SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #861 (29), Friday, April 18, 2003
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TITLE: Duma Liberal Killed in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan, Nabi Abdullaev and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Sergei Yushenkov, one of Russia's most prominent liberal opposition figures and a State Duma deputy, was shot dead in Moscow on Thursday evening in what fellow deputies condemned as an apparent political assassination. Yushenkov, 52, was gunned down at the entrance to his apartment building in northern Moscow, just hours after the Justice Ministry officially registered his Liberal Russia movement as a party. 
 
In his last public comments, a smiling Yushenkov told reporters in the Duma at 2 p.m. that the "registration has been completed" and his party hoped to finish third in the upcoming Duma elections.
 At 6:40 p.m., an unknown assailant shot him four times in the back after he got out of his chauffeur-driven car and walked toward the entrance of the apartment building. The assailant then fled, leaving a Makarov pistol equipped with a silencer behind in what bore the mark of a typical contract hit, police said.
 Yushenkov had bought the apartment, on the fourth floor of the five-story brick building, only several months before and had not yet moved in, since renovation work was still being done, the neighbors said.
 Four triangular white markers, apparently showing the location of the four pistol shells, were visible between the body and the door to the apartment building.
 A special taskforce that was quickly set up to investigate the hit was focusing on Yushenkov's acivities as a Duma deputy, chief city prosecutor Mikhail Avdyukov told reporters at the scene. He said investigators were also looking into the possibility that Yushenkov could have been killed over some disagreements in "his private life" or activities not related to his work at Duma. He would not elaborate.
 Yushenkov, a co-chairperson of Liberal Russia and a member of the Duma's security committee, had not been involved in any business activities, as had some other deputies who have been killed in recent years, his colleagues said. Yushenkov is the ninth Duma deputy to be killed in the past nine years. None of the killings has been solved.
 Unlike the prosecutor, Moscow city police chief Vladimir Pronin refused to comment on whether the hit was politically motivated. "No, we cannot say that. All I can say is that a professional did the work," Pronin said, standing next to the prosecutor as criminologists continued to examine the murder site.
 Investigators were trying to determine whether the killing could be connected to the killing of another Liberal Russia co-chairperson last year. Vladimir Golovlyov, also an independent Duma deputy, was gunned down in Moscow in August, and his killing remains unsolved.
 Yushenkov received death threats "long ago," Liberal Russia's executive secretary Yuly Nesenevich said on television. He did not elaborate.
 Leaders of Liberal Russia immediately described the killing as a political assassination.
 "The murder is purely political in nature. I call it a combination because Yushenkov is the second Liberal Russia co-chairperson to be murdered," Yuly Rybakov, a prominent member of Liberal Russia and independent Duma deputy, said in a telephone interview from his home in St. Petersburg. "Liberal Russia has obviously become a bone in the throat for someone."
 Rybakov, who said he had been assaulted and felt his own life was under threat, alleged that Yushenkov was killed for his efforts to find evidence to back up allegations that the Federal Security Service (FSB) was involved in the apartment bombings that killed some 300 people in 1999. The authorities maintain that the bombings were ordered by Chechen-based warlords, and several natives of the North Caucasus have been brought to trial on charges of preparing and executing the bombings.
 Duma Deputy Viktor Pokhmelkin, Yushenkov's co-chairperson in Liberal Russia, said he believes the murder was a political hit aimed at bringing the liberal opposition "to its knees."
 "It is clear that the murder has a political character," a visibly shaken Pokhmelkin said, without speculating as to who may have carried out the hit. 
 The Kremlin press service reacted to the murder by saying that President Vladimir Putin had been informed and had expressed his condolences to Yushenkov's family and colleagues. "I am deeply shaken by the tragic news. A man who believed it was his duty to protect democratic freedoms and ideals is gone," the press service quoted Putin as saying.
 The murder created a furor in the Duma, with most of the factions and all of the interviewed deputies calling the hit political.
 "This is a particular challenge for society because this murder was committed on the day when Liberal Russia officially declared the completion of its registration by the Justice Ministry," State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov said.
 Yushenkov and Golovlyov walked out of the Union of Right Forces at its founding congress in May 2001 to set up Liberal Russia after securing financing from tycoon Boris Berezovsky. The party was not officially founded until 2002, only to see the Justice Ministry turn down its registration bid in July, citing inconsistencies in its charter.
 Yushenkov blamed the refusal on the Justice Ministry's unwillingness to see a party affiliated with Berezovsky operate in Russia. Soon enough, however, Yushenkov fell out with Berezovsky over the exiled tycoon's pledge to finance the left opposition. Under Yushenkov's leadership, Liberal Russia's political council voted 9-4 with four abstentions to expel Berezovsky from the party. He tried to fight back, securing support from some of Liberal Russia's provincial branches. This splintered the party, but Yushenkov managed to solidify his loyalists and win the Justice Ministry's registration, sidelining Berezovsky.
 NTV asked Berezovsky on Thursday evening whether he believed investigators might want to question him over the murder. "Of course there will be questions. I would like to know who gave the command," Berezovsky said. He dismissed talk of a split in Liberal Russia and alleged that the Kremlin could have ordered Yushenkov's murder.
 Yushenkov is survived by his wife, daughter Yelena, 19, and son Alexei, 25.

TITLE: Mironov Jumps In on Election Fray
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the media continues to speculate that Governor Vladimir Yakovlev may leave office before his term is scheduled to end in May 2004, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov on Wednesday added his voice to those of politicians who would like to see the next gubernatorial elections moved ahead to this December to be held at the same time as those for the State Duma.
 
"It would be more proper and more rational to combine the State Duma elections and the gubernatorial elections in St. Petersburg," Mironov said at a meeting with Legislative Assembly lawmakers on Wednesday. "[The recent] announcement by Governor Vladimir Yakovlev [that he would not try to run for the third term] was the start of the election campaign in the city."
 "Yakovlev is an experienced politician, so I don't think he'll have much of a problem finding another job," he added.
 Mironov also said that he did not believe it would be necessary to amend City Charter in order to move the vote, as federal legislation allows local elections to be moved simply by passing a local piece of legislation to that effect, which he said would save the city some money.
 A number of lawmakers who favor moving the vote, however, say that they plan to amend the City Charter anyway.
 "[Mironov's comments are] a green light [for us]," Konstantin Sukhenko, head of the United Russia faction, said in an interview Wednesday. "It seems Yakovlev has already made a deal to end up with another job. He wouldn't have announced that he wasn't going to try to run next year this early if he wanted to stay [in City Hall] until next April."
 "Under these conditions, we need to do something to make sure that the city doesn't end up with a power vacuum," Sukhenko added.
 Earlier this month, Sukhenko filed a draft amendment to the City Charter, which would allow terms of office for executive positions to be altered where this is in line with federal legislation. Sukhenko said the draft will be included in the agenda for discussion for the assembly's next session, scheduled for Wednesday.
 Yakovlev's relations with President Vladimir Putin and his administration have been strained over the last couple of years, with members of the governor's administration charging the former presidential representative in the Northwest Region, Viktor Cherkesov, with organizing a campaign through the Prosecutor's Office here to try to hound Yakovlev out of office. This led some lawmakers on Wednesday to interpret Mironov's statement as a sign of agreement from above that Yakovlev should leave early.
 "I think that Mironov has indirectly expressed the position of the federal elites regarding how they feel the situation in St. Petersburg should develop," said Igor Mikhailov, an independent lawmaker, in an interview Wednesday. "This is a sign of an existing unanimity [among both local and federal political circles] on that question."
 Since Yakovlev's statement, speculation has circulated that the governor would step down in June, after the peak of the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations had been completed. Assembly members picked up on them Wednesday. 
 "In the current situation, this is the best way for everything to work out. We'll just have to wait until June, and then everything will be clear with regard to the fate of the governor." Vatanyar Yagya, a member of Our City faction, said in an interview Wednesday. When asked if he meant that he thought Yakovlev would resign in June, Yagya simply nodded.
 While one of the reasons that has been put forward for moving the vote was that holding it together with the State Duma vote would save the city budget money, lawmakers were not all sure that this was the case. Vladimir Yeryomenko, a legislator with the pro-governor United City bloc, countered Mironov's assertion that some 70 million rubles (about $2.2 million) of city-budget-money could be saved by the move.
 "This claim is inaccurate for the chief reason that all of the property and material resources are already set up to hold elections in May. We don't have to spend any additional money, so the elections would end up costing about 30 million rubles [about $940,000]," Yeryomenko said in an interview on Wednesday.
 From Yakovlev's side, City Hall spokesperson Alexander Afanasyev said that Mironov's speech to the Legislative Assembly simply confused him.
 "I just don't understand how Mironov can be for the idea now, when he was against it when it was Yakovlev's idea to move [the gubernatorial] elections forward in 1999," Afanasyev said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "He labeled it as illegitimate at the time. I have a feeling that our City Charter is made of rubber. ... The City Charter says that the governor's term is four years, but here we have our comrade, Mironov, saying that now it is possible to do something different. I wish I could understand this mess."

TITLE: Chechen PM on Abductions
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Chechen Prime Minister Anatoly Popov said Thursday that prosecutors had investigated hundreds of kidnapping cases involving Russian troops last year, but said the figures were "nothing out of the ordinary."
 
Popov said he was not familiar with a report by Human Rights Watch, claiming that 1,123 civilians were killed last year. The New York-based organization said 70 civilians were killed and more than 100 disappeared in the first two months of 2003.
 Popov said a report by Chechen prosecutors showed more than 500 kidnapping cases in 2002, including 300 believed to have been committed by service personnel.
 "Yes, there are crimes, there are kidnappings, and some of them involve servicemen," he said at a news conference. "There's nothing out of the ordinary in that report."
 Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said 720 murders were registered and 565 kidnapping cases were opened, Interfax reported. He said a report in the French newspaper Le Monde claiming the bodies of nearly 3,000 people had been found in mass graves in Chechnya was vastly inflated. To get such a figure, "every murdered person would have had to die five times," he said in remarks broadcast on TVS television. Le Monde did not say over what period the alleged victims had died.
 Human-rights groups say most civilians who disappear are killed, so Fridinsky's figures did not directly contradict Human Rights Watch's claims. Fridinsky said 156 murders took place in the first three months of 2003. 
 Meanwhile, Chechnya's deputy prime minister, Movsar Khamidov, denied reports that three teenagers who were found dead on the outskirts of Grozny this week had been kidnapped by soldiers. He said they had been killed by a land mine, Interfax reported.
 Meanwhile, Popov said the situation in the region had improved since the constitutional referendum last month.
 "Six months ago, the streets were empty after dark. Now it gets dark, and public transportation is still running, people are going about their affairs," he said.
 But Rudnik Dudayev, chief of Chechnya's Security Council, said the situation had worsened and 26 people had disappeared since the vote, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Hermitage Reveals 300th Plans
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: State Hermitage Museum Director Mikhail Piotrovsky announced on Wednesday that the museum will be open round the clock on May 27 this year as a present to St. Petersburg on the day the city celebrates its 300th anniversary.
 
Piotrovsky also said that the Hermitage will be letting in visitors free of charge, with the exception of tour groups, on May 27 through 29.
 "We wanted to give St. Petersburg an original present for its birthday, and we believe that having the museum open at night is a beautiful gift," Piotrovsky said at a press conference.
 Piotrovsky also announced the completion of a new building to house part of the Hermitage's collection, which numbers an incredible 3 million items. Located at Staraya Derevnya, in the north of the city, the new complex will be open this year.
 In addition, extensive renovation work on the Hermitage's famous 1812 Gallery is scheduled for completion on May 8. Other ongoing restoration projects at the museum will also be finished in May.
 "Currently, restoration works are continuing in St. George's Hall, the Jordan Hall and the Venetian Hall. The restoration of the General Staff Building will be complete by October," Piotrovsky said. "Our restoration program has had so much inspiration that it has expanded to the extent that we have even restored things that we hadn't planned to this year."
 Piotrovsky also confirmed that Alexander Sokurov's film "Russky Kovcheg" ("Russian Ark"), a technically groundbreaking feat shot in one take on a digital camera in the Hermitage in December 2001, will be shown several times in the Hermitage Theater on May 27.
 In a recent interview with The St. Petersburg Times, Sokurov admitted that the Hermitage is perhaps his favourite place in St. Petersburg, and also one of the very few things that keeps him in the city.
 "I disagree with people who call St. Petersburg an open-air museum," Sokurov said. "It is not a museum city but, rather, a martyr city, originally built on the bones of hundreds of thousands of people. This legacy is still heavily felt."
 For Sokurov, St. Petersburg today looks rather gloomy as well.
 "The city is magnificent, but poor," he said. "Look at the once glorious, but now dilapidated, mansions in the city center, see the conditions in which people live. It's frightening."
 Last week, the Hermitage also signed an "agreement on cooperation" with the Mariinsky Theater that set out a series of new joint plans to mark St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary.
 According to a statement on the Hermitage's Web site, the agreement includes "a succession of large-scale events in St. Petersburg, other Russian cities and abroad," and demonstrates that the two institutions, while remaining "absolutely autonomous," will "on equal terms realize projects combining music and fine arts." 
 So far, the two institutions' plans include performances and exhibitions to mark the 220th anniversaries of both the Mariinsky and the Hermitage Theater.

TITLE: Criticism Becomes Praise As Gryzlov Visits Again
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Officials with the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Department of the Ministry of the Interior (GUVD) may be believing the old saying that three is a charm after a visit by Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov on Wednesday.
 
In his third visit to appraise security preparations for the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations since the beginning of the year, Gryzlov said that significant progress had been made since his last visits, in March. After both of his earlier reviews, Gryzlov had criticized the work of the GUVD.
 The interior minister also said that plans had been finalized for supplementing local GUVD personnel with officers from other regions during the jubilee celebrations.
 But not everyone involved is happy, as a number of heads of department have been replaced and others are under investigation by the Interior Ministry for poor performance.
 Gryzlov said that a few problems still had to be cleaned up, but that most security targets set at a meeting during his last visit had finally been met. 
 "The last two meetings had an exclusively critical tone. ... At today's meeting, we noted a number of positive developments present in relation to carrying out action plans set last month," Gryzlov said at a Wednesday press conference. "We have also determined why certain aspects of the plan have not been implemented, and we know how to correct the situation."
 Gryzlov also said that he was satisfied with the work of local law-enforcement agencies, pointing out that a number of serious crimes had been solved and that the number of crimes registered in the city had dropped by 27.8 percent, compared to the same period last year.
 As an example of a high-profile case that he said had been solved, Gryzlov offered the example of the arrest of members of the "Naumov Gang," who are believed to be part of the Tambovskaya organized crime group. Gryzlov did not say how many people had been detained.
 During his March visit, Gryzlov had warned that some GUVD officials would be removed from their posts if their job performance didn't improve and, on Wednesday, he revealed that the earlier statement had not been an idle threat.
 "The head of the Interior Ministry Administration in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast has relieved the heads of the GUVD departments for the Vasilievsky Island and the Kurort districts of their posts. The work of the head of the Moscow district's GUVD department is also presently under investigation," Gryzlov said.
 Even higher up, the GUVD administration for the entire Northwest Region will also be getting a new chief, but Gryzlov said that Boris Uyemlyanin, who presently occupies the post, decided to step down of his own volition.
 "Uyemlyanin himself didn't think that his performance in the job had been satisfactory, and submitted a request to be transferred to another assignment," Gryzlov said. "I have reviewed the request, and documents to grant the request, as well as to name his successor, who has already been chosen, are presently waiting for the president's signature."
 He added that the orders were likely to be signed by Thursday.
 Gryzlov's comments on the reinforcements that will be sent from other regions to bolster the local GUVD staff, who will be called on to help ensure the safety of 45 foreign leaders, 15,000 officials guests and an expected 2 million tourists in May and June, came as good news for local GUVD officials.
 "There are under 35,000 police officers for the whole of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, which is not enough to ensure security in the city," Pavel Rayevsky, the spokesperson for the GUVD, said last week. "This is why thousands of police officers are being sent to St. Petersburg from other regions for the celebrations."
 Gryzlov said Wednesday that over 3,700 extra police officers will be shifted to St. Petersburg from other regions to help patrol the streets during the festivities. He was quick to add that the ministry did not foresee any adverse results in the regions sending the personnel, describing the general crime situation in Russia as "stable."
 Although most of the promised help from other regions won't arrive until just before the dates for the celebrations, some support forces have already started their work here.
 "Since April 4, 300 extra divisional inspectors from different regions of Russia have been working in St. Petersburg," Gryzlov said on Wednesday.
 Aside from the police officers sent to work in the city from other regions, Gryzlov said contingency plans exist to bring additional reinforcements to St. Petersburg, if necessary.
 "These reserves, taken from the police special forces, will be ready for combat. They will be called to St. Petersburg if they are needed, but I hope this won't happen," the minister said. 
 One of the main preventive measures now facing local law-enforcement bodies ahead of the festivities, according to Gryzlov, is finding and monitoring illegal immigrants living in the city. As many as 28,000 people were identified by the police as living in the city in violation of immigration laws in the first three months of the year, and court decisions for the deportation for a number of these have already been delivered.
 "The first big plane taking illegal immigrants out of the country will be taking off soon," Gryzlov said.
 But he dismissed rumors that the Interior Ministry would try to force homeless people out of the city during the celebrations.
 "Deportation is reserved for illegal immigrants," he said. "Homeless people, on the contrary, need to be helped."

TITLE: Limonov Claims Victory Against the FSB
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: SARATOV, Central Russia - A Saratov court cleared writer and National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov of all terrorism charges Tuesday, sentencing him instead to four years in prison for ordering the purchase of six Kalashnikov assault rifles.
 
In a sharp rebuke to prosecutors and FSB investigators, Judge Alexander Matrosov demanded that the Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor General's Office discipline their investigators for putting on a weak case filled with inconsistencies and fabrications.
 Limonov, 60, declared the verdict a victory for the Russian people over the FSB.
 "I have never seen such a precedent," he said, standing in the steel defendant's cage in the courtroom. 
 "After this trial, the FSB won't be able to repeat anything like this with other people," he said. "I believe that all Russian citizens have won a victory in this court today."
 Prosecutors said they were considering whether to appeal.
 The court found Limonov guilty of illegally acquiring weapons and leading an organized-crime group. He was arrested April 7, 2001, and the 13 months he has spent in pre-trial detention will be shaved off his sentence. He can file for parole in 19 months.
 Also Tuesday, the Saratov court sentenced Sergei Aksyonov, the 32-year-old editor of the National Bolshevik Party's Limonka newspaper, to three years and six months in prison on charges of illegally acquiring weapons and being a member of an organized-crime group.
 Party members Dmitry Karyagin and Vladimir Pentelyuk, both 26, were sentenced to 30 months each for arms possession. They were caught red-handed after buying four rifles in Saratov in March 2001. Party member Oleg Laletin, 31, got 27 months for buying two more rifles in Saratov in March 2001, while member Nina Silina, 26, was found guilty of delivering money from Aksyonov to Karyagin to buy the weapons. She got 28 months.
 Journalists and party members - mostly young people in black clothes and heavy boots - packed the courtroom Tuesday. Also in attendance were two State Duma deputies, outspoken Communist Vasily Shandybin and former Vladivostok Mayor Viktor Cherepkov.
 A dozen court guards were reinforced with a dozen OMON officers armed with batons and a black rottweiler dog.
 The 194-page verdict took five hours to read. Limonov and Aksyonov, who appeared downcast when the hearing started, began to relax and smile as Matrosov droned on, announcing the dismissal of charges that they had plotted to overthrow the government, created illegal armed formations and planned terrorist acts.
 The court found that Karyagin and Laletin met with Limonov in his Moscow apartment in February 2001 and he ordered them to buy weapons. The apartment had been bugged by the FSB a month earlier with the Moscow City Court's approval.
 Aksyonov coordinated the details of the purchases and provided the money, Matrosov said.
 Limonov and Aksyonov denied this, but the judge said that the evidence showed otherwise.
 The five male defendants, who all wore black, listened to the verdict from the defendant's cage. Silina, a petite woman with a boyish haircut, stood outside the cage under the close eye of a female police officer.
 During his months in custody, Limonov has traded his trademark crewcut for a gray ponytail and imperial beard. In a short break before the sentence was read, he leaned against the cage and twirled his thin moustache with a pleased expression on his face.
 He had reason to be pleased. State prosecutor Sergei Verbin earlier had demanded that he be given a 14-year sentence, most of which stemmed from the terrorism charge. Verbin had asked for 12 years for Aksyonov.
 Limonov and Aksyonov were accused of masterminding a plan to carry out an armed invasion of northern Kazakhstan, which is populated mostly by ethnic Russians. The plan was described in several articles in Limonka and newsletters circulated among party members in 1999 and 2000. Limonov and Aksyonov denied drafting the plan, and testified in court that they had never called for the violent overthrow of the government.
 The court said that investigators failed to prove Limonov and Aksyonov had put together the plan, and their witnesses could not confirm that the two men had publicly called for the overthrow of the government.
 Investigators offered the court audiotapes, secretly recorded in Limonov's Moscow apartment in early 2001, on which he discussed an invasion of Kazakhstan with party members. The court called the conversations "common theoretical talks."
 Only one witness, party member Artyom Akopyan, testified on alleged terrorist acts, saying Limonov ordered him to look for places for guerilla bases along the border of the Altai region and Kazakhstan. Limonov denied this, and none of the witnesses who testified in court could confirm the order, the judge said.
 Akopyan was among the party members arrested with Limonov on an Altai farm in April 2001. He was later released by the FSB, and criminal charges against him were dropped.
 Judge Matrosov said that the National Bolshevik Party's acquisition of guns did not necessarily mean it was planning terrorist acts or building illegal armed formations, as investigators had insisted.
 He rejected a request by prosecutors to give suspended sentences to Karyagin and Laletin, saying that they needed to be punished for acquiring weapons. Limonov's lawyer said earlier that the two men were cooperating with investigators.
 Matrosov said he decided to hand out relatively light sentences because the defendants had been so closely monitored by the FSB that they had never really posed a threat to anyone.
 After he finished reading the verdict, Matrosov slammed the prosecutors and investigators for their handling of the case. He said court papers filed by investigators to prove their case against Limonov had contained a lot of information unrelated to the case and some of it had been grossly manipulated to make matters look worse than they actually were. 
 "The 12 investigators have not done a good job, despite the lengthy investigation," he said.
 Matrosov said he would ask FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate the officers who had put together the case and report to the Saratov court any disciplinary action that had been taken against them. 
 Prosecutor Verbin said that the evidence presented in court had been sketchy because the party's plan was uncovered at an early stage.
 Limonov's lawyer, Sergei Belyak, said he was satisfied with the verdict.
 "There weren't any political charges left in it, and my client has been held for two years for political reasons. Arms trade is a banal crime in Russia that is usually decided in lower courts in about a month," he said. "In Limonov's case, the guns purchase was just a pretext by the FSB to frame him and punish him for his views."
 Limonov has written numerous books and articles critical of the government, and his party has gained notoriety for holding violent demonstrations in other former Soviet republics, ostensibly to defend the rights of ethnic Russians living there.

TITLE: Bank Raid Symbolic of Lawless City
AUTHOR: By Chris Tomlinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD - A riot broke out at a Baghdad bank Thursday after thieves blew a hole in the vault and dropped children in to bring out fistfuls of cash. U.S. troops arrested the thieves and removed $4 million in U.S. dollars for safekeeping.
 
The incident - part of the lawlessness that has broken out in Baghdad with the fall of former President Saddam Hussein's regime - took place at a branch of the al-Rashid Bank. As word spread that the robbery was under way, many Iraqis gathered, demanding that the thieves hand over the money. Many of them had accounts at the bank.
 "These people want the money and they believe it is rightfully their money, but they don't understand that the proper distribution is not first-come, first-served," said U.S. Army Colonel Philip DeCamp, a battalion commander.
 Two men with Kalashnikov rifles shot over the heads of the crowd and ran for a nearby bridge. As the crowd grew larger and more agitated, a U.S. special-operations patrol called in reinforcements, and an Army platoon arrived.
 The soldiers arrested a dozen men inside the building, several of them teenagers. As the Americans brought out the thieves, most of the crowd cheered, chanting, "Good, good, mister!" while the parents of the teenagers wept and begged the soldiers to release them.
 At one point, about 1,000 civilians surged around the 16 soldiers trying to secure the bank building. The soldiers cocked their rifles and charged at a group of men to get them to back away from their Bradley fighting vehicles.
 One special-operations officer found a resident who spoke English and had him use a loudspeaker to calm the crowd and ask them to move away from the troops. After the troops spread concertina wire around the bank entrance, most of the Iraqis wandered away.
 DeCamp ordered that a hole in the vault be enlarged and that the U.S. and Iraqi currency be removed and taken to his base for safekeeping.
 Troops blew open the vault with C-4 explosives, finding about $4 million in $100 bills, sequentially numbered in Federal Reserve wrappers and stacked in bricks of $10,000 each. Soldiers put the money in burlap bags and took it away.

TITLE: Banking Giants Aiming at Retail Primacy
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The world's largest financial retailer and the leading domestic commercial bank are taking the battle for primacy in Russia's booming retail-lending market to a new level.
 
On Wednesday, in what company chairperson Mikhail Fridman called the beginning of "a revolution" in Russian banking, Alfa Bank unveiled its ambitious Alfa Express project to open dozens of full-service, modern retail centers in the capital and throughout the country over the next several years. The move came a day after retail newcomer Citibank, a subsidiary of U.S. giant Citigroup, launched its first unsecured-loan products.
 "This project is not only crucial to the future of Alfa Bank, but it can be considered a revolution for the local banking sector in general," Fridman told reporters.
 Fridman said that the market for corporate banking has already been divvied up, making growth in that direction practically impossible.
 "The growth potential of the retail market is unlimited."
 After spending some 18 months and $40 million on the Alfa Express project, including infrastructure and advice from Western consultants McKinsey and Accenture, the bank is ready to offer Russians the best possible retail services available, Fridman said.
 The target is a consumer credit market that is growing exponentially. Consumer lending was virtually nonexistent just a few years ago and has ballooned from total lending of some 10 billion rubles at the beginning of 1999 to more than 120 billion rubles now, said Richard Hainsworth, banking analyst at Renaissance Capital.
 "With interest rates falling and consumer confidence rising, the most obvious constraint is the availability of credit providers," Hainsworth said in a research note to clients on Wednesday.
 Ironically, the man hired by Alfa Bank to create Alfa Express is the same man credited with making Citibank a retail force in Poland.
 Maciej Lebkovski spent years building up the retail operations of Poland's Handlowy bank, which Citibank bought in 2001. Now, as the driving force behind Alfa Express, Lebkovski, who is deputy board chairperson of Alfa Bank, sees Citibank as his main competitor.
 Lebkovski said that the bank is targeting a broad range of clients, from low-income students to small and medium-size companies and wealthy individuals. Like Citibank, he said, Alfa Express gives its retail clients access to a wide variety of retail products and plans to launch telephone and Internet services later this year.
 "We already have 11 branches in Moscow and are planning to open 10 to 15 more by the end of this year," Lebkovski said. "We will also expand into the regions starting next year."
 Alfa Bank, which has more than 450,000 retail clients in 50 regions and $1 billion in deposits, expects its share of the retail market, which is dominated by state-owned Sberbank, to at least double from the current 3 percent within the next three years.
 Citibank, which has opened 8,000 accounts and 26 mini-outlets since it launched its retail operations in Moscow in December, welcomed the competition.
 "We think that our entrance to the retail market made other banks improve their services and move faster in the same direction," a Citibank spokesperson said, adding that Citibank views Alfa Bank as one of its main competitors.
 The banks said, however, that they are targeting different clients and have different goals, and analysts agreed.
 "Citibank will never consider the Russian market a priority," Fridman said, adding that Alfa is ready to fight for supremacy in its home market.
 "Sberbank remains the major constraint to the development of retail business by commercial banks in Russia," Fridman said, referring to Sberbank's privileged position as the only bank whose deposits are guaranteed by the government.
 "But we hope that situation will change as banks improve the quality of their services," he added.
 Vladimir Savov, senior banking analyst at Brunswick UBS, said he doubts that Citibank will be able to attract the same broad range of clientele in Russia that it has in the United States.
 "Citibank is mostly targeting up-market clients with high incomes, and unlike Alfa Bank, it will be reluctant to expand into the regions," he said.

TITLE: Italian Firm Keeping Petersburg's Water Hot
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Italian-based company Merloni TermoSanitari put two new assembly lines for Ariston water heaters into operation in Vsevolozhsk, in the Leningrad Oblast, last week, and Francisco Stefanelli, Merloni's director for CIS countries said that the firm also plans to begin construction of a water-heater-production facility at the same site by the end of the year.
 
The two new assembly lines, able to turn out 300,000 water heaters under the Ariston brand name per year, are located on a property rented from the Russky Diesel company, located next to the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk.
 While the site is presently only assembling the units, using components manufactured in Italy, Stefanelli said that the future plant will carry out the full range of production of the heaters.
 At present, Merloni plans to assemble 200,000 water heaters, with capacities ranging from 10 to 100 liters, which will be distributed for sale in Russia, the CIS and the Baltic States.
 "The second phase of the project is the construction of our own plant, which is due to be started in 2003 and should be completed in 2004," said Lidia Yefimova, the company's local spokesperson. "The new facility will produce 500,000 water heaters per year, which can be expanded to 1 million units."
 Merloni says that the total cost of the project will be about 26 million euros and that the company will eventually employ 450 workers in the region.
 Although the Leningrad Oblast has enjoyed notable success in attracting foreign companies to build production facilities there, Merloni's investment is something new.
 "Merloni is the first Italian investor in Leningrad Oblast but, hopefully, not the last," Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov said in a telephone interview last week. "We've met with several other Italian companies and have got the general impression that they are interested in launching production facilities on existing production sites."
 "They generally note that the transport infrastructure, port facilities and the attitude of the local administration are advantages to setting up here," he added.
 Merloni TermoSanitari, a subsidiary of Merloni, operates 14 plants worldwide (six in Italy and one each in India, Malaysia and China), employing 6,300 workers in total. The company produces boilers, water heaters, air conditioners, bath and shower equipment and had revenues of one billion euros in 2002.
 Merloni TermoSanitari is Europe's third-largest water heater and heating-equipment manufacturer and has a 40-percent share of the market in Russia, having sold 300,000 water heaters in the country in 2002.
 Merloni's chief competitors in Russia include Lorenzo, another Italian company that sells Thermex and ISEA brand water heaters here, and a British company, Wester.
 Last year, foreign companies accounted for about 90 percent of sales in the water-heater market, which has expanded rapidly in recent years. Market sales have quadrupled since 1998, jumping by 100 percent last year alone.

TITLE: Kasyanov: Economy Is Surging
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The economy surged by 6.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to 3.7 percent in the same period in 2002, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said at the Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
 
"The results of the first quarter are cheering. This is a heartening indicator. But the positive trend could be lost without further systematic action," Kasyanov was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 Similar GDP growth was last seen at the end of 2000 - and the economy was shrinking at the time. In addition, growth that year was the result of an economic rebound from the 1998 financial crisis, while the 6.4 percent this year is pure growth, economists said.
 "The economy is flying," said Al Breach, chief economist with Brunswick UBS.
 "Fate is giving Russia a gift for the third time in the five years since the 1998 economic crisis," said Alexei Moiseyev, economist with Renaissance Capital. The gift Moiseyev is referring to is negative interest rates. Banks tie interest rates to the ruble-exchange rate, and with high inflation factored in, factories are ending up with free money to invest into production.
 "It's rather simple. You borrow at 12 percent to build another beer-producing line, and beer prices get 15 percent more expensive due to inflation. This is a very attractive option," Moiseyev said.
 Industrial production shot up 6 percent in the first quarter of this year, Kasyanov said, citing State Statistics Committee figures.
 The previous two "gifts" that stimulated the post-1998 economy were the relatively long-lasting effects of the ruble devaluation and three years of high international oil prices.
 The economy grew 4.3 percent in 2002, compared to 5 percent in 2001 and 9 percent in 2000. The government is forecasting annual growth of 4 percent to 5 percent this year and next.
 Moiseyev said the current availability of money for investment is priming big companies for further growth. Worryingly, however, the small and medium-size businesses that fuel the economies of developed countries are being left out of the windfall, he said.
 Kasyanov stressed at the Cabinet meeting that industrial growth was not tied only to the expanding oil sector.
 "In addition to ongoing growth in oil and heavy metals, high growth rates were registered in machine-building and a number of other sectors including a range of processing industries," he said.
 Kasyanov, however, noted that light industry is continuing to lag behind. The sector soared in 1999 and 2000, fueled by a trend of heavy import substitution after the ruble devaluation.
 Breach said first-quarter growth was also linked to strong domestic demand, which has been steadily growing due to political and economic stability.
 "Russians are starting to feel comfortable with investing savings domestically," Breach said.
 In another sign of a strengthening economy, Russian stock markets on Wednesday saw their highest trading volumes since the start of this year. Trading volumes on the MICEX and RTS and in ADRs exceeded half a billion dollars. The Central Bank's reserves are also on the rise, swelling $1.8 billion to $57.6 billion in the week ending April 11. 
 The ruble gained 10 kopeks this week, to 31.18 rubles to the U.S. dollar.
 Breach said ruble appreciation could have a positive effect on the economy if it forces factories to improve productivity in order to survive and withstand competition from imports.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Cleaning Up
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Henkel-Era plant in Tosno, in the Leningrad Oblast, a subsidiary of German-based Henkel, has invested 1.7 million euros in a new production line for cleaning liquids.
 The company is planning to launch production of a number of new product brands at the site, including Vernal fabric softer, the Pril line of detergents and the Pemolux Gel and Bref brands of cleansers, according to Yulia Krashennikova, a company spokesperson. Presently, these brands are imported.
 Henkel's investment in Russia totals $50 million at present and the company accounts for a 25-percent share of the Russian cleaning-substances market, with revenues of 3.5 billion rubles (about $110 million) last year.
 
 
<b>New Canning Facility
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Product Terminals, the parent company of the St. Petersburg Fishing Port, last week launched a canning facility for herring with a price tag of 15 million rubles ($480,000).
 While the plant is presently working at only 30 percent of its capacity, it will ultimately be able to turn out 560,000 cans of herring per month, according to Vladimir Artyukhov, the company's marketing director.
 Along with canned herring, Product Terminals produces 1.3 million cans of seafood combined, also including squid and cod.
 
 
<b>Vimpelcom Starts Work
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Vimpelcom, Russia's No. 2 mobile-phone operator, providing services under the Beeline brand name, has officially started operating in St. Petersburg, the company's vice-president, Alexei Mishenko, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
 Vimpelcom has installed 110 base stations in the city and is providing service on the GSM 900/1800 MHz frequencies.
 According to Mishenko, Beeline is offering local and federal numbers and prepaid as well as monthly billing systems.
 Vimpelcom has introduced three kinds of payment schemes, with free incoming intra-network calls and $0.01 per-minute outgoing intra-network calls - just as Beeline's major competitor, and Russia's largest operator, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), did when it entered the St. Petersburg market in December 2001.
 Beeline has opened two service offices, one on Konnogvardeisky Prospect and the other on Moskovsky Prospect, and more than 1,000 mobile dealer centers will also provide Beeline services.
 According to Andrei Yeliseyev, Vimpelcom's Northwest Region director, the company has invested $50 million in network development in the region. Vimpelcom, backed by Telenor of Norway, is currently operating in 43 regions of Russia, with 6 million subscribers.
 
 
<b>Gazprom Loans
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - Gazprom is preparing to draw a two-year syndicated loan for $100 million to $150 million, a source close to the company said Thursday, Dow Jones reported.
 The loan would be one of few international borrowings by Russian companies not to be secured against export earnings, according to the source. Despite this, the Dow Jones source said the company can still expect to issue at around 400 base points over the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, for dollars, a rate that compares favorably with Gazprom's recent 10-year global-bond issue, which was launched at around 575 base points over the corresponding U.S. Treasury benchmark. 



TITLE: Will There Be Any Proper Election Coverage?
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Pribylovsky
TEXT: SOMETIME in the next few weeks, the State Duma is to debate a package of amendments to Russia's laws on the mass media and charitable organizations, as well as to the Criminal and Administrative codes. The amendments, sponsored by President Vladimir Putin, are intended to bring these laws and codes into line with the new law on the basic guarantees of voters' rights.
 
Horse-trading continues before the Duma votes on these amendments in their crucial second reading, but all of the big issues have already been settled in negotiations with the Central Election Commission.
 Proposed changes to Russia's mass-media law would give the government broader powers to stop the presses. If a publication or other media outlet commits two violations during a single election campaign, federal or regional elections commissions can file a complaint with the Press Ministry, calling for the offender to be shut down until after the election campaign is over.
 The voters' rights law, passed last summer, prohibits electioneering during a campaign that is not paid for by a party or candidate with official campaign funds. &quot;Electioneering&quot; under the new law includes speculation as to what would happen if a particular candidate or party were to win or lose, reporting on a candidate outside the scope of his or her professional activities, and any &quot;other actions&quot; that could influence the voters. In other words, the new election law prohibits not just &quot;unauthorized&quot; electioneering, but all independent political analysis for the duration of an election campaign.
 The new law forbids giving more space or airtime to one candidate than to others, and requires that reports of campaign events be presented without bias or commentary.
 In theory, the law has been in force since last November. But, to date, these provisions have not been enforced because the law contains no mechanism for punishing offending journalists and media outlets.
 Putin's amendments would fill this gap.
 One loophole does remain, however. Anyone not on a candidate's payroll will still be able to write about elections on Internet sites that are not registered as Internet publications. This would still be a violation of election law, of course, but the president hasn't come up with a punishment for it yet.
 Central Election Commission chairperson Alexander Veshnyakov has emphatically denied that recent legislation governing elections in Russia strikes a blow against the freedom of speech. &quot;It strikes a blow all right,&quot; he said, &quot;but against the freedom to lie, against negative campaigning and dirty money.&quot;
 When journalists and average voters talk about violations of voters' rights, they usually focus on how the ruling elite misuses the power of office (or &quot;administrative resources&quot;) to ensure victory for the &quot;party of power&quot; and its candidates. And when members of the elite talk about the shortcomings in the electoral process, they angrily denounce so-called &quot;negative campaigning.&quot; By &quot;negative campaigning&quot; the ruling elite always means compromising information about its candidates, whether that information is true or false.
 Abuse of the power of office, especially when it involves vote-tampering and removing candidates from the ballot, directly violates voters' rights. Negative campaigning, even in its most egregious forms, such as libel, does not. It more likely violates the ruling elite's monopoly on tendentious campaign coverage.
 Independent candidates, by definition, have no access to &quot;administrative resources.&quot; When things get nasty they prefer to &quot;go negative&quot; or buy votes. The establishment also buys votes, but it doesn't just hand out cash on street corners. It buys votes indirectly, misusing the power of office, as when the administration of the Krasnodar region allocated 300 million rubles (about $9.5 million) for road repair and construction of a new stadium in Novorossiisk in order to give their candidate a boost in the mayoral election.
 In the Duma's first reading of Putin's proposed amendments, the four factions that enjoy &quot;administrative resources&quot; - Unity, Fatherland-All Russia, People's Deputy and Russia's Regions - voted to ban &quot;negative campaigning.&quot;
 This means that, during election campaigns, the mass media could no longer independently remind voters which candidates voted to legalize the importation of nuclear waste, or to evict people from public housing for falling behind on their bills, or to raise phone rates, or against raising the minimum wage. That sort of information could only be printed or aired in campaign ads paid for by the candidates and their parties.
 On the other hand, the proposed amendments effectively legalize the abuse of power. Officials who get involved in ballot-stuffing or removing their competitors from the ballot could be fined, it's true. But the fines - a few thousand rubles-are merely symbolic. Were a candidate to get up to the same kind of monkey business, he or she would face a fine and up to four years in prison. The same applies to election-commission employees - the very people who would be called on to do the dirty work for those higher up the political food chain.
 As Duma Deputy Boris Nadezhdin joked, governors can now pay their fines for abusing the power of their office up front, and then &quot;do whatever they like.&quot;
 According to the letter of the law, television programs like &quot;Besplatny Syr&quot; (&quot;Free Cheese), &quot;Tushite Svet&quot; (&quot;Turn Out the Light&quot;) and &quot;Odnako&quot; (&quot;However&quot;), which deal with politics, would have to be pulled off the air for the entire upcoming Duma-election campaign, and again for the presidential campaign next spring.
 But, since all laws in Russia are enforced selectively, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Mikhail Leontyev's program, &quot;Odnako,&quot; will stay on the air, while Viktor Shenderovich's &quot;Besplatny Syr&quot; will get the hook. It should be obvious that the Central Election Commission will turn a blind eye to slanted coverage of incumbents backed by the &quot;party of power&quot; on state television, and that it will crack down on independent Internet publications for posting &quot;compromising&quot; material &quot;not related to the candidate's professional duties.&quot;
 You may recall that in the election campaigns of 1999 and 2000, Veshnyakov muzzled opposition journalist Alexander Minkin, even though he lacked the legal means to do so, while allowing &quot;party of power&quot; pit bulls Leontyev and Sergei Dorenko total freedom of expression, and how Veshnyakov cynically announced that Putin's announcement of his &quot;personal&quot; decision to vote for the Unity party was not a misuse of the power of his office. In fact, he said that, by reporting the announcement, the press had violated the president's freedom of speech.
 The new legislation affords grim prospects for satire, political analysis and independent journalism. The only real hope is that, in line with the old Russian tradition, the severity of the new laws will be mitigated by their non-enforcement.
 
 <i>Vladimir Pribylovsky, the president of the Moscow-based Panorama think tank, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Give Them Bread and They'll Be the Circus
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: EARLIER this winter (I will start thinking of what we have now as spring when the temperature manages to get above ten degrees for three days in a row), I was introduced to a colleague who told me that she had just started working for a new television station set up to provide coverage of news related directly to the Northwest Region and the Baltic States.
 
Her use of the term &quot;Northwest Region&quot; immediately piqued my curiosity, as I was pretty sure that the Presidential Representative's Office would somehow be involved. It didn't take me long to find out.
 &quot;We're going to work under [then Presidential Representative in the Northwest Region Viktor] Cherkesov,&quot; she said.
 The Roman poet Juvenal suggested that providing &quot;bread and circuses&quot; was the best way to keep any constituency happy. Pension payments in Russia are enough to cover the cost of bread, if little else, but the government has excelled in giving us circuses. There are 16 television channels broadcasting in St. Petersburg. The messages we get from much of our news is the one they want us to hear and, soon, Russian-speaking residents will have another opportunity to keep up to date with what the Kremlin expects them to believe.
 Because of the situation that already exists, it doesn't really change things much in the television-media field that another Kremlin-controlled station is joining the club. Rossiya and ORT are both government-owned and run, NTV and Channel 6 both have to step lightly when interpreting cues from the Kremlin and Channel 5, presently the domain of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's crew in Smolny, may, depending on Yakovlev's successor, may also soon be looking to Moscow for programming tips.
 Even TVS, which is the only one of the major stations that can claim some degree of independence, is, according to a report in the daily Izvestiya, about to fall under control of Alexander Lyubimov, who the paper described as the &quot;presidential representative at the channel.&quot;
 &quot;During the next elections, Alexander Lyubimov will ... be able to provide control over the team of TVS journalists, including Yevgeny Kiselyov, to make sure that the political position [of the channel] is correct,&quot; Izvestiya wrote Tuesday this week.
 Needless to say, this little revelation depressed me a bit.
 It was particularly disturbing after I had read, in the same edition, an interview with Lyubimov's father, Mikhail, a former intelligence officer, who tried to assure the public that there is nothing wrong with the situation.
 &quot;I wouldn't even label RTR as 'representing the Kremlin.' There is nothing wrong with it showing [President Vladimir] Putin, and I think that it is self-sufficient enough. TVS and NTV are even more so,&quot; the elder Lyubimov was quoted as saying. &quot;Of course, it takes the government's position into consideration - is there any country where they don't? The United States, for example? There, you can find 100 copies of some leaflet that opposes the official line, but only 100 people end up reading them.&quot;
 I'm not sure that I see the logic in this explanation, but the fact that people think that way doesn't do anything to ease the feeling I have that, soon, there will be nothing even remotely resembling independent news coverage here.
 It seems that everybody here is happier working &quot;under&quot; somebody - it seems to provide a sense of calm, of safety. Everybody has a warm place to eat and a steady source of income. Freud would probably have analyzed it as the result of some kind of yearning to return to the womb.
 Thinking about the situation here reminded me of a meeting I attended between Russian journalists and an editor at the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver daily at which I worked for six months last year. The visiting writers kept asking who financed the paper, not being able to comprehend that the publication turned a profit through advertising sales and a relatively small subscription charge.
 The editor just kept repeating a phrase that was beyond their ability to accept.
 &quot;We earn our money ourselves.&quot;

TITLE: clowns bring a smile to masks
AUTHOR: by John Freedman
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It took a bunch of clowns to salvage the mundane awards ceremony for the ninth annual Golden Mask Festival, honoring productions that premiered during the 2001-2002 season.
 
Moscow artists ran away with the majority of the awards at the 18-day festival, which was held for the first time in St. Petersburg, in honor of the city's 300th anniversary, and luminaries such as directors Kama Ginkas and Lev Dodin, ballerina Ilze Liyepa and actor Alexander Kalyagin were honored for their work.
 But most of the spectators in the sumptuous Mariinsky Theater on Monday night seemed destined to fall asleep until the stage was invaded by the St. Petersburg-based clown outfit Litsedei.
 Their job was modest - to hand out four awards in the category of puppetry - but they noisily marched through the hall and boldly took the stage like conquerors and saviors wrapped into one.
 Ridiculing everyone as they danced, mimed and cut up, the clowns repeatedly attacked Ruslan Kudashov of St. Petersburg's Potudan Theater to keep him from receiving the best puppet director award for &quot;Nevsky Prospekt.&quot; They smothered Svetlana Mikhailova of the Arkhangelsk Puppet Theater with kisses before inundating her in red paper hearts, as she accepted her award for best puppet actor in &quot;Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.&quot; And they set up roving human barricades when a man stepped up to receive the best designer award for &quot;A Winter's Tale&quot; by the Kukolny Dom Theater from Penza - before chasing him away angrily when it turned out he was a stand-in for absent winner Konstantin Melnikov.
 Waging a counterattack, the entire cast of &quot;Nevsky Prospekt&quot; took the stage to receive the award for best puppet show. However, they were no match for the half-dozen Litsedei clowns, who sprayed water on the actors, tugged at their clothes and covered them in colored wigs to the utter delight of the crowd.
 Things were much calmer earlier on, as Moscow systematically hauled in seven of the eight major awards in opera and ballet. Liyepa took best female dancer for her work in the Bolshoi Theater's &quot;The Queen of Spades,&quot; while her partner Nikolai Tsiskaridze won best male dancer. &quot;Roland Petit's Evening of Choreography&quot; at the Bolshoi was named best ballet, but Petit and other nominees were snubbed when the jury declined to bestow the best choreographer award.
 In opera, Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater enjoyed a near sweep with its production of Puccini's opera &quot;Madame Butterfly.&quot; It was honored as best opera and garnered best female singer for Olga Guryakova, best director for Lyudmila Naletova and best designer for Yelena Stepanova.
 Vladimir Ponkin was singled out as best conductor for his work on Berg's opera &quot;Lulu&quot; at Moscow's Helikon Opera. No award was made in the male singer category.
 &quot;Nord Ost,&quot; which was derailed by a terrorist attack last fall, was named best musical. Accepting the award was co-director Georgy Vasilyev, who said it had been important to remount the production after the tragedy to show that &quot;good is stronger than evil not only on stage but in life, too.&quot; The show's star, Yury Mazikhin, was named best male performer in a musical.
 Best female performer went to Teona Dolnikova for her work in &quot;Notre Dame de Paris&quot; at the Moscow Operetta Theater. No award was made for best director of a musical.
 Several heavyweights walked away with awards in drama. Ginkas, who had never won an individual award despite four nominations in the past, finally copped the best director award for his exquisite production of &quot;The Lady With the Lapdog&quot; for Moscow's Theater Yunogo Zritelya. The show also was named best small-stage production.
 Best large-stage production went to &quot;The Moscow Choir,&quot; directed by Dodin and Igor Konyayev for St. Petersburg's Maly Drama Theater - Theater of Europe, while its sublime star, Tatyana Shchuko, was tabbed best actress.
 Kalyagin, chairperson of the Russian Theater Union and a presenter at the ceremony, was named best actor for his comic turn as a clown-like ruler in &quot;Ubu Roi&quot; for Moscow's Et Cetera Theater.
 

 <strong>
The other awards were:
 </strong>y Best Modern Dance Production: &quot;Expectation,&quot; Theater of Modern Dance, Chelyabinsk.
 y Musical Jury Awards (2): &quot;Wedding Cortege,&quot; Choreographical Miniatures Ballet Theater, St. Petersburg; and Svetlana Matveyeva, a singer with the Yekaterinburg Experimental Musical Theater.
 y Critics' Award: &quot;Wanderers and Hussars,&quot; OKOLO Theater, Moscow.
 y Audience Appreciation Prize: &quot;Oblom Off,&quot; Playwright and Director Center, Moscow.
 y Innovation Award: &quot;Sine Loco,&quot; AKhE Theater, St. Petersburg.
 y Best designer, drama: Yury Kharikov, &quot;Mother Courage,&quot; SamArt Theater, Samara.
 y Drama Jury Awards (2): &quot;Oedipus Rex,&quot; Theater on Liteiny, St. Petersburg; Kashtanka,&quot; Theater Yunogo Zritelya, Yekaterinburg.
 y Lifetime Achievement Awards (2): Yury Grigorovich, Lyudmila Zhivykh.
 

 <i>
(See p. ix for a review of the musical-theater prizes awarded.) </i>

TITLE: chaos at skif is all organized, really
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Over the past few years, the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, more popularly known by its abbreviation, SKIF, has established itself as the city's most varied and most chaotic festival of fringe music and arts.
 
The festival, the seventh running of which kicks off at LDM on Thursday, is dedicated to late local pianist Kuryokhin, a member of seminal underground rock band Akvarium in the early 1980s and the founder, in 1984, of Pop Mekhanika, or Pop Mechanics, an eclectic ensemble with a flexible lineup. 
 Kuryokhin died of a rare heart disease in July 1996.
 SKIF's beginnings were rather dramatic. The festival was founded in January 1997 in New York as the Sergei Kuryokhin International Interdisciplinary Festival, or SKIIF, by Russian emigre cellist Boris Rayskin, who played with Pop Mechanics before moving to the United States in 1989. 
 However, Rayskin committed suicide in March 1997, which eventually led to the moving of the festival to St. Petersburg by Kuryokhin's widow, Anastasia Kuryokhina, who formed the Sergei Kuryokhin Foundation to promote it.
 Now in its seventh year, the festival has substantially expanded to include dozens of musical bands, theater troupes and performance artists. The highlights include Dutch drummer Han Bennink, U.S. saxophone player Charles Gayle, Iranian traditional musicians Reza Moafi, Bihnaz Zakiri, Muhamad-Mehdi Kardgar, and Damo Suzuki's Network, a project formed by ex-Can vocalist Suzuki and with Russian musicians.
 &quot;As I see it, there is a qualititive change this year,&quot; the festival's art director, Alexander Kan, said this week. Kan is normally based in London, where he works for the BBC's Russian Service producing the show &quot;Otkrytaya Muzyka&quot; (&quot;Open Music&quot;), but arrived in St. Petersburg for SKIF on Wednesday.
 &quot;In the past, we struggled, we had to send an invitation to every artist but, now, the festival is swamped with requests and proposals,&quot; Kan said. &quot;It's turning into a trademark, and there's more and more interest in it.&quot;
 &quot;One indication of this interest is the SKIF concerts that will take place in Milan in late June and in Berlin in early July,&quot; he said.
 SKIF has developed a reputation as arguably the most disorganized and chaotic musical festival in the world - a performance scheduled for 8 p.m. may start well after midnight, for example, or a band may find its performance postponed from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. and cancel it, as Tequilajazzz did two years ago.
 However, Kan claims it also has its good points.
 &quot;Yes, it can't be like this at other, normal festivals - everything runs on time there - but at other festivals there's not such a buzz, such a thrilling atmosphere as there is at SKIF,&quot; he said. &quot;Here, you never know what will happen in the next moment, and you're in a constant state of nervous excitement. For me, personally, I think it's valuable, it's important.&quot;
 However, Kan concedes that there are different dangers inherent in SKIF's organization.
 &quot;Like a crazed tightrope walker, SKIF balances on a very thin line,&quot; says Kan. &quot;If it steps further to the left, it will fall into utter chaos and confusion, and the festival will die.&quot; 
 &quot;And there is the other danger,&quot; he said. &quot;If it gradually settles down, when everything happens on time and nobody is late, like in Switzerland or Germany, then it will be deadly boring.&quot;
 <i>SKIF7, 7:30 p.m. daily from Apr. 24 through 27 at LDM, 47 Ul. Professora Popva. Links: www.kyryokhin.com.
 </i>
 <strong>
Thursday, April 24
 </strong><i><strong>Concert Hall: </strong></i><i>Experimentum Mundi (Italy), 8 p.m.; Stephan Wittwer (Switzerland), 9:30 p.m.; Zu (Italy), 11 p.m.; Charles Gayle (U.S.), 12:30 a.m.; Tenores de Bitti (Italy), 1:30 p.m.
 </i><i><strong>Rock Stage: </strong></i><i>Skafandr, 7:30 p.m.; Skazy Lesa, 8:30 p.m.; C.W. Moss (Germany), 9:30 p.m.; Sever Combo, 10:30 p.m.; Proiskhozhdeniye Vidov, 11:30 p.m.; Iva Nova, 12:30 a.m.; Maler i Ya (Moscow), 1:30 a.m.; Barocco Flash, 2:30 a.m.; Malenkiye Tragedii (Berlin-Kursk), 3:30 a.m.
 </i><i><strong>Chamber Hall: </strong></i><i>R20, 8 p.m.; Natasha Artyomova, 9 p.m.; MRC (Austria-U.K.), 10 p.m.; Starflesh (Sweden-Finland), 11 p.m.; Jonathan LaMaster (U.S.), midnight; LORO (Denmark), 1 a.m.; al-Sharq (Lebanon-Russia), 2 a.m., Cyclophilidea, 3 a.m.; Vera Dorn Project, 4 a.m.
 </i><strong>Friday, April 25
 </strong><i><strong>Concert Hall: </strong></i><i>Gjallarhorn (Finland), 7 p.m.; SBB (Poland), 8:30 p.m.; Charles Gayle and APosition Orchestra (U.S.-Russia,) 10 p.m.; Wittwer/Pliakas/Wertmueller (Switzerland), 11:30 p.m.; Farlanders (Moscow), 1 a.m.
 </i><i><strong>Rock Stage: </strong></i><i>Shamanada, 7:30 p.m.; Rtut, 8:30 p.m.; Korpus, 2 9:30 p.m.; Bobry (Moscow), 10:30 p.m.; Kuzya Uo i Virtuozy, 11:30 p.m.; The Noise of Time (U.K.-Russia), 12:30 a.m.; 2/5 bz (Turkey), 1:30 a.m.; Huun Huur Tu/Maler i Ya (Tuva-Moscow), 2:30 a.m.; I-Laska, 4 a.m.
 </i><i><strong>Chamber Hall: </strong></i><i>Sentieri Selvaggi (Italy), 7:30 p.m.; Tenores de Bitti (Italy), 9 p.m.; Zu (Italy), 10 p.m.; Yury Sobolev, 11 p.m.; Helfer-Levin Duo (Switzerland), midnight; Polina Runovskaya Project, 1 a.m.; Tri Cheloveka, 2 a.m.; DaDaZu, 3 a.m.; Asia, 4 a.m.
 </i>
 <i>All times subject to change. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The weekend starts strongly with a show by <strong>The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review </strong>at Red Club on Friday. The band failed to appear at PAR.spb in early March as planned - both the club and the band claimed that the other side was to blame - so the Friday show will be a really rare opportunity to see the local band live in its own city.
 
The band mostly performs 1960s ska-jazz covers, but is also fond of adapting more unlikely numbers - such as The Sex Pistols &quot;Anarchy in the U.K.&quot; or a Soviet cartoon ditty - to its style.
 The same night, concerts at PORT and, on a smaller scale, at Manhattan will mark what would be the birthday of the late songwriter <strong>Mikhail &quot;Maik&quot; Naumenko. </strong>Naumenko used to lead R&amp;B band Zoopark, and did much to introduce songwriters as Bob Dylan - then unpopular in Russia - by writing Russian lyrics full of quotes and images from the songs of Dylan, Lou Reed and similar artists.
 Off-the-wall London-based cabaret-blues trio <strong>The Tiger Lillies </strong>will offer the main entertainment in the city by playing two concerts at Red Club on Saturday and Sunday.
 Sergei Shnurov of ska-punk band Leningrad was an early Tiger Lillies fan, admitting he was strongly influenced by the London trio when he wrote Leningrad's breakthrough second album, 1999's &quot;Mat Bez Elektrichestva.&quot;
 But, now, it looks like the two bands have formed something of a mutual-appreciation society, with Lillies' mainstay Martyn Jacques readily mentioning Leningrad as his favorite Russian band.
 &quot;I listened to Leningrad, and I liked their music. [Shnurov] is very funny, I like his voice,&quot; he said. &quot;[It's a] kind of cracked, sort of howling voice, a great voice. [Leningrad is] a lot of fun, it's got energy, quite mad and stuff. I think [that], of the Russian bands I've heard, it's the best one.&quot;
 Meanwhile, <strong>Leningrad, </strong>which seems to be going through an integrity crisis - splitting between being an underground, subversive band that's banned in Moscow and, simultaneously, Russia's biggest-selling act - will appear at an unlikely venue, this time at Papanin nightclub and casino on Moskovsky Prospect on Saturday.
 <strong>SKIF7,</strong> the seventh running of the annual Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, will start on Thursday. The festival, which runs for four days this year, is set to turn the inconveniently located LDM into an enormous, crazy club, with lots of alcohol, cigarette smoke and plenty of very diverse music from obscure local experimental bands to Iranian folk performers.
 The opening night, which is scheduled to encompass 23 acts playing in three different rooms, will be headlined by saxophonist <strong>Charles Gayle, </strong>described as a &quot;forceful, dramatic player in the ferocious sound-and-fury tradition of New York's loft scene.&quot;
 The 64-old musician, who started in the 1960s playing with Pharoah, Archie Shepp and others, then spent years homeless busking in the street, and finally reemerged with a new sound, and a performing style often described as a &quot;sound assault.&quot; As well as playing, he also uses his concerts to share his views about Jesus.
 &quot;There is no player on the scene today with the emotional wallop of Charles Gayle,&quot; wrote Allaboutjazz. com.
 See article, and the first two day's listings, page ii.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: six cheers for the czechs' beer
AUTHOR: by Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Located in the basement of a building behind the scarcely inhabited spit of the Vasilievsky island, the Czech restaurant-bar Bogemius is not the kind of lively beer bar you like to drop into after a hard day's work. But a few hours spent there convinced us that this venue is a very well kept secret. 
 
There might be two explanations why Bogemius was completely deserted when we went there: either St. Petersburgers don't hang out in this part of town on Tuesday evenings, or they don't hang out there at all. Bogemius is indeed a little out of the way, being located under a corner house at a dimly-lit crossing just off Naberezhnaya Makarova. The only sign betraying its existence is a red sign hanging outside. Bogemius' spacious interior was as deserted as the street upstairs, and we took the waiter by surprise when we walked in. We chose a seat next to a large aquarium - the theme here is decidedly marine, with ropes hung around the place and lots of wood.
 The menu was just what I expected from a beer bar: pretty much standard and lacking in healthy, light food. The dishes on the menu are a mix of Czech, Hungarian and general European cuisine, with a few un-Russian dishes containing tripe, heart, liver, and various other internal organs. Staying well away from these, as well as from the three salads, which sounded as though they would be mayonnaise laden, we both opted for fried cheese, which is encountered in every self-respecting Czech bar. My dining companion had the Prague version, for 115 rubles ($3.70), and I the Plzen one, with a little onion, for 130 rubles ($4.15). The fried cheese proved to be a decent accompaniment to the real specialty of Bogemius: its wonderful Czech beers.
 Beers at Bogemius are relatively cheap, considering they are all imported, and the choice is, to say the least, inspiring. 
 We started with light Czech beers on tap, Velvet and Krusovice, respectively 80 rubles ($2.55) for half a liter and 48 rubles ($1.55) for a third of a liter. (I am a bit of a lightweight, so I thought I'd take it easy and go for half portions, which proved to be quite a wise decision.) Both beers were fresh, smooth and creamy to perfection, and went down very well - and very fast. Keeping the menu at hand, we pored once more with delight over the beer selection and ordered another Czech beer on tap, a dark Staropramen, which went for 48 rubles for a third of a liter - and a large Schoefferhofer, a German wheat beer also on tap, for 80 rubles for half a liter. You might have some trouble pronouncing this name, especially if you've already had a few, but don't let that discourage you: This light and fruity beer is delicious. The Staropramen was a success too, with its bitter caramel flavor.
 Our reserved, yet friendly, waiter finally brought our main courses, which took our attention away from the drinks for at least a little while. My dining companion found his Magyar - meaning Hungarian in Hungarian, my erudite companion informed me - goulash (165 rubles, $5.30) &quot;alright,&quot; but seemed bitterly disappointed by his French fries (30 rubles, $0.95), which were most likely of the industrial frozen kind. 
 I was slightly more taken than my companion with my main course, old-Czech style trout with lemon (290 rubles, $9.20). Although its was nothing exceptional, it felt healthy and tasty enough. The fried potatoes that accompanied the dish, for a modest 30 rubles, were fairly banal but also &quot;alright.&quot;
 Considering Bogemius' dessert page is hugely unoriginal - three combinations of peaches, probably out of the can, ice-cream and cream - we decided to skip the sweets and have another few beers instead. As we sat there in silence, blissfully sipping Velvets one after another under the placid gaze of the aquarium's inhabitants, we felt a wave of well-being sweep over us. Despite its empty rooms, banal food and somewhat tacky decoration, one ought to appreciate Bogemius for what it is: a quiet, unpretentious beer haven. 
 
 <i>
Bogemius, 10 Nab. Makarova. Tel.: 323-9286. Open 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (weekdays), 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (weekends). Credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, with lots of beer: 1,261 rubles ($40.40). </i>

TITLE: golden masks lose their shine
AUTHOR: by Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Horse trading is a natural feature of competitions like the Golden Mask regardless of where they are held but, usually, there is tacit agreement between the organizers and the jury about how far the spoils can be divided up among friends without taking merit into consideration. Many of the Golden Masks, Russia's most prestigious performing-arts awards, handed out this year made it painfully obvious that the festival had stepped over that line.
 
For the first time in the Golden Mask's nearly decade-long history, St. Petersburg co-hosted the festival with Moscow, as a gift to the city for its 300th anniversary. Both the opening and closing ceremonies were held here, as well as a full program of all the nominated productions, with only a limited selection shown in the capital. However, it seems that the city paid a high price for the gift, carrying off pitifully few of the masks in the opera and ballet competitions, which, traditionally, it dominates. In addition, although two of the five nominated operas were from companies based outside the two traditional powerhouse cities, only a few scraps were tossed to the provinces, while Moscow enjoyed the prime cuts.
 The Golden Mask is divided into two sections, musical theater and drama theater. The musical theater section is split into opera, ballet, operetta-and-musical and contemporary-dance categories, although no operettas were nominated this year. Drama, meanwhile, includes divisions for normal stage productions - further subdivided into large-stage and small-stage categories - and puppet theaters. There is also an innovation award, plus special jury prizes, an audience appreciation prize, a critics' prize and a lifetime-achievement award.
 Each of the two major categories - musical theater and drama - has its own juries, and it was clear at Monday's closing ceremony that followers of the two have very different interests. Whereas, for the most part, the audience was largely subdued - even bored - there was a moment of vociferous booing when Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater walked off with all the ballet prizes. When it was the turn of the puppet theaters, by contrast, the Litsedei clown troupe brought the audience to life (see article, p. ii).
 That audience members should boo at such a triumphal event is remarkable in itself, but they were provoked by the shocking discrepancy between the quality of the mask-winning productions and that of those that were overlooked. It was symptomatic of the malaise in the competition that, in all of Russia, only one singer - Oleg Videman as Don Jose in the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater's production of Bizet's &quot;Carmen&quot; - was nominated for best male opera singer. Videman was, by any standards, vocally superb, so it was all the more shocking, that he was snubbed by the jury, which decided not to award the prize this year. (There were initially more nominees, but two shows - the Mariinsky's take on Mozart's &quot;Cosi fan tutte&quot; and the joint production of Vincenzo Bellini's &quot;Norma&quot; by the Yerevan Opera and Ballet Theater and Moscow's ABA Studio - were withdrawn for various reasons.)
 Arguably the strongest nominee was the Yekaterinburg Experimental Music Theater's production of Britten's &quot;The Turn of the Screw,&quot; whose very presence in the competition was heroic. Struggling to stay solvent against the odds, the theater sent its vocalists to the Golden Mask, but could not afford to bring its orchestra. Instead, in the week before the competition, conductor Dmitry Lazin worked with the orchestra of St. Petersburg's Zazerkalye Theater, producing a superb result. The sound produced and the balance between singers and orchestra all came off, as did the wonderful orchestral interludes. Ilya Mozaisky's staging showed enormous elegance and good sense, probably on a par with any Western venue. The design and lighting by Lev Katugin and Nina Indrikson, respectively, were exactly right for shifting precisely between images of this world and the nether world, creating a mysterious atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, while the use of video-projected images was tasteful and effective. The libretto was delivered in clear, understandable Russian, conveying the full dramatic content, and the singing itself was perfectly in the spirit of Britten. The production - the first of &quot;The Turn of the Screw&quot; in Russia - proved its worth at the Zazerkalye, where it kept an audience including many children - as usual at the Zazerkalye, founded as a children's theater - spellbound in their seats. The jury on Monday rewarded all this with just a special prize for Svetlana Matveyeva, in the main female role of the governess.
 The other regional opera, the Novosibirsk &quot;Carmen,&quot; staged by St. Petersburg-based Alexei Stepanyuk, should also have been a contender. The production blends modern and traditional elements, transposing the action to 1930s Spain, under the regime of the newly victorious Franco. The stage design, costumes and the psychology of the protagonists were all coherent. Musically, it was solidly sung - with Videman outstanding - while the orchestra, was well rehearsed and attentively conducted by Sergei Kalagin. In short, the production would hold its own on any world-class stage, and is certainly superior to the Mariinsky's production, which is dragged down by vulgarity. None of this, however - nor the fact that the show sold out both the Mariinsky and Moscow's Bolshoi Theater - moved the Golden Mask jury, and &quot;Carmen&quot; came away empty handed.
 Arguably the weakest operas this year came from Moscow, in the shape of the Helikon Opera's take on Berg's &quot;Lulu&quot; and the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko's production of Puccini's &quot;Madame Butterfly.&quot;
 The Helikon Theater's Dmitry Bertman has a reputation as an enfant terrible, but his production of &quot;Lulu&quot; was shocking more for its lack of common sense than its artistic innovation. The staging was tasteless and passe, while mixing amplified voices with unamplified was distinctly unsuccesful. The real problem, however, was that this first Russian staging of Berg's masterpiece made no concessions at all to the audience. The plot of &quot;Lulu&quot; is challenging even when seen with a copy of the libretto to hand or with subtitles, but neither option was made available at the Mussorgsky Theater on Sunday. Needless to say, the quality of the German language in which the opera was sung was so poor as to be incomprehensible. The audience got virtually nothing, therefore, from an opera in which dramatic content counts for at least half the value. It is not surprising that many demanded refunds on their 400-ruble tickets.
 In fairness, Tatyana Kuindzhi, nominated for best female role, has a voice suited to the opera's title character. However, despite being flexible, airy and stylistically appropriate, she lacked volume in the performance at the Mussorgsky, a much bigger venue than the Helikon's home, 200-seat theater. In dramatic terms, Kuindzhi's performance lacked any indication that Lulu is meant to be extremely sexy, portraying her instead as an absolutely sexless little girl. One of Monday's few vindications was that Kuindzhi did not win, beaten by Olga Guriakova in the title role of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko's &quot;Madame Butterfly.&quot; The Helikon did, however, get the mask for best conductor, the honor going to Vladimir Ponkin, a previous mask winner, despite his tedious conducting that lost the point of the first-act orchestral interlude.
 The other Moscow entry, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko's &quot;Madame Butterfly,&quot; compared unfavorably with the final nomination, the Rostov-Na-Donu Musical Theater's production of the same work. The Moscow version was vocally good - Guriakova fully deserved her mask for her beautiful performance - but terrible in terms of scenery, a fact that seemed to escape the jury, which gave all the prizes to the Muscovites and nothing at all to the Rostov theater.
 Specifically, the Moscow production was a bad example of minimalism borrowed from the West, where it is already passe. The curtain comes up on a white boat stage left, a white, bone-like construction on the right that serves as the rice-paper house near Nagasaki that Pinkerton, the central male character, has rented for his bride, the opera's heroine. It was all very stylized, and completely interchangeable with any minimalist production from the time the fad began to recede 10 years ago. The stage direction was similarly minimalist, which is no compliment. The production from Rostov, by contrast, was lavish and inventive, if traditionally conceived. However, it went unrewarded, although whether this was aimed at the theater or St. Petersburg-based director Yury Alexandrov for his decision to offer a likeable, comprehensible production is a matter for debate.
 It is a real pity that the Golden Mask jury has no sympathy for traditionalism, however outstanding. Perhaps the jury members should be taken to see what is going on in the West to shake them out of their complacency. Local fans, meanwhile, will hope that St. Petersburg productions will do better next year - when Moscow has the Golden Mask back on home ground.
 
 
 y y y
 The Mariinsky Theater, absent from the opera competition, was left empty-handed in the ballet section as well, in which Moscow's Bolshoi Theater won most of the awards. (See article, p. ii.) The Mariinsky's &quot;Cinderella&quot; had been nominated for best production, best choreographer (Alexei Ratmansky) and best male and female dancers (Andrei Merkuryev, as the Prince, and Diana Vishnyova, in the title role, respectively).
 
Commenting on the awards, The Moscow Times opera and ballet critic, Raymond Stults, wrote: &quot;With all due respect to the Bolshoi, my vote, had I been on the Golden Mask jury, would have been for &quot;Cinderella&quot; as best production and the same ballet for best work by a choreographer (an award the jury declined to give this year) and best dancing in a female role.&quot;
 &quot;Privileged over the past 50 years and more to have seen the very best in ballet on the stages of Chicago, New York, London and Paris, I cannot recall a production of greater overall beauty than the Mariinsky's &quot;Cinderella.&quot; Throughout its three-act length, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky produced an unbroken succession of classically-based but entirely modern dance steps, wondrously imaginative and always tuned to Prokofiev's score. In the title role, Diana Vishneva moved from rags-to-riches and back again to rags with astonishing brilliance. Though played against the sparest of decor, &quot;Cinderella&quot; proved an utterly magical fairy tale in dance, every bit as appropriate for adults as for children.&quot;
 &quot;The Roland Petit evening at the Bolshoi follows a re-staging of the French choreographer's brief &quot;Passacaille&quot; with an altogether new, hour-long retelling, in brittle, abstract form, of Alexander Pushkin's famous tale &quot;The Queen of Spades,&quot; set to the music of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, the movements played out of order and at unusually slow tempos. The result, without doubt, is highly effective. And one can hardly fault the Golden Mask jury award for naming Tsiskaridze best male dancer for his role as German or Ilze Liepa best female dancer for the grand style in which she played the Countess. Nevertheless, Ratmansky, in his choreography, and Vishneva, in her dancing, offered to me at least something much more fresh and vibrant.&quot;

TITLE: caine stars in quiet masterpiece
AUTHOR: by Stephen Holden
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: The mood of wry disillusion that seeps through the screen adaptation of Graham Greene's novel &quot;The Quiet American&quot; is sounded in the movie's opening moments by the voice of Michael Caine musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 1950's. It is a place, declares his character, Thomas Fowler, where colors and tastes seem sharper than they do elsewhere and where even the rain has a special intensity. People who go to Saigon in search of something, he suggests in a silky murmur, are likely to find it. That something has everything to do with faraway places and a mirage of sex and adventure in an exotic clime.
 
Fowler is a wistfully cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he is reporting on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. His attitude toward the political turmoil swirling around him is studied detachment bordering on disinterest. Only when Fowler is in danger of being summoned home does he bestir himself to go into the field and pursue a story juicy enough to keep him at his post.
 But beneath his worldly facade lurks a streak of romantic fatalism. Fowler is hopelessly besotted with Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), a beautiful former taxi dancer who embodies the Asian feminine stereotype of compliance and impenetrable erotic mystery. Although Phuong lives with Fowler and is financially dependent on him, the relationship can last only as long as he keeps his job. Although he would love nothing more than to take her back to England, his wife adamantly refuses to grant him a divorce.
 Fowler may be the richest character of Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement, whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness. Fowler is the embodiment of a now-faded British archetype: the suave, impeccably well-mannered man of the world who keeps a stiff upper lip and camouflages any inner torment under a pose of amused knowingness.
 Caine, with his hooded snake eyes and his trace of a Cockney accent, lends Fowler (played by Michael Redgrave in an earlier screen adaptation of the novel) an added frisson of rakish insouciance that makes the character all the more intriguing.
 &quot;The Quiet American&quot; is the story of a romantic triangle involving Fowler, Phuong and Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a U.S. intelligence agent operating under the guise of an economic aid worker. Fraser, looking puffy and wide-eyed, plays Pyle as an earnest, gawky naif. It is a brave but uncomfortable performance. Even after his character is revealed to be an American spy who speaks fluent Vietnamese, he makes Pyle's lumbering bluntness appear almost comically oafish.
 The story begins with Pyle's murder, then flashes back to fill in the whys and wherefores. As the film digs into the characters' relationships, it re-examines the notion that the personal is political in the context of 1950's cold war mentality and the slow fade of the British Empire. Fowler and Pyle's friendship, which rests on quaint notions of gallantry and honor among gentlemen, is also a metaphor for competing styles of imperialism, one wearily resigned, the other aggressively intrusive.
 No sooner has Fowler introduced Pyle to Phuong than Pyle falls madly in love with her. Once smitten, Pyle feels no compunction about blurting his feelings about her to Fowler. Pyle's campaign for Phuong has the support of her avaricious older sister Miss Hei (Pham Thi Mai Hoa), who sees him as a bright marital prospect for Phuong.
 After Fowler is caught in a desperate lie and Phuong abandons him to live with Pyle, the two men maintain a civilized friendship. Despite their shared passion for the same woman, the movie implies that both view her as a precious toy who can be bartered in a sporting may-the-best-man-win atmosphere. And in the film's most dramatic scene, Pyle saves his rival's life after the two find themselves stranded on the road between Phat Diem and Saigon and take refuge in a French watchtower raided by Communist forces.
 It could be said that their feelings for Phuong are meant to reflect their countries' different, but equally patronizing attitudes, toward Indochina. Where Fowler, ever the detached journalist, affects indifference to the Vietnamese struggle, Pyle is a meddling anti-Communist zealot who has no qualms about helping foment resistance to Communist forces by funneling weapons to a ruthless Vietnamese warlord (Quang Hai).
 If &quot;The Quiet American&quot; unequivocally views U.S. intervention in Vietnam as an arrogant blunder, the movie, directed by Phillip Noyce from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, doesn't convey much strong political passion. Pyle may be buffoonish, but he's not evil. Although a coda to the movie links the events of the story to U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War a decade later, that afterword seems a convenient formality.
 The movie is ultimately more interested in the characters' relationships than in their politics, and it does a superb job of evoking the psychological world of Graham Greene in which the truth of any situation tends to be hidden and riddled with ambiguities. Because &quot;The Quiet American&quot; is told through Fowler's eyes, its drama is muted. More than once violence explodes on the screen, but it seems to come out of the blue in random bursts. Even then, the film conveys little of the excitement or the sense of historical imperatives that drive a movie like &quot;The Year of Living Dangerously.&quot;
 In burrowing deeply into Fowler's consciousness, however, &quot;The Quiet American&quot; beautifully sustains the mood set by Caine's opening narration. The world as seen through Fowler's eyes may be a shabby paradise on the verge of ruin. But as he ponders his fate under Japanese lanterns at a riverside cafe in Saigon in the heat of the night, its tawdry glamour exerts a sad but irresistible tug.
 
 <i>
&quot;The Quiet American&quot; shows at Dom Kino from April 22. </i>

TITLE: on complacency and political power
AUTHOR: by Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It is fashionable in some circles to compare Russian democracy to a Potemkin village - a pleasant facade with little substance. &quot;Elections Without Order: Russia's Challenge to Vladimir Putin,&quot; by Richard Rose and Neil Munro, follows much in this vein. With freely elected officials and a full range of outspoken political parties, the country looks democratic from a distance, they say, yet society lacks the rule of law, which is key to achieving democracy in substance as well as style. 
 
Throughout much of the 1990s, Russia was a disorderly state suffering from its own unpredictability - and, some argue, it remains so today. Wage earners were not always paid on time, leaders acted arbitrarily and corruption was tolerated on all levels. In this context, President Vladimir Putin easily swept to power in 2000 with promises to establish a &quot;dictatorship of law&quot; characterized by the predictability and order, that strict observance of laws would bring.
 In their book, which was released by Cambridge University Press last October, Rose and Munro - political scientists from the University of Strathclyde in Britain - try to make sense of Russia's first decade of post-Soviet transformation and the ever-evolving picture of democracy here. Light bedtime reading this is not. But it is a valuable resource for those hoping to peer through the fog of Russia's political climate and the complex social attitudes underpinning it.
 Despite its pro-democracy rhetoric, Putin's Russia remains an &quot;untrustworthy, unaccountable regime in which corruption is taken for granted,&quot; the authors write. It's a rather biting judgement, though one that's backed up by the 64 tables and charts the authors provide, drawn from polling data from 10 New Russia Barometer surveys conducted since 1992 by the Moscow-based polling service VTsIOM. 
 The state may not be perceived by the authors as trustworthy, but Putin certainly is, as demonstrated by his steady, stratospheric approval ratings. The latest VTsIOM survey numbers, from the first week in March, show Putin enjoying a 76-percent approval rating, just off his record-setting 83 percent last November, following the resolution of the hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater. Meanwhile, ratings for the government headed by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov have slid almost 10 points since last fall to 35 percent, and for the Duma, they hover lower still, at 30 percent - its all-time high. 
 But the authors argue that not only is the Duma one of the least trusted institutions in Russia society, but that it is also one of the least accountable. Russia's so-called floating political system - whereby 225 of the Duma's 450 seats are doled out proportionally, based on votes cast by party list, while the other half run as individuals, elected from single-mandate districts - allows representatives to change their party affiliations at will after taking office, enabling many, the authors write, to operate as political chameleons. 
 The parties themselves are ephemeral, disappearing as quickly as they appear, with more than half the Duma list vote in 1999 going to parties participating in national elections for the first time, Rose and Munro write. Unity, for example, had been formed only 10 weeks before the December 1999 vote. Putin, like Boris Yeltsin before him, ran for president as an independent in a field where all candidates were either supported by a number of diverse parties, or by none. 
 Rose and Munro note that transparent political identity and continuity from one election to the next is necessary for society to be able to punish or reward its representatives: &quot;Citizens cannot vote to turn out the rascals when it's unclear which rascals are governing.&quot; The public attitude, they suggest, is this play on a popular Soviet saying: &quot;They pretend to represent us, we pretend to support them.&quot; Within Russia's hourglass-shaped society, where horizontal interrelationships among the ruling elite and among ordinary individuals are myriad - but with little vertical contact connecting the two - demand for change is weak. 
 &quot;Most Russians regard a corrupt state as part of the eternal order of things rather than a problem that can be solved,&quot; Rose and Munro write, illustrating a frustrating tendency for people to throw their hands up in the face of political problems that are not insurmountable, but seem to be. The authors' 2001 surveys showed that 66 percent of the Russian population considered government corruption the biggest obstacle to the country's ever becoming a &quot;normal&quot; society, but no doubt a considerably smaller percentage were inspired by their indignation to take action to fight that corruption. 
 During the heady days of early post-communism, citizens were less complacent and democracy held more promise. Somewhere en route toward liberal democracy, though, transition fell off track. Efforts to transform Russia's political system into one where civil society flourishes, holding leaders accountable and within bounds of the law stalled - an &quot;unfinished revolution,&quot; as Stanford political science professor Michael McFaul has termed it. The danger, he has said, lies in that the longer Russia stays in the no-man's land between dictatorship and democracy, the greater the chances that this illiberal system - democratic elections without strong democratic institutions - will put down roots. 
 Faced with such reproach, Russia's leaders are quick to respond that the Western model of liberal democracy is alien to its nature and therefore cannot be expected. Yet Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst at Moscow's Carnegie Center, this week dismissed this as a convenient way for the political class to justify its desire to preserve the old rules of the game. When elections can be used to legitimize managed democracy, when insiders can be &quot;appointed millionaires,&quot; as banker Peter Aven famously put it, and when change comes from the top down, where is the incentive to reform a system that allows such privileges? There is none, Shevtsova said.
 The stability of Russia's political system hinges almost entirely on Putin and public support for him, and power concentrated in one person has its disadvantages. As Rose characterized Putin's support in a recent meeting with policymakers in Washington: &quot;It's a mile wide, but how deep?&quot; Russia's political landscape would be thrown into significant upheaval if Putin or his support were to disappear. But there are benefits, too. Putin single-handedly can choose to tackle reform of the federal bureaucracy. He can opt to turn a blind eye no longer to corruption within the ranks and he can apply the rule of law to all who act in the state's name. Whether or not he will remains to be seen. But this is what he promised to do, and this is Russia's - and the authors' - challenge to him. 
 
 <i>
Caroline McGregor is deputy business editor at The Moscow Times and a former junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
 
 &quot;Elections Without Order: Russia's Challenge to Vladimir Putin.&quot; By Richard Rose and Neil Munro. Cambridge University Press. 262 pages. $22. </i>

TITLE: Latest SARS Victims Got Disease via Pipes
AUTHOR: By Min Lee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HONG KONG - A SARS patient with diarrhea infected other people in a Hong Kong apartment complex as the disease apparently spread into homes through a sewage pipe linked to poorly sealed water drains, an official report said Thursday. 
 
Also Thursday, India, the world's second most-populous country, confirmed its first case of severe acute respiratory syndrome - a man who recently visited Hong Kong and Singapore. 
 Universities in Beijing canceled some classes, and officials in both China and Singapore said that economic growth would slow as a result of the flu-like illness. 
 SARS has killed at least 166 people worldwide, out of more than 3,000 infected. Symptoms include fever, shortness of breath, coughing, chills and body aches. 
 Mainland China and Hong Kong have reported 65 deaths each. Singapore has 15 SARS deaths, Canada 13, Vietnam five, Thailand two and Malaysia one. 
 The outbreak at Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens apartment complex has been the most alarming in the former British colony, where the disease has infected 1,297 people. Four new deaths and 29 new cases were reported in the territory Thursday. 
 About 40 percent of the 324 SARS cases at Amoy Gardens occurred in one building, called Block E. The disease was brought to the building by an infected man who visited his brother there on March 14 and March 19, Health Secretary Dr. Yeoh Eng-kiong said. 
 As more people came down with SARS, contaminated feces spread the virus into bathrooms through malfunctioning seals between a sewage drain and water pipes. Fans apparently helped suck the virus particles into homes, he said. 
 The disease apparently also was spread through person-to-person contact and possibly by rats and cockroaches, Yeoh told a news conference. 
 &quot;They were just passive, mechanical carriers,&quot; Yeoh said, adding that rats captured by the investigators did not come down with SARS symptoms. 
 In India, officials said a 32-year-old man in the west-coast state of Goa caught SARS after traveling to Hong Kong and Singapore. India's government has been slow in imposing screening of airline passengers from SARS-affected countries. 
 Air travel has been instrumental in spreading SARS around the globe. Singapore has begun scanning incoming air passengers for fever using military-grade heat sensors adapted for the war on SARS, while Hong Kong is taking the temperature of anyone boarding a plane. 
 Malaysia, meanwhile, lifted restrictions imposed last week on tourists from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Canada because it is satisfied with efforts in those places to contain SARS, an official said. 
 In Beijing, universities canceled activities and some classes to prevent the spread of SARS, breaking with earlier official insistence on continuing public events as China fights the disease. 
 For the first time, China's government said the outbreak could hurt the country's economic growth, echoing projections by private economists. 
 &quot;SARS, for sure, will have an influence on the economy's performance in China,&quot; said Yao Jingyuan, an economist at the National Bureau of Statistics. He added that it was &quot;too early to make any forecasts.&quot; 
 But private economists have cut projections of China's economic growth this year by up to 1 percentage point, citing the impact on airlines and other industries amid international warnings to avoid travel to affected areas.

TITLE: Election Results Challenged in Nigeria
AUTHOR: By Gilbert Da Costa
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ABUJA, Nigeria - Nigeria's independent electoral commission was investigating the results of weekend legislative elections, after political parties accused each other of vote rigging. 
 
With more than two thirds of the returns in by Wednesday, incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo's ruling party made a solid showing in Saturday's parliamentary vote. Tensions were high days ahead of another election - this time for president - with the opposition threatening massive protests. 
 Steve Oseneke, a spokesperson for the Independent National Electoral Commission, promised investigations and a report before Saturday's presidential vote. 
 &quot;The parties have told us about some alleged cases and we are of course investigating some and turning over others to the relevant agencies,&quot; Oseneke said. His group is mainly dependent on funds from Nigeria's government, with some financing from foreign donors, and is charged with making an unbiased evaluation. 
 In partial results Wednesday, the ruling party won 60 Senate constituencies against 31 opposition seats, and took 180 House seats compared to 118 by opposition groups. 
 Muhammadu Buhari, a former junta leader who is Obasanjo's main rival, claimed there was widespread fraud in last week's elections for the 109-seat Senate and 360-member House of Representatives. 
 &quot;We witnessed abuses unprecedented in the history of elections in this country,&quot; Buhari said in the capital, Abuja. 
 Ruling party officials in the northern state of Kano, in turn, blamed their counterparts of rigging the vote in that state, where Buhari's party apparently won 14 of 24 House seats. 
 Nigeria's legislative elections were marred by at least two dozen deaths, organizational chaos and a boycott in the oil-producing Niger Delta. International observers in the troubled West African country said that the elections were more peaceful than expected, but cautioned it was too soon to say whether they had been free and fair. 
 Buhari, whose party is one of 28 that have rejected the vote, warned of &quot;mass action&quot; if Obasanjo's party uses fraud to win presidential and gubernatorial elections on Saturday. 
 As a military officer, Buhari launched a coup d'etat toppling Nigeria's previous civilian leader, Shehu Shagari, following 1983 elections that were widely derided as flawed.
 Akin Osuntokun, a spokesperson for Obasanjo's campaign, dismissed the threat as &quot;cheap blackmail.&quot; 
 Obasanjo - a former military ruler turned civilian politician - has said the elections were &quot;substantially devoid of massive rigging.&quot; 
 There were signs of growing tension in some parts of Nigeria. 
 Buhari supporters on Tuesday burned down the home of a ruling party official in Buhari's home state of Katsina, said Gambo Ubale, an aide to the governor. 
 In the southeastern state of Enugu, Buhari's party joined other opposition groups in boycotting the vote for president and state governors. 
 More than 10,000 people have been killed in ethnic, religious and political violence in Nigeria since Obasanjo's election four years ago ended more than 15 years of brutal military rule.

TITLE: Getty, Billionaire, Art Lover, Philanthropist, Dies at 70
AUTHOR: By Sue Leeman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - John Paul Getty Jr., the reclusive American-born billionaire philanthropist and art lover who became a British citizen late in life, died Thursday, his doctor said. He was 70. 
 
Getty, Britain's leading patron of good causes, died in a London hospital where he was being treated for a chest infection. 
 Getty was admitted to the London Clinic on Monday for treatment of a recurrent infection but died Thursday morning, Dr. John Goldstone said. 
 &quot;His family would like to extend their thanks to all those who have expressed their sympathy, which is greatly appreciated,&quot; Goldstone said in a statement. 
 During more than a quarter-century of living in Britain, the fiercely Anglophile Getty gave more than $200 million to many causes, including the National Gallery. 
 He once paid to rescue a family of seals caught in a storm, bought a mansion for needy children and gave a grand piano to a concert pianist who did not own one. 
 Getty was given the honorary title of Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1986 for services to charity, but could not be called Sir Paul then because he was not a British citizen. 
 He was invested with the full honors in 1998, a year after changing his citizenship. 
 &quot;When I heard the national anthem played, I felt very proud to be British - it's my national anthem now,&quot; Getty said after his investiture at Buckingham Palace. &quot;I love Britain's way of life. I love its people. I love its history and I love its future.&quot; 
 In 1985, he gave $63 million to the National Gallery in London. He also gave $32 million to the British Film Institute and millions more in smaller donations, often anonymous, to other charities and causes. 
 In a rare public statement after subsidizing the families of striking miners in 1985, Getty said he was &quot;privileged to be the heir to huge wealth and I regard myself as custodian of that money for the benefit of people who need it more than I do.&quot; 
 John Paul Getty Jr. was born Sept. 7, 1932, the third of five sons of J. Paul Getty, nicknamed &quot;Oklahoma Crude,&quot; who founded Getty Oil and built a $6 billion fortune - making him the richest man in the world in his day. 
 After attending the University of San Francisco and doing a brief stint in the army, Getty Jr. took charge of Getty Oil enterprises in Rome. But he resigned within six years, telling his father, &quot;It doesn't take anything to be a businessman.&quot;

TITLE: Jordan Plays Final Game of NBA Career
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA - One of the greatest players in NBA history played the final game of his illustrious career Wednesday night, not in the setting that he would have preferred but in a special atmosphere nonetheless.
 
Michael Jordan's final moment on the court ended with him receiving applause and a lengthy standing ovation from nearly everyone in the arena - including the coaches and the other players.
 He soaked it all up with a wide smile and a wave to the crowd after exiting for good with 1:44 remaining in the fourth quarter of a 107-87 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers.
 &quot;Now I guess it hits me that I'm not going to be in a uniform anymore - and that's not a terrible feeling,&quot; Jordan said afterward. &quot;It's something that I've come to grips with, and it's time. This is the final retirement.&quot;
 Jordan finished with 15 points, four rebounds and four assists in 28 minutes - drawing several adoring ovations from the last sellout crowd that will ever watch him play.
 &quot;The Philly people did a great job. They gave me the biggest inspiration, in a sense,&quot; Jordan said. &quot;Obviously, they wanted to see me make a couple of baskets and then come off. That was very, very respectful, and I had a good time.&quot;
 Jordan's final points almost looked scripted, with Eric Snow of the 76ers fouling him in the backcourt for no apparent reason except to send him to the line.
 &quot;Coach [Larry Brown] told me to foul him, get him to the line to get some points and get him out of there,&quot; Snow said.
 Both foul shots went in, and the Wizards committed a foul 0:01 later so that Jordan could be removed from the game and receive the proper send-off. In a rare scene, the 10 players who remained on the court turned to Jordan and applauded, too.
 The 40-year-old Jordan would have preferred to end his career in the playoffs, but the Wizards never clicked during his two years in Washington and finished 37-45 in both seasons.
 But that was merely a footnote on this stirring night, the last time the basketball public was treated to one of the greatest athletes in history playing the game one last time.
 Jordan finished his career with 32,292 points - the third-highest total in league history, behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. His final career average of 30.12 goes down as the best in NBA history, just ahead of Wilt Chamberlain's 30.07.
 &quot;I never, never took the game for granted. I was very true to the game, and the game was very true to me. It was just that simple,&quot; Jordan said.
 With the Sixers ahead by 21 points with 9 1/2 minutes remaining, the crowd began chanting &quot;We want Mike.&quot; The chant grew louder as the period progressed with Jordan remaining seated, and fans ignored the game to stand and stare at the Wizards' bench, wondering why Jordan wasn't playing.
 This being Philadelphia, they eventually booed.
 Jordan finally pulled his warmups off and re-entered the game with 2:35 left for his brief final appearance.
 &quot;I played here. I told him I at least have to be able to come back [to Philadelphia],&quot; Wizards coach Doug Collins said. &quot;I told him to go back in for a minute. He said, 'I'm stiff.' I said, 'Please. They want to see you.' He said, 'Larry Hughes is going to foul out soon, so put me in then.&quot;'
 Earlier in the game, Jordan showed his age.
 There was a play in the first quarter when he looked like the Jordan of old, except for the result. Starting near the foul line, Jordan ducked his shoulder, lowered his head, stuck out his tongue and drove to his right, the ball rolling off his fingers ever so softly as it arched toward the net.
 Rather than going in, though, the ball hit the front rim and missed - one of several of his shots that came up a few centimeters short.
 One of the exceptions was Jordan's final shot of the first half - a one-handed dunk that came after he received a nice pass under the basket from Bobby Simmons.
 Jordan hit his first two shots of the third quarter but didn't do much else positive in the period. On an alley-oop pass from Tyronn Lue, the ball hit him in the fingertips and bounced harmlessly away. A lazy crosscourt pass was picked off by Aaron McKie, leading to one of Philadelphia's 31 fast-break points.
 Jordan's final field-goal attempt was a missed layup with 8:13 remaining.
 &quot;I'm not embarrassed,&quot; Jordan said, &quot;but it's just not ... I've had better feelings in terms of playing a competitive game.&quot;
 Allen Iverson scored 35 points as the Sixers clinched home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. They open against New Orleans on Sunday night.
 Many people in the sellout crowd wore Jordan replica jerseys, including one small boy in an oversized black Bulls jersey who wasn't looking when Jordan, about to inbound the ball, tousled his hair as the boy walked along the sideline. When the child turned around, he was stunned.
 The 76ers had a couple of pregame surprises for Jordan, presenting him with a golf cart driven onto the court by Moses Malone and Julius Erving, then having longtime Chicago Bulls public address announcer Ray Clay introduce Jordan with his familiar inflection of &quot;From North Carolina ... &quot;
 The standing ovation that Jordan received lasted about three minutes, with Jordan smiling, nodding and chewing gum throughout. The group Boyz II Men sang &quot;It's So Hard To Say Goodbye&quot; between the first and second quarters as a montage of Jordan's career highlights was shown on the scoreboard.
 &quot;We both feel the same way right now: We're very, very disappointed,&quot; Collins said before the game.&quot;We had good players, we just didn't fit.&quot; 
 &quot;So I know there's a part of him that was hoping we could make the playoffs to show that we did the right thing and made the right moves, but if we lose tonight, we're basically the same team we were a year ago, record-wise,&quot; he said.
 &quot;From Michael's standpoint, he wanted desperately to be in the playoffs. But I just get a sense that after tonight is over, he'll breathe a sigh of relief and say 'You know what, it's done now.'&quot;

TITLE: Russia Gets Bolshoi Priz Once More
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia captured its third-straight gold medal at the Bolshoi Priz junior ice-hockey tournament with a 2-0 win over the Czech Republic in the final game of the tournament Wednesday night at the Yubileiny Sports Palace. 
 
The Czechs entered the final game of the round-robin competition with a chance of stealing the gold from the Russians. Had they defeated the home team, both teams would have been tied with six points, with the Czechs taking the gold due to the head-to-head win over the Russians. 
 Both teams came out and played physically, but conservatively in the first period, during which the teams racked up 22 penalty minutes. In the second period, the Russian team began showing the superior skill and speed that it demonstrated throughout the tournament. 
 Russia's Nikolai Zherdev, currently ranked No. 1 by the NHL Central Scouting office for this year's draft, finally put Russia on the board at 13:34 in the second period. Pressuring the Czechs on a powerplay, Zhedev took a slap shot from the face-off circle that went in just inside the post before Czech goalie Tomas Popperle could get over. Alexander Shinin and Igor Mirnov were credited with assists. 
 The Czechs tried to get back in the game, but were stifled by a number of penalties. Early in the third period, back-to-back holding penalties set up Russia's second goal at 5:27. With a two-player advantage, Viktor Bobrov one-timed the puck from the top of the circle past Popperle. 
 Russian penalties late in the third period gave the Czechs a chance to get back into the game, but the Russians killed their penalties effectively, with Zherdev often exploding into the offensive zone and showing his stick-handling skills and agility. However, he also showed that he still needs to work on his passing game. 
 At the final buzzer Russia had completed the tournament undefeated with impressive 6-1 and 5-0 wins over Sweden and Team St. Petersburg, respectively, and a close 2-1 win over the Finns in which Zherdev scored the game winner with 0:12 remaining on the clock. 
 Although tied with the Czechs with four points, Finland took the silver thanks to a 4-2 win in an earlier matchup. Team St. Petersburg finished fourth, with three points, and Sweden fifth, with one point. 
 At the closing ceremony, Russia coach Rafail Ishmatov picked up the best coach honors, while Sweden's Sebastian Majer was a surprise choice for the most promising player.
 Sweden coach Per Neujords said that it was difficult for his team to compete, saying that the Swedish system gives kids too much free time. &quot;Our team lacks the physical training and speeds that the other teams have.&quot;
 Sweden was very successful in the demonstration penalty shootouts that followed each game. 
 Overall, the organizing committee was pleased with the event, but said it was too early to comment on moving next year's tournament to the Ice Palace.

TITLE: Mighty Ducks Complete a Shock Sweep of Red Wings
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANAHEIM, California - Jean-Sebastien Giguere again was outstanding in goal, and Steve Rucchin scored 6:53 into overtime on Wednesday night as the Anaheim Mighty Ducks beat the Detroit Red Wings 3-2 to sweep the defending Stanley Cup champions out of the playoffs.
 
&quot;If you would have asked me at the beginning of the series about a sweep, I would have said, 'No,'&quot; said Giguere, who stopped 32 shots in the Game 4 victory.
 In his first NHL playoffs, Giguere faced 171 shots and had 165 saves in the Western Conference series, a 1.24 goals-against average against the high-scoring Red Wings.
 The Ducks might have to wait as long as a week before beginning the second round against Dallas, St. Louis or Vancouver.
 Anaheim's sweep of the Red Wings was payback: The Ducks' only two previous appearances, Detroit beat them in four games, in the second round in 1997 and the first round in 1999.
 &quot;They are a great team, and it's a good feeling to finally beat them,&quot; said Paul Kariya, who scored a first-period goal that tied the game 1-1.
 Jason Krog scored with 15:25 left in the third period to give the Ducks the lead, but Sergei Fedorov's goal with 2:15 left in regulation sent the game into overtime.
 Anaheim won the first game of the series 2-1 in triple overtime, and each of the four victories was by one goal.
 With new coach Dave Lewis, a former assistant, and new goalie Curtis Joseph, the Red Wings became only the second defending Stanley Cup champions to be swept the following year in a four-game opening series.
 In 1952, Detroit upset the 1951 champion Toronto Maple Leafs and went on to win the Cup.
 &quot;We just did not get it done, not one game,&quot; Lewis said. &quot;Their team played hard. [Giguere] did not beat us; he was the difference, but their team beat us.&quot;
 The Red Wings' Darren McCarty said, &quot;We just couldn't get that goal when we needed it. We're just all in shock.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Phildalphia 3, Toronto 2. </strong>Mark Recchi scored his second goal of the game with 6:06 remaining in the third overtime period to give the Flyers a series-evening 3-2 victory Wednesday night over the Toronto Maple Leafs.
 
 Ed Belfour made 72 saves before Recchi's wrist shot from the faceoff circle hit the Leafs goalie's stick and barely trickled over the goal line as the Flyers evened the best-of-seven Eastern Conference playoff series a 2-2. Game 5 is Saturday night in Philadelphia.
 &quot;Eddie Belfour battled tremendously hard. He was great tonight,&quot; Recchi said. &quot;I was just trying to get it on net.&quot;
 Jeremy Roenick also scored for the Flyers.
 &quot;That was two hockey games,&quot; Roenick said. &quot;Eddie was awesome. Eddie gave that team a chance to win the hockey game. They almost did, but we were very fortunate.&quot;
 Travis Green and Mats Sundin scored for the Leafs, who were without leading scorer Alexander Mogilny. Clipped under the jaw by a stick two nights earlier, Mogilny was advised by team doctors to sit one out. He'll be re-examined Thursday.
 The Flyers outshot the Leafs 75-38, setting a Philadelphia playoff record for most shots on goal. Belfour's total saves was one short of the playoff record New York's Kelly Hrudey set when the Islanders beat Washington in four overtimes in 1987.
 &quot;The shots seem to be an incredible number,&quot; Toronto coach Pat Quinn said. &quot;Eddie's a trooper. He put us in a position to win but we didn't do it.&quot;
 Toronto, which beat Philly in double overtime on Monday night, played its third-longest game in franchise history and longest since 1943.
 It was the second-longest game in Flyers history.
 &quot;This was a must win for us,&quot; Philadelphia captain Keith Primeau said. &quot;We're even instead of going home down 3-1.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Ottawa 3, N.Y. Islanders 1. </strong>Mike Fisher scored just 0:28 in and Anton Volchenkov had a goal less than four minutes later as the Senators took an early lead and made it stand up in a 3-1 victory Wednesday night as Ottawa went up 3-1 in the first-round, best-of-seven series.
 
&quot;We got those two quick goals, and that made it just a great game for us,&quot; said Ottawa goalie Patrick Lalime, who faced just 22 shots. &quot;I wasn't too busy. They had a few chances, but our defense and penalty killing was great.&quot;
 Marian Hossa had a goal and an assist for Ottawa, which will try to wrap up the Eastern Conference series at home on Thursday night.
 &quot;This puts us in a good position going home,&quot; Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson said. &quot;We know they won't give up, though.&quot;
 Adrian Aucoin scored for the Islanders, who have lost three straight after winning the opening game.
 &quot;I'm very disappointed and a little frustrated because, honestly, I didn't think we had our best effort,&quot; Aucoin said. &quot;They're a fast team, but we knew that and we expected it. We just have to have a good attitude. Obviously, you have to feel confident and know that you can win three games in a row.&quot;