under two euros per kilogram, the tariff should be 0.9 euros per kilogram, the proposal says.
Currently customs officials have a choice of whether to levy a value-based tariff of 20 percent or a weight-based tariff of 0.5 euros per kilogram if the furniture is unassembled and 0.6 euros per kilogram if it is assembled.
Olga Gurleva, the association's general director, said the tariffs would affect about 30 percent of imports. The tariff hikes could bring an extra $50 million into state budget coffers every year. However, foreign producers are likely to shift to local production sites as a way to avoid paying higher duties at the border.
IKEA argues that it already pays tariffs of as much as 100 percent. It would have to raise prices significantly if the tariff hike is enacted and consumers ultimately would be hurt.
TITLE: NRB Said To Pay $135M for Stake
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - National Reserve Bank, a private bank, said in a statement Wednesday it had bought 26 percent of state carrier Aeroflot from the Millhouse Capital asset-management firm.
"The deal will help Aeroflot's development and speed reform in the local plane-building industry," the statement said.
The bank did not say how much it paid for the stake, but a source close to the deal put the figure at $135 million.
National Reserve Bank has been involved in a dispute over leasing Ilyushin-96 planes.
Ilyushin Finance, in which the bank has a 37-percent stake, has the option to supply Aeroflot with four Ilyushin-96 aircraft, although Aeroflot has not yet decided to buy them.
Analysts and traders have said the news is potentially negative as National Reserve Bank is closely linked to Russia's aircraft producers and may use its influence in Aeroflot to force the company to purchase domestic planes it does not need.
(Reuters, SPT)
TITLE: Port Expansion Gets Approval
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government said Wednesday that it had approved a plan by state pipeline monopoly Transneft to expand the Baltic port of Primorsk to help ship the country's booming oil output to lucrative Western markets.
The government resolution said Transneft was now allowed to expand Primorsk to 600,000 barrels per day, or 42 million metric tons per year, and possibly to 1 million bpd in the future, from the current level of 240,000 bpd, or 12 million tons a year.
Primorsk, located 120 kilometers to the northwest of St. Petersburg, in 2001 became the first new oil-export outlet facility for Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But, as oil output in Russia booms for the fifth straight year, reaching 8.1 million bpd in February, oil-export capacities are limited to just 3.5 million bpd.
Private majors say Transneft cannot cope with the rising volumes.
However, the government has said it would keep tight control over the pipeline network, and is unlikely to allow oil majors to construct private links.
If Primorsk were expanded to 1 million bpd, it would become Russia's biggest oil-export port, surpassing the 900,000-bpd capacity of the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk.
Transneft has said that it would need eight months to complete a feasibility study, and another 18 months to expand Primorsk, a project likely to cost the monopoly some $1.3 billion.
The funds for the construction will be borrowed, Transneft Vice President Sergei Grigoryev told Interfax on Wednesday.
He also said the tariffs for transporting crude oil through the BPS will not change as a result of the work on the throughput capacity increase.
Additionally, the construction of eight oil reservoirs at Primorsk capable of storing up to 400,000 tons of crude oil is planned, he said.
(Reuters, SPT)
TITLE: Report Says Services Are Outpacing Production
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The service sector grew last year at a faster rate than the production sector for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the World Bank said Wednesday.
The share of financial, telecoms, transport, tourism and other services in gross domestic product grew 5.4 percent in 2002, and now accounts for 51.5 percent of GDP.
This growth puts the sector back roughly to where it was before the financial collapse of 1998, according to the World Bank's quarterly report on the Russian economy. The report was based on figures provided by the State Statistics Committee.
Some economists said the growth in the sector was even higher, but harder to calculate because much of the activity is unaccounted for.
"I think that real numbers were much higher, because the lion's share of the services sector remains in the shadow economy and is not reflected anywhere," said Renaissance Capital economist Alexei Moiseyev.
The share of manufacturing in GDP grew only 3.2 percent in 2002, almost half the growth showed by the services sector.
The World Bank's chief economist for Russia, Christof Ruhl, blamed several factors for the slowdown, including higher production costs due to the strengthening ruble.
Ruhl applauded the re-emergence of a healthy rate of growth in the services sector, but said that stagnating production was indicative of an economy that is excessively dependent on resources.
If the economy continues to be dependent on externally-driven prices like those for oil, growth in "the services and export sectors may not be able to compensate for employment losses in the industrial sector," he said.
The government has tasked its Economic Development and Trade Ministry with correcting the imbalance in its new medium-term strategy, but forced diversification of the economy has its own risks.
In this year's federal budget, for example, structural changes in the economy are not a priority, Ruhl said.
The biggest increases in this year's budget went to defense, law enforcement, legal reform, research and education.
All of these areas are important, according to the World Bank, but the spending bill does not dovetail with the government's structural reform program.
"In fact, we don't see any correlation between the two, so, probably, there should be more coordination between the authorities responsible for reforms and the authorities responsible for the budget," Ruhl said. "Any key reform is likely to cost money, whether administration reform or banking reform, but it is important to make such calculations."
The World Bank sees diversifying the economy, without interfering in it, as the government's main task over the next two years.
"There is a huge risk that, when one says 'diversification,' others mean non-market measures, including subsidies," Ruhl said.
"But this would be a very big mistake so, in the end, the government should find ways to diversify the economy by creating incentives."
TITLE: Poll: Piracy Disapproved Of, Though Benefits Are Reaped
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Three out of every four Russians have bought pirated goods within the last two years - but didn't approve of it, according to a survey released Wednesday.
Only 7 percent of the 2,000 consumers polled in Moscow and Samara said they had never seen pirated goods, and 90 percent said they had a negative view of the practice.
The survey, conducted by Interactive Research Group and commissioned by the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, showed consumers are more likely to forgive music and video pirates than bootleggers of alcohol and medicine.
Around 80 percent of those polled said counterfeit medicine, food and alcohol were "totally unacceptable."
But consumers are much easier on clothing and sportswear pirates. Just 34 percent said the practice was absolutely unacceptable, while a full 22 percent said just the opposite, calling it "absolutely acceptable."
Counterfeited music and film is unacceptable for 47 percent of respondents, while almost 30 percent think it is "absolutely acceptable."
More than half of those polled could identify which brands are most often faked - naming Adidas, Nike, Reebok, Kristall and Nescafe. 35 percent named Noshpa, Analgin, UPSA Aspirin and Validol as the most commonly faked drugs.
Comparing Moscow with the regions, "We found attitudes and behavior in Samara, a typical industrial city in central Russia, to be completely consistent with Moscow," IRS Research Director Tatyana Veretinova said.
51 percent of those polled said they had encountered fake clothing, footwear and sportswear; 47 percent had come across bootleg alcohol; and 46 percent said they had seen counterfeit food.
37 percent had encountered pirated music and film products, and 31 percent reported a similar experience with medicine. Meanwhile, 24 percent said they had seen faked soft drinks for sale, and 23 percent had seen counterfeit tobacco products.
45 percent of those polled had purchased fakes at open markets, while 22 percent pointed to "small shops" and 14 percent said they bought items at kiosks and street vendors. Only 6.5 percent thought that hypermarkets, supermarkets and department stores stocked bootlegged goods.
"The findings illustrate the tough dilemma facing the software, recording, apparel and sportswear industries," CIPR President Peter Necarsulmer said.
Consumers said the low income of the average household, combined with high prices on genuine goods, easy profits with little risk of punishment to counterfeiters, weak anti-counterfeiting laws and the lack of effective law enforcement stoked the continuing rise in counterfeits.
TITLE: 'New' Policy on Chechnya Is Already Doomed
AUTHOR: By Thomas de Waal
TEXT: TRACKING Moscow's policy-making toward Chechnya since September 1991, I can only conclude that someone in the Kremlin wants to set a world record for inconsistency.
Since Sept. 6, 1991, when the last Communist administration was overthrown in Grozny, Moscow has, successively, tried the following tactics: support the new regime; threaten it; land troops; retreat; negotiate and blockade; arm the opposition; bomb; declare victory; negotiate; bomb; declare victory; negotiate; surrender; support the new regime; ignore it; threaten it; bomb; proclaim victory.
Now, the Kremlin has a new plan: Impose a new constitution on Chechnya - no one doubts that there will be a resounding "yes" vote in this Sunday's plebiscite, in the absence of proper monitoring - and proclaim that peace and security have been restored.
The trouble is that, since 1991, Chechnya has already had two constitutions, four parliaments (none of which went to full term) and half a dozen leaders, two of whom still regard themselves as the legitimate rulers of the republic. None of a series of mutually contradictory documents defining its relationship with Moscow have ever been properly observed.
Perhaps it is time for a rethink.
The fundamental problem is that all Russian plans to date have been shaped not by the political realities in Chechnya, but by a political agenda set in Moscow. So it is again with the new draft constitution, which will affirm that Chechnya is part of the Russian Federation and prepare the ground for electing a new Chechen president.
There are two problems here already. The status of Chechnya is such a serious issue that it has been the primary cause of two wars. Chechnya has twice declared itself independent. Many - myself included - will dispute the legality of this, and others the practicability or wisdom of Chechnya being an independent state. Chechnya's two periods of attempted independence from 1991 to 1994 and 1997 to 1999 were disastrous. Moreover, its economy is now so destroyed that it would take at least a decade to restore it to the level of being just an average region of Russia. In any real terms, the debate on the independence of Chechnya is an entirely pointless one.
I need hardly point out, however, that simply to declare Chechnya a full part of the Russian Federation and that the problem is solved is absurd. Thousands of Chechens have died trying to achieve secession from Russia, and hundreds more fighters are still prepared to die for that cause. Calling them "misguided" or "bandits" or "terrorists" will not make them go away. And even those Chechens - a majority I suspect - who reject the armed struggle against Moscow do not want to be fully integrated into a state that has sent bombers and heavy artillery against their towns and villages. As prominent Chechen politician Ruslan Khasbulatov - an opponent of independence for Chechnya, incidentally - has said, Moscow cannot ignore the abyss it has created between itself and Chechnya: "A question should always be put to those who support the thesis 'Chechnya stays inside Russia.' So why did Russia kill two hundred thousand of our citizens?"
As for the appropriate form of government for Chechnya, a glance at Chechen history, both old and recent, makes it clear that the republic is ill served by a vertical power structure.
Traditionally, Chechnya has never been a unified or monolithic place. It is a land of both plain and mountain shared between more than 150 teips, or clans, in several hundred villages. Its supposed capital, Grozny, was always a Russian city, and power was decentralized throughout the regions. Early Russian ethnographers labeled the Chechens' traditions of collective decision-making and lack of aristocracy a "mountain democracy." In the 19th century, they did not have one single leader in their resistance against the tsarist armies, but rallied instead behind an outsider, the Dagestani Imam Shamil.
Logically, therefore, Chechnya would do best from a parliamentary form of government in which no single leader was in charge and different politicians, regions and families could share power and make collective decisions.
Arguably, Chechnya set off on the road to ruin in 1991 when Dzhokhar Dudayev was elected president and overturned those traditions. Dudayev had, in fact, spent his entire adult life outside Chechnya and borrowed many of his nationalist ideas from the Baltic States. And his attempts at one-person rule did not work, and never gave him full control of the entire territory he claimed to be his "state." In 1994, one southern Chechen village, Shalazhi, even declared itself "independent" from Dudayev's would-be independent republic.
Dudayev's successor, Aslan Maskhadov, was far more in tune with the public mood in Chechnya and more consensual. He was also - although a vast number of commentators on Chechnya, both Russian and foreign, prefer to forget this - the one and only legitimate and popularly elected leader Chechnya has had in its history, when he was voted into office in 1997. But Maskhadov's status as leader became, in the end, a trap for him: Both Chechen warlords and Russian politicians were happy to ascribe personal blame to him for what was actually beyond his control, and shirk the responsibility themselves.
And now, in Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya has another leader more in the Dudayev mold (indeed, at one point, the two men were quite close, so perhaps this is not surprising): bullying, jealous of his power, and not interested in consensus.
Kadyrov, in his way, is just as divisive as Dudayev, and just as doomed to fail as Maskhadov. His only virtue seems to be his loyalty in the eyes of the Kremlin. Alarm bells about Moscow's dependence on Kadyrov should have rung last December, when suicide bombers attacked his government headquarters in Grozny, killing more than 72 people. The suicide attack proved how insecure - both physically and politically - Moscow's chosen government was. It also showed that the old anthropological deterrents that used to stop Chechens from fighting one another - a fear of blood vengeance from your victim's family - are being destroyed.
There are still threads of consensus under the surface in Chechen society. People like Akhmed Zakayev, Ruslan Khasbulatov and Salambek Khadzhiev, whom outside analysts place in different camps, all command respect and agree on much more than they disagree.
Many of those who died in the Grozny bombing last December were apparatchiki who had served in one government after another from Dudayev to Doku Zavgayev to Maskhadov to Kadyrov. In 1995, I remember people supposedly serving the "pro-Moscow" government in Grozny swapping messages with friends in the "anti-Moscow" government in the mountains. Family and village ties were stronger than public political allegiances.
These old threads still help hold Chechen society together, despite the men of violence and the ambitions of would-be leaders like Kadyrov. But this constituency in the middle is weakening with every month that passes, as the war goes on.
For Moscow to accommodate this mass of ordinary Chechens, however, would require it to admit that it has failed them utterly over the past twelve years. It would entail admitting that it has lost Chechnya and it must make a case for reclaiming it. Eventually, President Vladimir Putin and his team will have to come around to that view. But what kind of condition will Chechnya be in when they finally throw up their hands and admit that they have failed?
Thomas de Waal is Caucasus editor with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London (www.iwpr.net). He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Everybody's Best Friends on the Political Merry-Go-Round
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: IF anybody was under the illusion that City Hall's problems with Viktor Cherkesov, until last week the presidential representative for the Northwest Region, were anything but political, Smolny's reaction to the appointment of Valentina Matviyenko as his replacement should have cleared this problem up.
The standard line coming from Governor Vladimir Yakovlev and his administration over the last year has been that the criminal investigations in to the activities of some Smolny officials were all the result of the work of an official - Cherkesov - who occupied a position that was unconstitutional.
Alexander Afanasyev, the governor's spokesperson, has been the main proponent of this line, saying that the presidential-representative posts that were established in each of Russia's seven main regions by President Vladimir Putin were not mentioned anywhere in the constitution, and that Putin had no constitutional right to transfer some of his responsibilities and powers to these officials in their respective regions. It's an interesting argument and, if I was a lawyer, I might be interested in writing an analysis of the question in this piece.
I'm not a lawyer and, therefore, am not interested.
More interestingly, it doesn't look like the folks at Smolny are interested anymore either. Since the appointment of Matviyenko to her new post, Yakovlev has been engaged in what is, essentially, the political equivalent of blowing kisses. The governor's new line is that he is looking forward to "cooperative work with the office of the new presidential representative." It's a strangely positive comment when you consider that his administration professes to believe that the position shouldn't even exist.
Afanasyev, who on Feb. 14 told me that "The question should be whether the unconstitutional institution of the presidential representative's office should be allowed to interfere in the work of the legislative branch but, instead, everybody is screaming that the governor is doing something [wrong]," has also changed his tune. Now, he says that he is not in any position to discuss the question. Hmmm.
Someone more suspicious than myself would suggest that some kind of deal had been struck. Everyone is being so friendly now. Matviyenko has been "asking" state-controlled networks to tone down the negative coverage they have been running on the preparations for the city's 300th anniversary and Yakovlev is about one step from calling the presidential representative's office a constructive branch of power.
Yakovlev's office appears also to be cutting loose some of it's traditional allies. Ivan Sydoruk, who was the city's prosecutor general until Tuesday, when, just like Cherkesov, he was called to Moscow, has done a fair bit of work in making sure that not only Yakovlev's allies were being investigated. His office, for example, launched an investigation into the activities of independent Legislative Assembly deputy Alexei Kovalev, who had generally lined up against Yakovlev in the little tussles with Cherkesov and the Kremlin. Now, Afanasyev brands Sydoruk as an "opportunist" for leaving. So much for old friends.
But I think that Afanasyev probably has a point this time, and "opportunist" appears to be the name we could pin on any of the characters in our little drama.
Sydoruk may very well have been looking for some sort of guarantee of a more or less acceptable job after Yakovlev leaves City Hall in May, 2004 (or, perhaps, earlier).
Matviyenko, for her part, is touted by many to be the Kremlin's preferred candidate to become governor when Yakovlev's term ends.
If Yakovlev were to decide to end his term even earlier, I'm sure that a nice spot will be found for him as well. Everyone is being taken care of - almost. The only people who have yet to find out what's in it for them are the city's residents themselves.
A poll published this week on the Fontanka.ru information Web site suggests that the city's residents are painfully aware that this is the case. The poll asked just one question: Who was the winner in the recent reshuffle on the St. Petersburg political scene - Cherkesov, Matviyenko, Yakovlev, the city's citizens or nobody. "Nobody" was the most popular answer, favored by 40 percent of respondents, while "the city's citizens" came last, with only 9 percent.
This suggests that the majority of people in St. Petersburg doubt that they will gain anything out of the moves. For them, they are just more news items to follow on television for another few months.
The people are probably right. Their television screens are the closest they get to these political games of musical chairs. The opportunists whom they elect or whom are chosen for them don't get very close to the dirty city streets, smelly stair cases, cold buses and crumbling buildings where they live.
It's hard to get people's trust if you're too busy making sure you get the spot you want.
TITLE: events for the golden youth
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Parties promoted by the Svetlaya Muzyka agency usually draw a crowd that is well dressed, drinks expensive cocktails, and has an ear for relaxed, trendy sounds from some of Europe's top club acts. The secret of the agency's success, says its founder, Ilya Bortnuk, is simple: It has no opposition.
"As far as the artists and parties I promote are concerned, I don't have any rivals," says Bortnyuk, who traces the beginnings of Svetlaya Muzyka to a party he promoted at the Nabokov Apartment Museum in April 2001 that featured Italian easy-listening combo Montefiori Cocktail.
"The rest do some parties, but without any artists, or there are big promoters who bring acts like the Scorpions, Bjork or Garbage," he says. "It's a different market. The market I aim at is contemporary club projects of different genres, from electroclash to folk music."
Bortnyuk, who promoted the locally renowned Sushi parties, featuring Japanese DJs, and the four-day summer electronica festival Stereoleto, explains his lack of rivals by saying that only he has the relevant know-how.
"It's probably because [other promoters] don't know how to do it financially," he says. "Because I've worked with certain sponsors for a long time, they make it possible to bring the artists."
"I choose the artists, but the sponsors trust me. Of course, I coordinate it with them."
Many of Bortnyuk's events are arranged in cooperation with Moscow-based agency Caviar Lounge, fronted by critic and promoter Artyom Troitsky, but he disagrees that he necessarily has to choose from what is being brought to Moscow anyway.
"I do some projects with them, I do some projects myself, I do some projects with other people," he says. "For instance, we did The Residents with Seva Gakkel [of Akvarium and TaMtAm Club fame]."
Moreover, he claims that what is good for Moscow is not necessarily good for St. Petersburg, and vice versa.
"The markets in Moscow and St. Petersburg are different," Bortnyuk says. "There aren't many artist unconditionally popular both here and there. Sometimes something is a hit in Moscow, but nobody knows them here. For instance, almost all new electro and electroclash acts: The Hacker, Tiga and Miss Kittin are hugely popular in Moscow but, here, this style is not as popular."
The opposite is true of Hungarian act Yonderboi, a favorite with local crowds, according to Bortnyuk.
"I think there are more clubs where they play such music in Moscow," he says. "For instance, a DJ starts to play The Hacker and people see how cool it is. A good DJ can make an artist popular in a brief period. Here, only PAR.spb tries to promote new music; the rest just play what is popular, i.e., what [stations] they play on Europa Plus or Radio Re-cord."
Sometimes, acts just don't need any promotion, as was recently the case with Italian duo Gabin.
"It's when it falls into a category like De-Phazz and Gotan Project, when the music is so near to the Russian listener that it becomes madly popular without any advertising," Bortnyuk says. "But that's something of an exception."
Although The Residents are not a trendy contemporary act, Bortnyuk says he is also interested in bands which are "beyond time."
"For me, The Residents were always a cult, mystery band that influenced my views," he says. "I think we'll also bring Coil and Aphex Twin - classical electronic and alternative bands."
Bortnyuk admits that the acts he promotes cost less than big artists such as Garbage or Depeche Mode.
"[Yevgeny] Finkelshtein [of agency Planeta Plus responsible for local concerts by such acts as Depeche Mode and Prodigy] can throw $100,000 at a risk," he says. "I don't have that opportunity."
"There's the possibility of bringing Bjork, and there are promoters who want to bring her but, because it's necessary to pay 50 percent in advance, it can only be done by well-off promoters, or those who have well-off relatives or companions who can make the initial payment to get the concert," Bortnyuk says. "But I'm satisfied that I can do concerts for one or two thousand people; it's a normal market.
"If you look at the number of people who came to my parties over 12 months, it can be compared to the numbers going to concerts put on by big promoters," he says. "It's obvious that Depeche Mode attracts much more interest but, for instance, Melanie C at Ice Palace drew 3,000, while my concert of Yonderboi drew 2,500, although the fee and the costs differed 100 times."
Svetlaya Muzyka's most recent party featured Desperate Sound System, a DJing duo formed by Britpop band Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey on March 8. Unusually, when Cocker took to the stage, the audience started to leave - and the duo ended spinning their vinyls for the audience of 10.
"The thing is that many people came just to see him, but he started well after 3 a.m. and people were tired," Bortnyuk explains. "I wouldn't say that it was music for all - it was music for those who understand. Actually, he just played his favorites, from Donna Summer to The Clash."
How did Cocker react?
"He didn't give a damn," Bortnyuk says. "He liked what he was playing, and paid absolutely no attention to how many people were in the hall."
Svetlaya Muzyka's next events are Lo'Jo at Red Club on Saturday, and Lady Kier at Onegin on March 29.
Links: www.stereoleto.spb.ru
TITLE: mariinsky is a qualified hit in moscow
AUTHOR: by Raymond Stults
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Last weekend, under the auspices of the Golden Mask performing-arts festival, the Mariinsky Theater made its contribution to the current season's exchange of performances with Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, bringing to the Bolshoi's stage two programs of ballet, each danced twice during four evening performances. Friday and Saturday saw a trio of short ballets, two by Roland Petit and one by Alexei Ratmansky, each in its way a variation on the theme of death, while Sunday and Monday brought the full-length "Manon" by Kenneth MacMillan.
The Petit-Ratmansky triple bill, as seen Friday, proved rather short on dance and long on intermissions, with a mere 70 minutes of the former interrupted by two breaks of more than a half hour each. Nor did it display the Mariinsky's dance troupe at its formidable best. The highlight of the evening was Ratmansky's brief "Middle Duet," created for the Mariinsky five years ago. On a bare stage, moving through three circles of light, a young couple literally dance themselves to death. As an accommodating angel carries them away, another virtually identical couple appear upstage, presumably to begin the process all over again. Superbly executing Ratmansky's original and unpredictable leg and arm movements were two of the Mariinsky's finest young dancers, Svetlana Zakharova and Andrei Merkuryev.
"Carmen," set to music from Georges Bizet's opera of the same name, is without doubt an audience-pleaser, a fact confirmed at the Bolshoi on Friday. Yet the performance's only real distinction lay in Diana Vishnyova's dancing of the title role. Quite possibly the most beautiful ballerina on earth, with dancing skills to match her beauty, Vishnyova brought to the role her usual radiance and quick, lithe movements and proved particularly stunning in the final duet that leads up to Carmen's murder. Still, for all her fine effort, the short-statured Vishnyova could do nothing to erase the indelible image left by the role's most famous interpreter (and the spouse of Petit), the improbably long-limbed Zizi Jeanmaire.
The rest of the principals, including the corps de ballet and Merkuryev, as a last-minute substitute Don Jose, had more than a few awkward moments involving Petit's dance steps and seemed perhaps insufficiently rehearsed.
The 15-minute "Le jeune homme et la mort" offered another dance of death, this time of a young Parisian poet in the arms of a temptress from Pigalle. Dancing to Italian composer Ottorino Respighi's raucous orchestration of Bach's Passacaglia for organ, two of the company's top dancers, Irma Nioradze and Andrian Fadeyev, did what they could with the piece, bringing the evening to an inauspicious close.
"Manon," by contrast, turned out to be as gorgeous an evening of ballet as Moscow has seen all season. Premiered in 1974 by the Royal Ballet at London's Covent Garden, "Manon" has since enjoyed great success with ballet companies throughout the world and entered the Mariinsky's repertoire three years ago. The Mariinsky staging copies with exactness not only MacMillan's choreography, but also the colorful period costumes and richly realistic sets of its original designer, Peter Farmer. The result is one of rare beauty.
In terms of choreography, MacMillan remained essentially within the limits of the classical, tempered by a certain gentle English charm, and the Mariinsky troupe seems to have had little trouble mastering his style and steps. The title role at Sunday's performance was danced by Zakharova, her elegance and lightness of touch remarkably close to what can be remembered of the role's creator, Antoinette Sibley, at the very first night of "Manon" 29 years ago this month. With a near faultless portrayal of Manon - whether demure schoolgirl, ardent lover, carefree courtesan or, as at the end, pathetic deportee - Zakharova gave evidence yet again that she can now be ranked among Russia's and the world's truly great dancers.
Excellent as well was Nataliya Sologub, as Lescaut's unnamed coquettish lover, confirming the fine impression she made in "The Nutcracker" and during a triple bill of John Neumeier ballets on a Mariinsky visit to Moscow last season. Her dance with a thoroughly drunken Lescaut (nicely played by Maxim Khrebtov) gave wonderful comic relief to the second-act ballroom scene.
With the exception of some inelegant dancing by the large-bodied Ilya Kuznetsov as DesGrieux, all other elements of the Mariinsky's "Manon" worked splendidly, including the playing of the orchestra, which once again sounded like its usual first-rate self after a sloppy start on Friday.
Certainly chief among the pleasures of last weekend was the chance to watch Vishnyova and Zakharova, two extraordinarily gifted young ballerinas. Though the Bolshoi troupe currently boasts many fine dancers, it can't truly be said to have a counterpart to either of the two.
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: This weekend will see a local concert by Lo'Jo, one of France's leading world-music groups.
The band, whose instruments include keyboards, violin, kora, upright bass, drums, percussion and saxophone, cames with an unique blend of French chanson, African, Arabic, Romany, funk, jazz and dub music, adding elements of street circus.
Formed in 1982, Lo'Jo is actually a commune; its members are reported to reside together and even split money, no matter what each member brought to the band - which has seen around 300 musicians circulating through it over its 21-year history.
Britain's The Independent newspaper has called it "one of the best live bands in the world" and the U.S. Billboard magazine hailed its most recent album, "Au Cabaret Sauvage," as "one of the world releases of 2002."
The band will perform at Red Club on Saturday.
Strangely, Tequilajazzz will appear at Red Club on Friday after months of refusing to play at the venue because of its undemocratic rules, with its security guards and weapon checks.
"They somehow persuaded ... not me, but our drummer," said singer and bassist Yevgeny Fyodorov.
"It will be just a usual concert," he said. "Some old stuff, some new stuff, nothing special."
While there is no new Tequilajazzz album in sight ("I have no time," said Fyodorov), the most recent outing is a compilation CD released on Moscow-based indie label FeeLee.
Called "Izbrannoye. Nami" ("Selected. By Us"), it is not a standard collection of greatest hits.
"It's not a best-of album, as pirates usually do, but the songs that, in our opinion, undeservedly remained unnoticed," said Fyodorov.
"But, for us, they are, if not epoch-making, then at least very important in a certain period. We called it this because it's what we consider our best."
"It's our official 'anti-best'," he added. "Nothing like 'Zimneye Solntse' [Winter Sun] is on it."
Meanwhile, Tequilajazzz's favorite club, Moloko, is being sued by its district Property Committee, which insists that the alternative club will leave its premises.
The preliminary hearings were held this week, the next hearings will be on May 14.
Until then, the club is likely to continue promoting concerts.
There are no Tequilajazzz concerts planned for this period, but Fyodorov said the band would be at the place if there were to be any events before it is shut down.
"I think there will be some improvised actions - and we'll be there for sure."
Another popular club, Cynic, has apparently changed its policy, at least in one respect - the Leningrad CD "Piraty XXI Veka" ("Pirates of the 21st Century"), which used to get an airing several times a night, is now not being played.
Rumor has it that the place is aiming at more "respectability," but owner Vladimir Postnichenko says this is not true, and that Cynic will remain Cynic at any costs.
- by Sergey Chernov
TITLE: serving up portions of history
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Yelena Molokhovets' book "Podarok Molodym Khozyaikam" ("A Gift to Young Housewives") became a bible for Russian women immediately after it was published in 1861. The author, a graduate of the presitigious Smolny Institute, had no special culinary training, yet her manual on classic cookery and household management deservedly became a bestseller.
The Arkhangelsk-born Molkhovets not only offered mouthwatering recipes by the hundred, but also provided expert advice about matters such as setting up a kitchen and shopping. (The book's full title is "Podarok Molodym Khozyaikam, ili Sredstvo k Umensheniyu Raskhodov Domashnem Khozyaistve," or "A Gift to Young Housewives, Or a Recipe To Reduce Housekeeping Expenses.") In Soviet times, the book was more likely to tease its readers, as using Molokhovets' recipes would saddle a cook with losses rather than help to save some cash.
Ironically, the author of more than 4,000 recipes that made up this golden collection of Russian cuisine starved to death in 1918.
However, a recently opened restaurant in St. Petersburg is aiming to honor the memory of the late great culinarist. Its name, Mechta Molokhovets ("Molokhovets' Dream"), certainly reflects its namesake's ambitions.
Mechta Molokhovets has what is best described as a chamber atmosphere, with just six tables in its main room, plus a separate side room. The tables aren't very big either, accommodating four diners at most. Maybe they're not expecting large numbers of Molokhovets' admirers. In any case, booking is highly recommended.
As we entered the restaurant, the name Molokhovets didn't ring any bells for my dining companion. When I said Molokhovets wrote a cookbook, my companion confused it with the Soviet version, "Kniga o Vkusnoi i Zdorovoi Pishche" ("Book of Delicious and Healthy Food"). She was further confused by the place's appearance, which is distinctly un-Soviet - long, dark-green fringed curtains of the kind you can see in the Nikolayevsky Express train to Moscow, and a pianist and violinist playing romantic melodies. "This place has a strong White Guard feel," she said, and was relieved to hear that Molokhovets wrote her book long before 1917. "Oh, then this hits the spot perfectly," she said, giggling at her initial confusion.
A glance at the menu would be enough to persuade you that great Russian writers, from Tolstoy to Chekhov to Bulgakov, found inspiration for their culinary episodes from Molokhovets' book. The service is similarly weighty; all three waiters working on the day of our visit were men of a similar, rather solid constitution, who all served in a somewhat ceremonial manner.
I started with a portion of foie gras ($9; all prices are denominated in dollar equivalents), served on toasts with warm slices of pineapple and apple, which made an exquisite contrast to the rich goose-liver pate. The menu also contains a hot alternative, foie gras with hot saffron sauce and iced apples ($27), a dish that was described by Silver Age writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky in one of his stories.
My companion opted for the chicken macedoine ($8), a mixture of tiny bits of tender chicken fillet, ham and sour cabbage, spiced up with creamy cocktail sauce.
We passed on the soups, although that section of the menu looked incredibly tempting, including bordelaise lobster soup with chicken quenelles, meat and fish solyankas, and cabbage soup with boletus and cheese, to name a few.
My piscophile companion scanned the main course section's fish dishes for some time before finally deciding on pike-perch soaked in a piquant sauce made with red caviar ($11), although she found it hard to resist a sturgeon dish and, especially, the lobster stuffed with boletus, mango, red caviar and vanilla sauce. When her dish arrived, she was fascinated both by its taste and the way it was presented: The fish was decorated with round potato chips carefully covering the fish, like scales. She recalled the writer Sergei Dovlatov, who in one of his books wrote that he was tempted to ask in one restaurant who the artist of a particular dish was. In fact, one of the main points of Molokhovets' book was to show cooking as an art, and the restaurant certainly lives up to this.
I found choosing a main course as difficult as my companion did, the only difference being that I had a hard time choosing between deer fillet, accompanied by baked pears filled with cranberries and soaked in chanterelle sauce; quail fillets in pomegranate sauce with cedar nuts; and roe deer with almond croquettes stuffed with prunes and blackberry sauce. In the end, I went for the deer, and was delighted; the baked pears stuffed with cranberries provided a mouthwatering setoff to the deer fillet.
With so many options on the menu, it would seem impossible to visit Mechta Molokhovets only once. I now have two reasons to go back - the quail and the roe deer.
Mechta Molokhovets. 23/10 Kovensky Per. Tel.: 279-2247. Open daily, 11 a.m to 11 p.m. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, without alcohol: $58.
TITLE: pletnyov: playing on own terms
AUTHOR: by Michael White
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: LONDON - In the 21st-century culture of oversupply and underdemand, it's small wonder that every second musician in the marketplace is sold by agents, impresarios and record companies as unique. It doesn't mean much.
But just occasionally it does. And Mikhail Pletnyov - arguably the most distinctive and idiosyncratically remarkable of living pianists - is a case in point.
Only in the last 10 years have Western audiences had the chance to come to terms with him, although he made his mark a quarter century ago, when - at 21 - he took first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow and immediately stacked up invitations for impressive world tours.
Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and, as he says, "the doors closed."
"Cultural relations stopped," he adds, when we meet here in a discreetly empty restaurant of his choice. "I couldn't do 'the career.' Concerts outside the Soviet territories, all canceled. So for years I played Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, East Germany. No further."
And how did he feel about that?
"Philosophical," he says. "I stayed at home and taught. And this was not bad for me. Many young artists make success, become stars, play everywhere. Then disappear. They don't have time to take in. They just give. Then they run out of ideas, of energy, of repertory. You could say I was spared."
Pletnyov says in a confiding tone, heavily Russian but half whispered, with long pauses during which he thinks, draws deeply on a cigarette (he chain smokes) and insists on pouring me another vodka, which I make an ineffectual effort to decline. I've never liked the taste.
"In Russia, we do not drink vodka for taste," he says, filling the glass. "We drink for effect. For consequence."
And, no doubt, to assist the philosophical approach to life that Pletnyov holds to, on and off the stage. Like a Russian Buddha smiling quietly to himself, he comes across as self-contained, inscrutable: the guardian of some vouchsafed secret that he may or may not reveal.
It's all a game, played to a book of rules that only Pletnyov knows. And though he's serious about his art - about the piano, about conducting (roughly one sixth of his dates these days are with a baton rather than a keyboard) and about composing (a lifelong sideline) - a latent mischief infects the presentation. Usually encased in a veneer of gloom.
You see it when he walks onto the stage, slowly, like a pallbearer at a funeral. "I have a bad knee," he says laconically.
But even more, you hear it in the playing: in the teasing virtuosity of his Beethoven bagatelles disc for Deutsche Grammophon, in the outrageous license of his award-winning Scarlatti sonatas for Virgin Classics and in the way he milks the encores in his live Deutsche Grammophon recording from Carnegie Hall.
You also get it on a plate when he conducts. Last year he was in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra and what, in other hands, would have been a standard program of Tchaikovsky bonbons. But in Pletnyov's hands, it raised the currency of easy-listening to exalted heights of style and substance.
And its special pleasure was its wit: immaculately wry and sharp but somehow lovingly extracted from the orchestra with an absurdly modest repertory of gestures. Just a shrug here or a lifting of the finger there. He hardly bothered to beat time: a curiously inverted kind of showmanship, and very Russian. (Yury Temirkanov, the artistic director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, plays the same game.)
But playing games in concerts is dangerous. Especially when you're playing them with an orchestra.
"Let me tell you a story." says Pletnyov, and it's an old one. "A conductor gives a concert, charges a million dollars and five cents, and barely moves a finger. One single gesture, no more. People say after, 'How do you justify your fee?' He says, 'Five cents is for the single gesture. The million dollars is for knowing when to make it. This" - a deep drag on the cigarette - "is conducting."
Pletnyov's story comes with a mock-geriatric gravitas appropriate to the heavy, hooded, slightly swollen details of a face no longer that of the alluring young Slav in the 1978 Tchaikovsky competition. It takes some effort of will to remember that he's actually just 45 - born in Arkhangelsk, the only child of parents who were both musicians. His mother, with whom he still lives on the outskirts of Moscow, is a pianist - "a good one, a real example," he says - and his father, now dead, played the bayan, the Russian accordion.
In the circumstances, his musical education started late: at 13, when he went to the Central School in Moscow, a famous forcing-ground for prodigies.
"But I wasn't forced," he says. "I had a happy childhood."
"I'm still happy," he adds, staring at me with the solemn features of a bloodhound. "Ecstatic. I praise God I'm not ill, not crippled, except for my knee and my finger" - an injury that caused him to cancel concerts earlier this year - "and still alive. What should I complain about?"
In fact he does complain - a lot - about contemporary Russia which, he says, is run by "rich persons with money but no culture." As a pianist he's emphatically old-school: a natural heir to Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Sergei Rachmaninov, concerned to make the piano sing, with plenty of color but emphatic stress on melody.
"Rather old-fashioned, of course," he says. "And it won't survive. Times are changing. Mobile phone, Internet - national schools will go. There's no community among Russian pianists now. If there is, I'm not part of it. I met Evgeny Kissin, sure, for five minutes. Otherwise I see him only on TV. He plays his way, I play mine."
It sounds as though he's not interested in other pianists. "Not so much," he says. "In fact I'm not interested in piano music, whoever plays. I find it boring. It surprises me that other people don't find boring what I do. I can't say I don't enjoy it. It's a nice thing to play good piano in a nice hall. But listen to someone else? No."
This, presumably, is one of Pletnyov's games. He's after a reaction. How could any credible musician be so insular? Or so incurious?
He shrugs his shoulders. As he does to criticism of his interventionist approach to music-making.
Pletnyov's repertory is selective, rooted in Russia but with lifelines out to Chopin, Liszt, Scarlatti and the Austro-German classics. No Ravel, Debussy, nothing modern (other than his own scores). "I only play what I understand and feel I could compose myself," he says. "The rest I leave to others. They do it better."
But within those tight parameters he gives himself a wide interpretive freedom that wins friends (for its imagination) and occasionally enemies (for its distortion of the text). His art is truly recreative.
"And why not?" he says. "As a composer myself, I know a score can never say exactly what the composer wants. Even if he knows. They're like children, compositions. They have your name, you think they belong to you, but no. They have their own life."
So does he consciously set out to liberate the offspring of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky? Is he trying to be different?
"If it's like everyone else, why do it?" he asks. "The audience can always get a CD. But difference - this is a result of how I play, not the reason why. A result of how I feel on the spot, in the concert hall."
Making up for lost time, Pletnyov has been highly visible in American concert halls during the last decade. For one thing, the Russian National Orchestra, which he founded in the new economic freedom of 1989, is largely financed from the United States, courtesy of the oil magnate and musician Gordon Getty.
On its home ground the orchestra was, and remains, a controversial undertaking. The first nonstate orchestra in Russia since before the revolution, it began as a commercial challenge to the old-guard ensembles and made its presence felt by stealing their best players. This did not boost Pletnyov's popularity among orchestra managements.
But no one could deny the Russian National Orchestra's quality, which ranks beside that of Valery Gergiev's Mariinsky Theater Orchestra, outclassing the venerable St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Having seen it through its first decade and then withdrawn for a break, Pletnyov is now back in the driver's seat as artistic director - complaining of the lack of support the orchestra gets in Russia (despite connections in high places) but proud of its achievements.
"To conduct this orchestra is not a job," he says. "It's a privilege. We have a budget 60 times less than the budget of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but still, a privilege."
Another vodka, and another cigarette.
"Of course, I say this philosophically."
TITLE: on being and nothing
AUTHOR: by Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The opening of an exhibition by legendary Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus at the NOMI Gallery on Friday was marked by magnificent photographs on the gallery walls and a protest by the National Bolshevik Party that saw the Lithuanian Consul General sprayed with ketchup and leaflets handed out to visitors.
It is safe to assume that the leaflets trampled over the floor were not part of the exhibition, but an unfortunate reflection of present-day reality. The protestors said they were doing it "for Kaliningrad," according to Lithuanian Consul General Gintaras Ronkaitas.
However, this spoon of tar could not spoil the barrel of honey, as the Russian phrase has it, that is the exhibition. Born in 1939, the talented Sutkus is an internationally recognized photoartist, with more than 60 Lithuanian and international awards to his credit. A co-founder and, since 1996, chairperson of the Lithuania Photoartists' Union, he is also a significant public figure in his homeland. Sutkus has long been setting the agenda for Lithuanian photography; as a photojournalist, he "openly professes to be a 'fine-art photographer'" who makes the "distinction between 'informative' and 'fine-art' photography."
The current exhibition almost exclusively represents images from his "Lithuanian People" series, which show the whole gamut of human situations, from childhood through teenage and adult years, and culminating in honorable old age. Some works, like the well known "Goodbye, Party Friends," in which Sutkus caught the dismantling of a monument to Lenin in Vilnius, are Soviet and post-Soviet reflections. These works seem to be a gentle hint emphasizing the exhibition organizers' dedication of the show to Lithuanian Independence Day - as well as the inevitable dedication to St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary.
Probably the most attractive work on display, the highlight of the exhibition, is "Jean-Paaul Sartre in Lithuania, Nida," which captures the one-week visit of the great French existentialist philosopher and writer to Soviet Lithuania in summer 1965. As the official photocorrespondent assigned to cover the visit, the young Sutkus took many photographs of Sartre's trip, but only this one seems to make sense of the whole series of photographs, to meet Sartre's ideas and his personality. Even this one photograph alone makes visiting the exhibition a meaningful, worthwhile experience.
The Antanas Sutkus exhibition runs through March 31 at the NOMI Gallery, 13/39 Izhorskaya Ulitsa. Tel.: 233-0854.
TITLE: twenty five years of failed work
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: It's been 25 years since an advertisement in a Hollywood trade paper announced that director Martin Scorsese was in pre-production with a tale of 19th century street-fighting men called "Gangs of New York." Now, a full quarter of a century later, we have the film before us. It has not been worth the wait.
"Gangs of New York" seems in that great passage of time to have lost its sense of story and its narrative drive, to have quite simply lost its way. Its two-hour-and-45-minute length is elephantine enough to include an actual elephant, but what it doesn't contain is any compelling reason for us to pay attention. Despite having Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonard DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz in a melodramatic story centered on murder and revenge, the film plays like an interminable airplane flight: You look at your watch, hoping its nearly time to land, only to realize with a sinking heart you're not even halfway there.
While "Gangs" is surprisingly heavier on tedium than bloodshed, when we are not being bored, we are being assaulted by the film's palpable violence, always a Scorsese preoccupation and prominent enough here that some people are calling the result "Stab Wounds of New York." Even though the scenes of sustained mayhem are one of the few areas where "Gangs" rouses itself and displays some energy, it's also the area where you wish it hadn't.
In fact, it was a depiction of a world permeated with violence as much as any specific characters or incidents that doubtless drew Scorsese to "Gangs of New York," Herbert Asbury's florid, print-the-legend chronicle of early underworld doings, first published in 1928 and long a favorite of writers from Jorge Luis Borges to William Burroughs.
The other place where "Gangs" shows some passion is in its determination to have the most meticulous re-creation of the old Five Points section of Lower Manhattan that an estimated $100-million budget could facilitate. (Five Points was so infamous one unnerved 19th century reporter claimed "the very letters of the two words seem to redden with the bloodstains of unavenged crime.")
So Scorsese and his cast made the well-publicized trek from the new world back to the old, setting up shop in Rome's vast Cinecitta studio complex, where revered production designer Dante Ferretti set a working waterfront in a 3-million-gallon exterior tank and used more than 40 acres to painstakingly reconstruct several New York neighborhoods, accurate down to the cobblestones on the streets and the shingles on the roofs.
This fetish for authenticity (no, that's not too strong a word) overflowed into other facets of the "Gangs" production. The film has a Chinese opera coordinator, a butchering advisor, a man in charge of hand-lettered signs, plus a consultant who taught vintage fighting methods. These things are hardly meretricious, but they should be means to an end, not ends in and of themselves. Unfortunately, what's happened in "Gangs" is that all the time, money and energy invested in authenticity has both distracted the filmmakers from and enabled them to ignore the fact that nothing dramatically compelling is going on in those immaculately conceived and executed sets.
Despite the credited presence of Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan, two of the best Hollywood screenwriters, as well as original writer Jay Cocks, none of the main characters make any kind of meaningful emotional connection. The streets, shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, may be as authentic as they are mean, but it is nearly impossible to care about what happens on them.
"Gangs" opens with an extended street-battle-prologue set in 1846, in which the foreigner-hating Native Americans led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Day-Lewis) take on an immigrant Irish group called the Dead Rabbits and commanded by the imposing Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). Technically, though, "Gangs of New York" opens with a sound that, given Scorsese's predilections, is easily guessed to be a straight razor at work. When Vallon intentionally cuts his cheek, he tells his young son Amsterdam, in the first of the film's numerous self-consciously mythic lines, "The blood stays on the blade. One day you'll understand." Don't bet on it.
After seeing his father killed by the agile Butcher, Amsterdam disappears to be raised in an orphanage. He returns 16 years later as DiCaprio, a young man so changed by his theoretical thirst for revenge that of his father's old comrades (Brendan Gleeson, John C. Reilly, Gary Lewis) only his old boyhood chum Johnny (Henry Thomas) initially recognizes him as Priest's son.
Equally oblivious is Bill the Butcher himself, who, in the way of movies since time immemorial, takes a shine to this lad with the murderous rage and makes him a surrogate son. In fact, so much of "Gangs" is spent on Amsterdam shelving his revenge and just chilling with Bill and the lithe pickpocket and confidence woman Jenny Everdeane (Diaz) to whom he takes a violent fancy that the film has to apologize for him with a voice-over line about how warm and cozy it is to be under a dragon's wing.
Daniel Day-Lewis, who apparently listened to Eminem to keep his rage level up, gives an impeccable performance as the dandified, psychotic dragon Bill the Butcher. He's a self-consciously theatrical gangster, all menace and malevolence, and he has our complete attention whenever he's on screen. But as proficient as the work is, it's a performance in a vacuum, so apart from the rest of the film that it can't enlarge or feed it the way great performances classically do.
Facing even bigger problems is DiCaprio, who is simply miscast as an ace street fighter and all-around murderous type. Taking on a role that goes against his strengths (shown to good advantage in the forthcoming "Catch Me If You Can"), the strongest attitude DiCaprio can manage is the petulance of a sullen choir boy sulking because he's been caught filching the Communion wine. No amount of intense training in authentic combat techniques can turn him into a plausible rival for Bill the Butcher, and the film suffers as a result.
That casting lapse also hamstrings "Gang's" grandiose attempts to turn Amsterdam into something of a political leader as it sets this personal rivalry against the backdrop of the societal discontent that led to the Civil War draft riots of 1863. For "Gangs" does have a lust for larger themes, a desperate desire to be seen as saying something profound about the nature of the American experience and be what Scorsese has called "a template for what's going on today."
But using Amsterdam Vallon as a poster boy for multicultural democracy, a kind of early Tom Joad fighting for a more just and equal America, is way off the mark. You don't need to carry a torch for Henry Fonda to see that there's no way this kind of twerp can be a prototype of anything. Because nothing feels at stake in this kind of disconnected filmmaking, a great deal of what "Gangs of New York" attempts comes off as disjointed and beside the point. It does not, for instance, lack for local color, but instead of enriching the film, undoubtedly authentic folk - bare-knuckle fighters, bearded cross-dressers, opium smokers and unclothed prostitutes - turn the final product into a cluttered muddle, an overstuffed trunk of movie flotsam thrown together and packed in haste.
The film's supporting cast of real people come off as window dressing, even when, as with Jim Broadbent as Tweed, the acting is expert. "Gangs"' voice-over describing mid-19th century New York as "a furnace where a city someday might be forged" sounds forced. Even the film's closing song by U2 plays as lugubrious as its "The Hands That Built America" title would have you fear.
The virtues of "Gangs," a failed film but not a fiasco, are the virtues of a pageant, not a drama. Unable to make his personal obsessions compelling despite his unquestioned filmmaking skill, director Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.
"Gangs of New York" shows at Mirage Cinema from March 27.
TITLE: counting the cost of the cold war
AUTHOR: by Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Writing history books is a lot like Monday morning quarterbacking. In his new book "The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory," Derek Leebaert makes liberal use of the freeze button to comment on the good, the bad and the ugly of the vast expanse of world events since 1945.
Part academic treatise, part expose, "The Fifty-Year Wound" is finely researched and gracefully written. Alternately reverent and irreverent, objective and subjective, the book covers all and sundry aspects of U.S. political history from the last five decades. Hot wars and Star Wars. The arms race and the space race. The Truman Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine. John F. Kennedy's fondness for James Bond and his hatred for Fidel Castro. The CIA's misadventures in backwater jungles. And spy sagas from McCarthyism to terrorism.
A Georgetown government professor and a fearless iconoclast, Leebaert passes judgment on the pantheon of men who steered the United States through these tumultuous years. He admires Ronald Reagan for being unimpressed with power, ridicules Kennedy for his patronizing elitism, writes glowingly of George Marshall and disparagingly of Henry Kissinger. His most scathing criticism, however, is reserved for George Kennan, the foreign service officer known for his 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow. Leebaert hauls out Kennan for a sound thrashing no fewer than 19 times, happily highlighting the gap between Kennan's many predictions and the reality of what came to pass. He "did not understand power," Leebaert chides.
So, too, does Leebaert chip away at the luster of great Cold War success stories, like the Berlin Airlift, which he argues was plagued by corruption. Dollars went astray, Leebaert contends, as a result of "misplaced goodwill, misjudgment, or just plain theft." Leebaert also claims that many of NASA's early senior executives, including the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, were "deeply complicit" in Nazi concentration camps. The author accuses the Pentagon of whitewashing these inconvenient details from their resumes.
Wars, even cold ones, have costs, and the tolls exacted are all the more regrettable when they could have been avoided: soldiers' lives lost, money misspent, talent wasted, morals compromised. Enormous economic resources were consumed during the Cold War, and often the book swims in numbers. Leebaert shows how defense contractors cashed in on the anxiety of policy makers, who enabled the Pentagon to become a "Fortune-1 company," as the joke went. Leebaert calculates that, from 1948 to 1988, U.S. military expenditures totaled $10 trillion.
Academic entrepreneurs quickly figured out how to raid the national security coffers, a familiar charge in today's anti-terrorism climate. Research labs at MIT and Stanford won lucrative defense financing for space and electronics research. "We were the real war profiteers, no doubt about it," recalled Louis Smullin, the director of MIT's microwave tube laboratory. Leebaert points out the harm in the Pentagon's co-opting of academia, but also argues for an understanding of how many of today's high-tech companies were incubated with government money.
Money also flooded into the CIA, underwriting covert actions by the agency's "world order men," who dabbled in king-making all over the globe. Leebaert devotes scores of pages to cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and he pulls few punches in cataloging intelligence community failures. Insulated from scrutiny, these shadow warriors displayed "crippling unawareness" of the countries they meddled in, a condition that only increased the Cold War tab.
Some money simply went to waste. In a well-known example, construction of a new chancery for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1980s was so riddled with bugs that the structure had to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The cost came to nearly $500 million, a sum Leebaert attributes to CIA incompetence.
Hard currency wasn't the only thing spent in vain; ideals were also at stake. The United States was all too eager to intervene on behalf of the most repugnant tyrants, as long as they mouthed anti-communist rhetoric. In a 1997 conversation with Tom Brokaw of U.S. television network NBC, national security advisor Sandy Berger admitted that dictators are easier to work with, since "we only have to make one phone call."
Cameo commentary from novelist John Le Carre is sprinkled throughout the book. In discussing the CIA's dependence on costly yet chronically inaccurate satellite intelligence, Leebaert cribs from Le Carre's "Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy" (1988). "Ever bought a fake picture, Toby?" the book's hero, George Smiley, asks a young recruit. "The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt its authenticity."
Tallying the lives lost in this period is perhaps the bleakest task of all. In Korea, the United States lost 37,000 soldiers; in Vietnam, nearly 58,000. Even this does not begin to capture the suffering endured by millions elsewhere, as the result of American actions. Leebaert argues that, in 1964, the United States refused to intervene in communist-leaning Indonesia as a holocaust swept through Java, Sumatra and Bali, killing as many as one million people.
Alongside contemporary accounts of the Cold War, "The Fifty-Year Wound's" broad scope is equaled only by CNN's 1998 Cold War documentary series. But Leebaert condemns the CNN project as an attempt to present the United States and the Soviet Union as morally equal. An avowed conservative, Leebaert staunchly defends the idea that embracing McCarthyism was preferable to letting Soviet spies run unchecked through Washington.
In reaching for a conclusion that is perhaps too grandiose, Leebaert writes: "Every American in the past fifty-plus years ... has had one or more bits cut out of it by research postponed, investment trammeled, and bureaucracy expanded."
It's hard to view this retrospective as a "vital road map for the future," as the book jacket claims. But contemplating the picture of a half century of Cold War lessons is a valuable reminder that the course of history is just as imperfect as the humans who chart it.
Caroline McGregor is deputy business editor at The Moscow Times and a former junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory." By Derek Leebaert. Little, Brown & Company. 704 pages. $29.95.
TITLE: Israelis Prepare for Possible Iraqi Attack
AUTHOR: By Yoav Appel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEL AVIV, Israel - Israelis carried gas masks to school and work Thursday, after the opening U.S. attack on Iraq, while Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip waved pictures of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and burned U.S. flags.
Some foreign embassies in Israel were operating with a skeleton staff. The Israeli government has warned of the possibility of terrorist reprisals.
In several areas hit by Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, school attendance was low. In the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, one school reported about 20-percent attendance.
"I think [Hussein] is crazy enough to fire chemical weapons," said Shai Shtarker, 33, eating breakfast at a trendy Tel Aviv cafe. "I think something big will happen."
Israeli experts and officials continued to assure their people that the chances of an Iraqi attack against Israel in retaliation for the U.S.-led assault were small.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received a warning from the United States before it struck Iraq, Israeli government spokesperson Major General Amos Gilad said. U.S. officials said the air strikes targeted Hussein himself and other Iraqi leaders.
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun early Thursday, about 700 Palestinians, most of them schoolchildren, waved Iraqi flags and posters of Hussein and burned two U.S. flags.
They shouted "Death to America, death to Bush!" and "We will sacrifice our soul and our blood for Saddam!"
Many non-essential employees from the U.S. Embassy and British Embassy have left Israel.
Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a spokesperson for Hamas, said it would continue its fight against Israel but would not target Americans. The militant Islamic group has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis.
"We do not want to open battles with the Americans, despite their unlimited support to the Zionist enemy," Rantisi said. "Despite the war against Iraq, which we consider as an attack on the Muslim nation ... we have limited our battle to the area of Palestine against the Zionist enemy."
The military on Wednesday instructed civilians to get their gas masks out, install their filters, and carry the masks with them at all times.
Several thousand Israelis in the Tel Aviv area, a target of Iraqi Scuds in 1991, were leaving for safer parts of the country, like Jerusalem, unlikely to be hit because of its holy sites, or Eilat, far out of range at Israel's southern tip.
However, a poll in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot showed that 84 percent of the Tel Aviv region's 2 million people did not plan to leave.
"We have buses blowing up, we have car accidents and compared to what we go through every day, this is nothing," said Gal Ganzberg, owner of a beachside pub next to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
During the first Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel, all with conventional warheads, causing damage but few casualties. The United States had the support of an Arab coalition back then. But this time, much of the Arab world is opposed to a war against Iraq.
TITLE: U.S. Troops Search Hills For Terrorist Operatives
AUTHOR: By Jamey Keaten
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGRAM, Afghanistan - U.S. attack helicopters and about 1,000 U.S. troops stormed villages in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, in raids aimed at tracking down remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Operation "Valiant Strike" began in the early morning in Kandahar province, with soldiers combing rough mountain terrain where radio transmissions had been detected coming from caves.
The raids came minutes after U.S. forces opened a broad military action in Iraq, but military spokesperson Colonel Roger King said that the timing was coincidence.
"Operations in Afghanistan are conducted completely independent of any operations in other sectors," King told reporters at Bagram Air Base. "We have done a series of major operations; this is one more in a continuing series."
The attack Thursday was focused in the Maruf district of Kandahar province, where the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has tribal links, according to Khalid Pashtun, a spokesperson for the Kandahar provincial government. The U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were surveying at least three different villages in the mountainous region.
King said the raids would focus on areas east of Kandahar. The province is the former spiritual headquarters of the Taliban, which is allied with the al-Qaida network suspected of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks.
The military launched the operation after receiving "a mosaic of different intelligence inputs" of activity in the area, King said. Radio signals had been detected coming from areas above the villages, military officials in Washington said.
King declined to say what the goal of the operation was, or whether it targeted al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
The operation was likely to continue for two or three days, said Lieutenant Coryll Angel, a U.S. military spokesperson in Kandahar.
The assault was one of the biggest in Afghanistan since Operation Anaconda just over a year ago, King said. That eight day battle pitted hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters against thousands of American and allied Afghan troops.
Since then, the multinational, U.S.-led coalition has carried out at least a dozen major offensives. An operation of similar size took place in neighboring Helmand province about a month ago. Several suspected militants were killed, and about 30 were captured.
The latest assault involved Blackhawk, Apache and Chinook helicopters along with armored Humvee vehicles.
The operation was led by an 800-soldier battalion known as the "White Devils," part of the 82nd Airborne division, though additional ground support teams and special-forces soldiers were also taking part, King and other army officials said.
There have been a series of raids on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the weeks since authorities captured al-Qaida's No. 3 figure, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Pakistan on March 1. Authorities have said that he is giving information to U.S. interrogators, and have said some of the subsequent arrests came as a result of his capture.
TITLE: Cuba Intends To Put Dissidents On Trial in Clampdown
AUTHOR: By Kevin Gray
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAVANA - U.S. officials and Cuban dissidents reacted with anger as Fidel Castro's government arrested more activists and vowed to put them on trial in the country's harshest crackdown on dissent in years.
As tensions with the United States increased, a Cuban airliner carrying 29 passengers was hijacked at knifepoint Wednesday night and landed under U.S. military escort in Key West, Florida. The six hijackers were detained and faced federal air-piracy charges.
At least 46 dissidents have been detained in a two-day operation by Cuban state security agents, human-rights activist Elizardo Sanchez said. He said arrests of anti-government activists were continued Wednesday night.
The detentions come amid a sharp deterioration in relations between Washington and Havana, which has repeatedly criticized the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush for encouraging dissent on the Caribbean island.
The government accuses the dissidents of being linked to Washington's top diplomat in Havana, James Cason, who during his six months on the island has met publicly with opposition members. In one such appearance last week, he allowed dissident journalists to use his official residence for a meeting.
Cason has defended his actions as attempts to promote democracy and human rights on the Caribbean island.
But following days of sharp criticism from Cuban officials, the government reacted on Tuesday night by announcing an opening round of arrests and restricting the movements of U.S. diplomats based here.
An official statement read on state-controlled television Tuesday night accused the dissidents of "being directly linked to the conspiratorial activities" led by the U.S. mission.
"They have been arrested by the appropriate authorities and will be turned over to the courts of justice," the statement said of the dissidents.
In Washington, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher expressed outrage over the arrests, calling it an "appalling act of intimidation against those who seek freedom and democratic change in Cuba."
"These people have been arrested for simply speaking out, one of the most basic internationally accepted human rights," Boucher said.
In similar roundups in the past, many of those picked up have been released after a few hours or days without formal charges.
Opposition activists here fear that those arrested will be tried under the much-criticized but never yet applied "Law Against National Independence," which carries sentences of up to 10 years.
The law, passed in February 1999, made it a crime to publish "subversive" materials provided by the U.S. government.
Veteran human-rights activist Elizardo Sanchez called it "the most intense repression in recent years."
The U.S. Interests Section here distributes shortwave radios and a wide range of books and pamphlets throughout Cuba, with the stated purpose of promoting American culture, democracy and human rights.
The island's best-known activists, including Oswaldo Paya - the top organizer of the Varela Project reform effort - were left alone.
At least a dozen of those rounded up were independent journalists, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
On Wednesday night, assailants hijacked a Douglas DC-3 bound for Havana from Nueva Gerona, the main city on the small Isle of Youth, U.S. authorities said.
Air Force fighter jets from Homestead Air Force Base and a Black Hawk helicopter from the Customs Service intercepted the Douglas DC-3 as it approached Key West, where it landed at 8:06 p.m. local time. The hijackers surrendered.
There were no immediate reports of injuries among the hijackers, passengers or six crew members. Five of the passengers were minors, an airport spokesperson said.
The passengers were being interviewed by U.S. authorities. It was unclear if any had requested asylum or if the hijacking was related to the arrests of dissidents.
Under the new travel restrictions imposed by the Cuban government, U.S. diplomats must get prior approval to travel outside a 695-square-kilometer area that includes the capital, Havana.
Previously, U.S. diplomats had to notify Cuban officials when they traveled outside the Havana region, but no advance approval was necessary.
TITLE: S. Korea Military Increases Alert Level
AUTHOR: By Soo-Jeong Lee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea put its military on heightened alert Thursday, as the beginning of war in Iraq raised fears that North Korea might move to provoke its neighbor while the world is distracted.
"We expect North Korea to be cautious, but we have strengthened our alert status and our early-warning status in response to possible North Korean attempts to increase tensions," presidential spokesperson Song Kyoung-hee said.
North Korea announced it also was boosting its military readiness, saying it feared a U.S. attack.
"We will strengthen our readiness in every possible way to meet whatever military options the U.S. imperialists will take against us," said Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's most prominent state newspaper.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been high since October, when U.S. officials said that North Korea admitted having a program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
With the United States focused on Iraq, experts fear North Korea might use the opportunity to test a long-range missile or reprocess spent nuclear fuel to make atomic bombs. That would be viewed as an attempt to force Washington into direct negotiations over its nuclear programs.
In a televised address, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun vowed to ensure that the war will not worsen the situation on the Korean Peninsula.
"I believe the war on Iraq was an inevitable measure to eliminate weapons of mass destruction as quickly as possible, at a time when diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue peacefully have failed," he said.
After presiding over a National Security Council meeting, Roh said his military has strengthened its vigilance, and national police have beefed up security to guard against possible terrorist attacks.
Roh's security adviser, Ra Jong-il, said there were no reports of "unusual movement" by the North Korean military.
The South Korean Unification Ministry urged North Korea "not to take additional measures that will undermine the stability of the Korean Peninsula."
TITLE: Pacers Drop Celtics Despite Another Artest Flagrant Foul
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: INDIANAPOLIS - It took only five seconds for Ron Artest to get himself in trouble again. It'll likely be much longer before he plays again.
Artest committed his eighth flagrant foul of the season just seconds after tipoff, then scored 18 points as the Indiana Pacers cruised to a 102-72 victory over the Boston Celtics on Wednesday night.
Artest now faces a two-game suspension, though he again insisted he wouldn't change the aggressive way he plays.
"As long as I don't hurt nobody, I'm happy," Artest said.
The Pacers desperately needed the win, only their third in the last 16 games. They finished the season series against Boston tied 2-2 and moved within one game of second place in the Eastern Conference.
Boston's Paul Pierce went up for a layup after the opening tip and was slapped hard on the head from behind by Artest.
"I don't think they're picking on me, but I don't think it was a flagrant," Artest said.
Artest has been suspended twice already for exceeding the maximum number of flagrant foul points. If the league doesn't rescind the foul, he will miss Friday's game against Memphis and Saturday's against Atlanta. He won't return until next Wednesday against Philadelphia.
"I don't know how the league thinks," he said.
The Pacers are 4-7 without Artest in the lineup. He's missed one game with an injury.
Coach Isiah Thomas said Artest's pattern of erratic behavior continues to be noticed by the officials. Thomas said Artest receives extra scrutiny because of his past actions.
"Clearly, he's a player that people pay attention to and referees will pay attention to also," Thomas said. "It's going to be like this for a while. That's something we're going to have to adjust to."
Artest stayed in the game and helped the Pacers roll to their second blowout win in a week. Reggie Miller scored 11 of his 13 points in the first quarter and Artest added seven as the Pacers opened a 16-point lead.
Artest continued to show why he's so valuable to the Pacers. He deflected passes, came up with a couple of steals and held Pierce to 4-for-14 shooting.
Late in the fourth, Artest picked up a loose ball and drove toward the basket when he was grabbed around the waist by Bimbo Coles. Coles was whistled for a clear-path foul as the crowd howled for a flagrant.
Artest just smiled and shook his head as he sank a free throw. Artest said he slowed down as he approached the basket because he thought Coles was coming to hack him. By then, the game was well in hand.
Jermaine O'Neal had 18 points and 12 rebounds for the Pacers.
Antoine Walker led Boston with 18 points and Pierce, who sprained his left ankle in Tuesday's loss at New Jersey, added 14. The Celtics shot 28 percent in the first half and missed 15 of 20 shots in the second quarter.
"If we keep this up in the playoffs, we won't be around very long," Pierce said. "We can't afford to be playing this way as we head down the stretch."
The Pacers broke the game open in the second. Thomas, as he did in Indiana's blowout win last week against Utah, turned to the second unit and they delivered.
The Pacers went on a 12-0 run midway through the second, keyed by consecutive 3-pointers by Austin Croshere and Jonathan Bender. The second team scored 16 of the Pacers' 24 points in the quarter and they led 53-27 at the half.
The starting five returned in the third. They each played 12 minutes and pushed the lead to 30.
Orlando 109, Miami 93. Tracy McGrady didn't have a field goal and scored only three points in the first 19 minutes, but he finished with 36 points and nine assists Wednesday night as the Magic rolled to a win over the Heat.
The Heat's plan against the NBA's leading scorer was basic: double-team him every time he touched the ball and make somebody else beat them.
"I saw something in Tracy McGrady that I haven't seen in a player all year," Heat coach Pat Riley said. "He made everybody on his team better. Our game plan was to take him out of the offense and he still got 36 points."
"I was just moving the ball and trusting my teammates," McGrady said. "Miami was doubling me and my guys were knocking down shots. I was just making the game easy."
McGrady was content for a while to be the playmaker for teammates Pat Garrity and Gordan Giricek, who each had 18 points.
Garrity hit four 3-pointers and Giricek two as the Magic went 12-for-30 from downtown.
The Heat, who lost their fourth straight and seventh in their last eight games, were led by Caron Butler's 20 points.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Ftorek Fired as Coach of Slumping Bruins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOSTON - Robbie Ftorek was fired Wednesday as coach of the Boston Bruins, a team struggling to make the playoffs after a strong start.
General manager Mike O'Connell, who took over for Ftorek on an interim basis, said he had seen inconsistent effort and too many mistakes. The Bruins' 2-1 loss to Phoenix on Tuesday was the last straw, said O'Connell, who said he'll simplify the team's game plan, stressing fundamentals, checking and consistency.
The Bruins had the NHL's best record at 19-4-3-1 on Dec. 8, but slipped to 33-28-8-4 and into seventh place in the Eastern Conference.
Ftorek, in his second season as Boston's coach, was the Bruins' 10th coach in 18 years. The team also fired assistant coach Jim Hughes but kept assistant Wayne Cashman. Mike Sullivan, head coach of the Bruins' AHL affiliate in Providence, Rhode Island, was promoted to assistant in Boston, and Scott Gordon was named Providence coach.
O'Connell said he wanted to stick with Ftorek through the end of the season, but felt he had to make a change.
"It started with the way we came out last night and played in a game I thought was critical, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why that is," O'Connell said.
"I've seen it too many times, and regardless of what players we have in the lineup, I have to get this team back to working hard on a consistent basis," he said.
"I've seen too many times where we have one good period, we're bad the second and desperate the third," he said. "If we get in the playoffs we're not going to go anywhere with that kind of play."
Dallas 5, Atlanta 4 (OT). The Dallas Stars had lost three straight entering Wednesday's game. The one-time leaders in the Western Conference seemed destined for a deeper slide in the standings after two periods.
"I think that puts us in desperation mode," Dallas coach Dave Tippett said after the Stars beat the Atlanta Thrashers in overtime. "It was good to see that."
Trailing 3-1, the Stars rallied to take the lead before Dany Heatley's goal forced the extra session. Mike Modano's goal off a faceoff 2:24 into overtime made the Stars victorious.
The Stars pulled within a point of Detroit in the West.
Heatley's goal with 0:35 left in regulation helped the Thrashers overcome a three-goal third period by Dallas. But Modano deflected a pass from Phillipe Boucher, putting it past Pasi Nurminen for the Stars' sixth 40-win season in seven years.
Scott Young scored two goals, and Jere Lehtinen added his 30th of the season for Dallas, which came from two goals down in the third period to take a 4-3 lead.
"That could be a very important point in two weeks," Young said. "We hadn't felt good about ourselves in a little bit, and I think the way we won this was big."
The Stars snapped a three-game losing streak and avoided their fifth loss in seven games.
Atlanta lost for the seventh time in seven games against Dallas. It was the first time Atlanta earned a point against the Stars.
Lehtinen gave Dallas the lead with 4:51 left in the third. Young scored both of his goals on power plays.
Nurminen earned his second assist in three games on Atlanta's first goal. He made an outlet pass to Heatley, who skated to the right circle and passed to Mark Hartigan. Hartigan cut between the circles and scored over the right shoulder of goalie Ron Tugnutt.
"Offensively we played probably one of our best games of the season," Atlanta coach Bob Hartley said. "We did have a few bad reads that turned into goals for the Stars, but overall I am pleased with the effort, and it's going to be a good lesson for our young team."
Frantisek Kaberle's seventh goal came on a slap shot past Tugnutt's right shoulder with 5:39 gone in the second period after Heatley's pass from the right boards.
"It ticked off somebody," Tugnutt said. "It was coming right at my chest and the next thing I knew it was by me."
Dallas cut it to 2-1 when Young scored with a straight-on shot from beyond the circles.
Tony Hrkac pushed the lead back to two with an unassisted goal with 3:57 left in the second.
Young's second goal came with 14:11 left in the third, and Stephane Robidas tied it at 11:11.
"When you're down 3-1 going into the third, that's pretty big," Tugnutt said.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)