SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #867 (35), Friday, May 16, 2003
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Putin Likely To Pitch for Re-Election
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With 10 months to go before he stands for re-election, President Vladimir Putin has a chance to plead his case, tout his achievements and convince the country that the stability it has enjoyed for the past three years will not deteriorate into stagnation. 
 
Putin is to take the floor Friday before hundreds of lawmakers and government officials to deliver the fourth and final state of the nation address of his first term in office. 
 Although Kremlin speechwriters busily entered last-minute changes to the text and the weeks leading up to the address were punctuated by nasty public spats in the government, the speech itself was not likely to stir up much controversy.
 Official sources have kept quiet about its content, but Kremlin watchers expect that Putin will use the opportunity to accentuate the positive achievements of his presidency and chart out a course for his widely predicted second term.
 "It is time to sum up results, and the president must explain why many programs promised in his previous address have not been fulfilled," political analyst Sergei Markov told Ekho Moskvy radio this week.
 A point of pride mentioned by Putin in years past has been stability. In this year's address, two notches he may add to his administration's belt are the creation of a legislative base for implementing long-term reforms and the pragmatic foreign policy that has kept Russia closely linked to the West, even despite Moscow's bad gamble in the Iraq war.
 But many politicians and analysts are also waiting for Putin to explain why so little progress has been made in strategic areas identified by his administration.
 Reforms of the state bureaucracy, municipal government and military are spinning their wheels.
 "Even the legislation that has been passed - electric power reform, housing and utilities, railways, land sales - is subject to some rather weighty criticism," political analyst Andrei Ryabov of the Carnegie Moscow Center said Thursday.
 Analyst Andrei Piontkovsky agreed, saying that Russian "laws have very little in common with reality" - they are poorly enforced and all but powerless in the face of pressure from influential interest groups.
 The country's oil-dependent economy cannot ensure steady growth, but it is resistant to change because the political and business elites have too many vested interests in the status quo.
 One leitmotif of Putin's previous three addresses that is likely to resurface Friday is administrative reform - a long-nascent plan to streamline the country's unwieldy bureaucracy and reduce its interference in business.
 "He will stress this," Piontkovsky said. "He will be the strict master demanding accountability from the lackadaisical boyars." 
 The boyars, in this case, are the federal government. 
 It is highly likely that Putin will criticize the cabinet in his address - as he has in previous years - for failing to rev up the economy and implement reforms. 
 Unlike the president, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government has gotten consistently poor marks in opinion surveys. The latest poll, released Thursday by the Public Opinion Foundation, showed that 41 percent of respondents were unhappy with the cabinet's work.
 Nonetheless, chances are that Putin will not be too harsh in his reprimands and will not announce any personnel reshuffles, so as not to rock the boat in the election season.
 "There are problems [with the government]. Everyone sees them. But they are not bad enough to warrant radical measures, which could threaten the stability achieved under Putin," Ryabov said.
 In the days preceding his speech, Putin made several eleventh-hour attempts to show that there has been some progress on goals set out in previous addresses.
 On Thursday, he met with the country's three top judges and announced that they had resolved the issue of restructuring the system of courts dealing with commercial disputes - an objective highlighted in last year's address to the Federal Assembly. The comments were broadcast nationwide on state-controlled Channel One television.
 Earlier, Putin had met with liberal lawmakers and publicly backed their ideas on military reform, another sensitive issue for voters.
 Even an amorphous promise to revamp the government's much debated program of administrative reform was produced, after years of stalling, on the eve of the address.
 This year's speech was originally expected in April, following the pattern of 2001 and 2002. One rumored reason for the delay was the war in Iraq.
 But, more recently, local press speculated that the date of the address had been moved back because Kasyanov's government could not agree on its approach to administrative reform and the nation's social and economic development program for 2003 through 2005.
 Official sources in the presidential administration confirmed that work on the speech was continuing as late as Thursday, but said that this had nothing to do with the cabinet's infighting.
 "The president can introduce stylistic or other changes up to the last moment," said a source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The address is not all about the cabinet, after all. It focuses on strategy without getting into excessive detail. ... And the key elements of the Economic Trade and Development Ministry's program were known well ahead of time."
 
 
q
 As upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections ratchet up political tensions, Kasyanov's conflicts with his subordinates have been spilling into public view increasingly often. 
 
The latest scandal came this week when two deputy economic ministers announced that Kasyanov's administration had drastically changed the three-year development program prepared by the ministry before handing it over to the president on the eve of the May holidays.
 "The program sent to the president of Russia is not the one we designed," Deputy Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told reporters Wednesday.

TITLE: Powell's Visit Eases Tensions Over Iraq
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell rounded off a Moscow visit that appeared to help smooth over ruffled relations between Russia and the United States with a hint that the new Iraqi government that Washington will help appoint would pay off up to $8 billion in debts to Russia after all.
 
"I have no doubt that the new Iraqi government will take full account of its debts to Russia," Powell said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio on Thursday morning that wrapped up his visit. "We are trying to find a way to best solve this problem. We might be able to find some way to extend repayment, or to refinance it or do something else."
 Just hours later, Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov abandoned normal diplomatic niceties to say that Moscow's backing for a United Nations resolution to lift sanctions against Iraq and hand over control of oil revenues to occupying U.S. and British forces would depend on whether existing contracts worth billions of dollars and Iraq's debt obligations to Russia were met.
 "We discussed debts and contracts," Mamedov said, stressing that they were a key point of discussion during Powell's talks with Russian officials including Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. 
 "These questions are currently being discussed in New York - the fate of the resolution depends on it," he said.
 The open horse-trading appeared to mark a shift from Russia's ideological opposition to any U.S. resolution on lifting sanctions that does not give the United Nations control over rebuilding postwar Iraq to an argument based on defending any remaining economic interests it can. 
 The bidding indicated Russia might be willing to take a more pragmatic stance in the face of a postwar reality of U.S.-occupied Iraq, even though there is bound to be much diplomatic wrangling in New York over the final wording of the UN resolution before it goes to the Security Council next week.
 The shift also comes after former anti-war ally France moved ahead of Moscow to indicate greater willingness to cooperate with the United States over Iraq. 
 "It's very difficult for Russia to maintain its opposition without France," said Alexander Pikayev, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "Russian diplomats appear to be making it clear that it's more important for Russia to keep its economic interests in Iraq. For this to happen it needs to mend fences with the U.S."
 Powell on Wednesday said that he had failed to reach agreement with Russia over the role of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. But, in a joint press conference filled with jokes and general bonhomie, both he and Putin emphasized that Washington and Moscow were eager to keep the wider strategic relationship on track.
 Putin suggested the rift over Iraq was not permanent. "We succeeded in maintaining the basic foundation of our bilateral relationship," he said on Wednesday.
 Later that evening, another deputy foreign minister and the pointman on Iraq, Yury Fedotov, was even suggesting that Russia should drop its insistence on lifting sanctions only when weapons inspectors had finished their work. 
 "This [resolution] is very serious for us," Fedotov told a conference on the impact of the war on the Russian economy. "We are trying to minimize our losses from this resolution, and we are trying to ensure a role in the future."
 "A tough stance in insisting UN sanctions are lifted only when UN inspectors have completed their work ... could play a negative role when we have to deal with the new Iraqi regime," he said. "We have to find a golden mean."
 "We are trying to get a smooth transition from the end of the sanctions regime under which all existing contracts under the oil-for-food program should be completed or compensated for," he said. He said that Russia's existing contracts under the oil-for-food program totaled $4 billion.
 In a later interview with TV Center, Fedotov said that contracts to develop oil fields in Iraq, such as LUKoil's contract to develop the vast West Qurna field, would have to be dealt with on a separate basis. During the conference, he also acknowledged that Russia had gained the bulk of its oil-for-food contracts and oil deals not on a competitive basis, but because of its political ties to Saddam Hussein's regime. 
 Even though the diplomatic wrangling over the resolution appears to be far from over, even Mamedov said Thursday that progress had been made during the talks with Powell.
 "The latest talks in Moscow ... have increased the probability of reaching common ground on the main parameters of the role that the United Nations has to play in the post-conflict settlement in Iraq," he said.
 "We have already reached an understanding that the UN will not only play a role in solving humanitarian problems, but in rebuilding and in creating new political institutions in Iraq," he said, Interfax reported.
 Compromise seemed likely as the United States pushed to avoid another diplomatic debacle at the UN and as Russia moved to a more cool-headed assessment of what it could achieve. 
 Powell told Ekho Moskvy that the question of Russia using its veto against the UN resolution had not come up during discussions. Analysts, meanwhile, said it would be senseless for Russia to threaten to use its veto this time around.
 "If Russia was to use its veto on the sanctions resolution it would not end up with any more leverage over financial flows out of Iraq. It would mean only that the U.S. would never go to the UN again and Russia-U.S. relations would be spoiled forever," said Andrei Piontkovsky, an independent political analyst.
 "This way, Putin can still come out looking good," he said. "He can come out and say we disagreed with the U.S. and we haven't ruined relations. He is a Teflon president."

TITLE: Konstantinovsky Fence Keeps Residents Hidden
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One day at the end of April, Alexandra Laar, a 62-year old resident of Strelna, a town located 10 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg, saw workers installing a tall wooden fence in front of her house, blocking the view to her neighbors on the other side of Volkhonskoye Shosse.
 
Laar's wooden house, built at the beginning of the last century, happens to be on a route that will be used by more then 50 delegations traveling from Pulkovo-2 Airport to the Konstantinovsky Palace, a former imperial palace at Strelna that has been turned into a presidential residence, during the course of St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations.
 The house, one of many similar village huts, has been deemed an eyesore for VIPs arriving for the celebrations, and the 2-meter high fence is being constructed so it can't be seen from the road.
 "It was installed about two weeks ago, and we're already getting used to it. They've done it to stop the poverty from being seen," Laar said on Tuesday.
 "They didn't say much, but it was clear that, when government cars drive through, it's better that this area shouldn't be seen," she said, "We're a generation that was brought up behind a curtain [during the Soviet era], so if something is done to us [by officials], we think that it had to be that way. What's bad about it is that they've developed the poverty themselves and now they want to hide it."
 Laar said that she was told by officials not to open her gates while delegations are passing her house, and not to use her car from May 20 to June 1.
 "I can take a bus to a store near by, of course. But I don't know how I'm going to get to a dentist's appointment scheduled on one of those days? My husband can't drive me there now," she said.
 Yury Kolembet, director of Cosmos company, one of a number of private developers contracted to clean up areas around the Konstantinovsky Palace, said that, after a request came from the presidential authorities last month to fence off unattractive areas, his other local businesses agreed to improve views at their own expense. 
 "I can't say how much it cost, but I can say that we've put up 9 kilometers of fencing, and we'll continue working toward a total length of 10 kilometers to be reached in a few days," Kolembet said in an interview Thursday. "We're doing it to make the Northern Capital look better, and people here like it. Pensioners and old people are happy, because they see that the federal authorities care about them. We haven't had any complaints."
 "This [request] came from federal authorities and, of course, [President Vladimir Putin] is well aware of it," he said. 
 "Opinions of village residents on the fence are divided," said Tatyana Zhitkova, a middle-aged resident of Volodarsky village, on Volkhonskoye Shosse, on Thursday. "Some say that it looks like [a native American] reservation, although I think that one fence looks better, because, if the fences at each house were different, it would look messy."
 Those that are not happy prefer to express their dissatisfaction off the record, cursing the authorities and saying that the fence is too tall and looks ugly. 
 "The people who installed it told me we'd have to look after it and, if something is stolen, replace it at our own expense. Why? I didn't need this fence. This is none of my [expletive] business," said a resident who did not identify himself.
 To date, visually unpleasant sites on the Volokhonskoye Shosse, including all the villages, garbage dumps and even areas with small amounts of litter on the ground, sewage reservoirs, unfinished construction sites and even a cemetery, have now been fenced off with 2-meter or higher fences. People visiting the graves of relatives at the local cemetery now climb under the fence to cut down on travel times - a kilometer of fencing, with just one gap in the center, now blocks the cemetery off from the road. 
 On Thursday, workers could be seen walking around the fence with cans of green paint, putting the finishing touches on work that locals have described as "building Potyomkin villages", a reference to a fake village allegedly built by Prince Grigory Potyomkin in the 18th Century around present day Dnepropentovsk, Ukraine, to prove to Catherine the Great how well her people were living.
 While Kolembet said that the request for the fences came from presidential structures, Victor Khrekov, spokesperson for the Presidential Administration's property office, which is responsible for the construction of the Konstantinovsky Palace, said that the condition of the areas around Putin's new presidential residence was no concern of his department.
 "This is not a question for us, but for the local administration. It would have been better to do everything as it should have been done, instead of building Potyomkin villages. We are responsible for the Konstantinov Palace, and not for garbage dumps and villages," Khrekov said in a telephone interview Thursday.
 Oleg Korovin, head of the Petrodvorets District Maintenance and Ecology department, said that the plan to install the fences came from City Hall in March.
 "City Hall's Maintenance Committee presented us with a plan that said what sort of fences should be installed, and where, on roads of federal significance. So that's what being done," Korovin said in a telephone interview Thursday.
 City Hall representatives say the plan was formed in accordance with requests from the presidential administration.

TITLE: Attacks in Chechnya Showing New Trends
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Chechen suicide bombings killing at least 75 people this week highlight a new pattern in rebel warfare that will be next to impossible for Moscow to prevent, terrorism and Chechnya analysts said Thursday.
 
"Chechens live in such a violent and tense environment that many become obsessed with getting revenge against Russian troops and those who support them, even at the cost of their own lives," said Oleg Nechiporenko, head of the National Anti-Crime and Anti-Terrorism Fund think tank. "It is like in the Middle East, where even little Arab children are obsessed with avenging the Jews."
 Exasperation and desperation are prompting an increasing number of Chechens to become <i>shahids, </i>or holy suicide fighters, said Timur Muzayev, a Chechnya analyst at the Panorama think tank, and rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov's representative in Moscow, Salambek Maigov. 
 They said that tensions are being fueled by the lack of any significant improvement in the protection of their rights and safety following the Kremlin-sponsored constitutional referendum in March, which Moscow and the pro-Moscow Chechen administration promised would bring stability.
 &quot;There are plenty of shahids in Chechnya, especially women, who are psychologically prepared to sacrifice themselves in the fight with the Russians,&quot; said Sergei Goncharov, former head of the KGB's anti-terrorist squad. &quot;Shamil Basayev or any other warlord could easily pick and organize hundreds of them for their attacks, be it in Chechnya or in Russia, like in the Dubrovka theater raid in Moscow.&quot;
 Nine suicide bombing attacks have shaken Chechnya since June 2000, the most recent two this week. On Monday, an explosives-laden truck driven by two suicide bombers rammed into a guarded administrative compound in the village of Nadterechnoye and exploded. The death toll was at 59 on Thursday, with 320 wounded, Interfax reported. 
 On Wednesday, a woman with explosives strapped to her waist blew herself up at a crowded religious festival east of Grozny, killing herself, another suspected female suicide bomber and 14 others. Some 145 people were injured. The attack was an apparent assassination attempt against pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, who was attending the festival.
 The attacks followed the arrest Friday of a woman carrying explosives who admitted to planning to blow herself up in the middle of a Victory Day parade in Grozny. Also, a bomb detonated in Grozny on Friday, killing a serviceman and injuring two police officers.
 The majority of those killed in the attacks were Chechen civilians. No one has claimed responsibility.
 Basayev has said that he ordered the Moscow theater raid in October - in which at least 19 women were among the 41 attackers - and the truck bombing of Kadyrov's headquarters in Grozny in December. His statements appeared weeks after the attacks.
 Maigov said that he believed there are a large number of women among the suicide fighters because Chechen men have opted for protracted guerilla warfare over one-time attacks. 
 Women - who have been assaulted and raped by federal troops and seen their husbands and sons tortured and killed - might also have a deeper thirst for revenge, he said.
 The bomber in Wednesday's attack lost her husband at the start of the second military campaign in Chechnya in 1999, according to news agencies. Moments before the explosion, she said three of her sons had disappeared.
 Maigov dismissed any comparison between Chechen and Palestinian suicide bombers, saying Palestinians die for an ideological cause, while Chechens are motivated by revenge.
 The Chechen Interior Ministry said Thursday that the woman in Wednesday's attack belonged to a brigade of 36 female kamikaze fighters trained by Basayev, Interfax reported.
 President Vladimir Putin linked the deadly suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with Monday's attack, saying they bore &quot;the same imprint.&quot; 
 Nechiporenko agreed, saying that the use of suicide bombers, a trademark of terrorist warfare among Islamic extremists, indicates that the Chechens might be getting orders and money from abroad. 
 Goncharov and Muzayev said, however, that the attacks had directly targeted pro-Moscow Chechen officials and that they had only one aim: to show Chechens that Moscow's political peace process provides no guarantees for their safety.

TITLE: Audit Chamber Slams Elections
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Audit Chamber on Monday completed its investigation of December's Legislative Assembly elections, finding widespread election-law violations, the most serious a 10-million-ruble (about $322,500) embezzlement involving local television channel TRK Peterburg and three city vice governors.
 
The results of the investigation were sent Tuesday to law-enforcement agencies, City Election Commission President Alexander Garusov and the City Prosecutor's Office, which is responsible for deciding whether to launch a criminal investigation.
 Audit Chamber head Dmitry Burenin said that it was still too early to talk in detail about the findings, but that the violations uncovered were substantial.
 &quot;We found that the City Election Commission committed a series of legal violations, and contributed to depriving the city budget of 10 million rubles, which ranks as a very serious crime,&quot; Burenin said in an interview on Wednesday.
 &quot;City Hall uses the commission as a mechanism to finance commercial structures using budget funds,&quot; he said. &quot;City Hall paid TRK Peterburg television station, which virtually belongs to the governor, for a service that was never delivered. Moreover, this service should have been free of charge. In short, the administration paid TRK for nothing.&quot;
 &quot;Unfortunately, I cannot give further details as to what this service was exactly, but I can say that three vice governors are involved,&quot; Burenin added.
 Burenin's comments provoked an angry reaction from TRK Peterburg, which was quick to deny the report's findings.
 &quot;I can only try to guess what Burenin is talking about,&quot; TRK Peterburg General Director Irina Tyorkina wrote in an e-mail interview, adding that TRK Peterburg's documents could prove that the station had not received the 10 million rubles during the election campaign.
 &quot;During the election campaign, TRK Peterburg didn't receive a single payment for 10 million rubles. All the candidates received broadcasting time for free, as the law stipulates,&quot; she wrote. &quot;At the same time, TRK Peterburg, which is not a state-owned company, was perfectly entitled not to take such a burden upon itself. But it did anyway, as it is the only proper television channel in the city that has information to help city residents to make a choice.&quot;
 &quot;For that reason, after this election campaign, it is only possible to only talk about profits on which TRK Peterburg missed out, as this broadcasting time could have been used much more profitably in commercial terms,&quot; she wrote. 
 Election-commission head Garusov, who has seen the audit chamber's report, said that the 10 million rubles had been paid to TRK Peterburg, though he denied that there was anything illegal in the transaction and said that he disagreed with Burenin's allegations that the city administration was using the commission to transfer money to private companies. 
 &quot;This money was given from the city budget to TRK Peterburg so that it could provide candidates with free broadcasting time,&quot; he said in an interview on Thursday. &quot;Broadcasting time is very expensive - one minute costs as much as $330. Nothing comes for free, so the decision was taken to allocate the money to TRK to help it bear the cost.&quot;
 But Garusov confirmed Tyorkina's assertion that no 10-million-ruble payment had entered TRK Peterburg's accounts during the election campaign.
 &quot;The money wasn't put into TRK's account,&quot; he said. &quot;It was used to repay TRK's debts, such as gas and security bills that hadn't been paid.&quot;
 Yelena Ordynskaya, senior assistant to the City Prosecutor, said that she has yet to see the audit chamber's report. After the City Prosecutor's Office sees the material, it has 10 days to decide whether to open a criminal investigation.
 &quot;However, if the materials are not complete enough, this time can be extended,&quot; Ordynskaya said.
 Another sign that December's vote is still generating criticism came Wednesday at a Central Election Commission meeting in Moscow, where the St. Petersburg commission came under fire for its handling of the elections.
 &quot;Some negative conclusions were reached concerning control over the formation and the spending of election-campaign funds,&quot; said Garusov, who was present at the meeting.
 &quot;The City Election Commission was also criticized for not taking the necessary measures to eliminate candidates [who committed violations],&quot; he added.
 The majority of cases opened in relation to violations of financial regulations for election campaigns by candidates were filed by opposing candidates, not the local commission.
 The commission also expressed concern that control over the formation and spending of the candidates' election funds was reserved to the City Election Commission alone, and that controlling structures in district election commissions had not been formed. As a result, one third of all candidates have yet to present documents regarding their spending during the election campaign.
 &quot;The main aim of the meeting was not only to study how the work was organized during the regional election campaigns, but also to draw conclusions as to what measures should be taken before the next parliamentary elections,&quot; Central Election Commission head Alexander Veshnyakov was quoted by Interfax as saying after Wednesday's meeting.
 According to Veshnyakov, those supervising the St. Petersburg elections are to blame for violations committed during the campaign.
 &quot;If the approach is creative, targeted, and professional, then the results will reflect that approach,&quot; he said. &quot;However, if the issues are resolved completely differently, the results will also be different.&quot;

TITLE: DHL To Help With U.S. Visa Procedure
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The United States Consulate in St. Petersburg announced changes in its visa policy on Thursday, putting international courier-services company DHL in charge of much of the application process.
 
Starting Monday, applications for visas will be accepted at DHL's office at 4 Izmailovsky Prospect, where interview times will also be arranged. Interviews will continue to be held at the consulate, at 15 Furshtatskaya Ulitsa, which will continue to accept applications while the new system is phased in.
 &quot;Starting next week, DHL will start accepting visa applications, which it will then deliver to the consulate. After accepting the documents, DHL will immediately inform applicants of the date and time of their interview,&quot; Consular Section deputy head Christopher Misciagno said at a news conference at the Press Development Institute.
 &quot;Applicants then can arrive at the arranged time, pay the $100 consular fee, and have their interview with the consular staff,&quot; he said.
 If a visa is granted, DHL will return the applicant's passport with the visa. Applicants who are denied visas can reclaim their passports at the consulate following the interview.
 Consular Section Chief Margaret Pride underlined that DHL has no legal power in the application process, which is still fully controlled by consular officials.
 &quot;We really want to promote the new system. It will save people a lot of time waiting outside. Instead, they can be warm inside or doing something productive,&quot; Pride said.
 &quot;It is also saving us time. DHL is also handling some of the data entry, which usually ends up taking us three to four minutes. This means we have more time for the interview,&quot; Misciagno added.
 Visa prices will remain unchanged, although the new DHL service will cost applicants $20. However, during a transition period, applicants can avoid the charge by handing in their forms at the consulate, which does not charge the fee.
 Visa-application forms will be available at DHL's office and can be dropped off there between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m., an improvement to the consular section's operating hours, of 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. 
 Despite the apparent improvements, the new system seems to create a number of logistical problems, according to those familiar with the old systems.
 &quot;This all sounds good, but really it is more complicated,&quot; said Anna Sharogradskaya, head of the Press Development Institute's Northwest Regional branch, who has been traveling to the U.S. annually for the last 15 years. &quot;My experience tells me that it is better to handle things with the consulate directly. Consular officials are able to spot and correct problems on site.&quot;
 &quot;With the new system, if there is a slight mistake on the application, it might be mailed back,&quot; she said. &quot;This could not only cost applicants money, but it will potentially take them days to get their visa, rather than hours at the consulate. People should really be given a choice between using DHL or dealing with the consulate directly.&quot;
 Although the new system will only be able to handle a maximum of 40 applications per day, Igor Radchenko, DHL manager in Northwest Russia, dismissed concerns of an early-morning flood of applicants.
 &quot;We have just renovated our office, and the expanded hours should space things out nicely,&quot; he said, adding that the company hoped plans to extend the service to accept applications at its offices across the Northwest Region.
 Pride said: &quot;In Petersburg, we looked at a number of possible partners but, as the consulate is not paying for the service, we didn't have to hold a tender. We chose DHL simply because [it has] the best coverage in our region with offices.&quot;
 The policy change is being introduced to meet efficiency and security standards set by the U.S. State Department, Misciagno said, adding that it is not unusual for consulates to contract out such services.
 &quot;At my last post, in Ghana, we had a similar service that was handled by a British bank,&quot; he said.
 
 <i>
Information on the new system can be obtained by calling DHL at 326-6400. </i>

TITLE: Court Lifts Ban on Scarves for Muslim Women on ID Cards
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Muslim women can wear headscarves in ID photographs, overturning a police ban that hundreds of women in predominately Muslim regions have refused to comply with. 
 
The court's appeal board upheld a suit filed in January by 10 Muslim women from the town of Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, challenging a 1997 Interior Ministry directive prohibiting head coverings in ID photos. The Supreme Court's civil board rejected the suit in March.
 The women say that the Muslin holy book, the Koran, requires them to wear headscarves.
 Their lawyer, Vladimir Ryakhovsky, praised the ruling, saying that the ban violated the religious freedoms of Muslims granted by the constitution.
 &quot;The directive used to place them in a catch 22 in which religious norms and government regulations irreconcilably contradicted each other,&quot; Ryakhovsky said in a statement.
 An Interior Ministry representative at the hearing Thursday protested the decision, saying a person cannot be identified properly if her ears, forehead and neck are covered.
 &quot;The Koran does not have the status of the law in Russia. We live in a secular state, and no religion can be dominant,&quot; the representative, Irina Bochinkova, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 It was unclear Thursday if the Interior Ministry would be able to appeal.
 The court's appeal board said that the ruling came into effect immediately.
 Mufti Nafigulla Ashirov, co-chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia and spiritual leader of Siberia's Muslims, called the decision an unprecedented victory for religious rights.
 &quot;This is not only about permission being granted to our women to practice Islam in the proper way, but also a sign that democratic principles have started to work in Russia,&quot; Ashirov said in a telephone interview.
 After the court rejected the case in March, one of the plaintiffs, Roza Latypova, said the police ban was especially unfair because some Muslim women had been allowed to use photographs with headscarves in their passports.
 The plaintiffs and their supporters said at the time that the rejection of the case was a blow to religious freedom and promised to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, if necessary.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Amber Room Ready
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The restoration of the legendary Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin was officially pronounced completed on Tuesday, after 25 years of work.
 "This was an unprecedented project," said Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, who came to St. Petersburg to sign a memorandum on the completion of the work with representatives of German gas colossus Rurhgas AG, which provided $3.5 million in sponsorship to help finish the restoration.
 "I think that never in Russian history has anyone had to restore such a unique historical object literally out of nothing.
 The new Amber Room is to be officially opened on May 31 by President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and 47 other heads of state will be given a preview before the room is opened to the public on June 3.
 
 
<b>Harbor Master Killed
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg Harbor Master Mikhail Sinelnikov was found murdered near his home on Thursday evening.
 According to the police press service, Sidelnikov was discovered near his apartment on Sablinskaya Ulitsa. He had suffered severe brain damage, although the exact cause of death had yet to be determined Thursday evening.
 Sea Port Administration deputy head Andrei Markelov said Sidelnikov had been working as Harbor Master since 2001, before which he worked as captain of an ocean-going vessel.
 
 
<b>Police Nearly Ready
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - At a press conference on Wednesday, the acting head of the St. Petersburg public-safety-enforcement agency said that the organization was taking its final steps to guarantee security ahead of the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations.
 "The main security questions are usually solved on the eve of important events, and we hope that the St. Petersburg police are now ready to handle these events in a proper manner," Leonid Bogdanov said.
 According to Bogdanov, over the last three months the city police have checked 40,000 buildings, cellars and attics in an effort to identify and eliminate possible sites for terrorist attacks, contacted 170,000 owners of registered firearms and inspected 12,000 construction sites for the presence of illegal settlers.
 Bogdanov also said that, during the period, over 800 people living in the city illegally had been forced to leave. 



TITLE: Moscow To Cut Into City's Bread Business
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Recent weeks have seen the St. Petersburg bread business going through a process of drastic change. Two major bakeries, Petrokhleb and the Kirov Leningrad Bakery, were recently acquired by Moscow-based agricultural holdings, Agros and OGO, respectively, while the Finnish company Fazer plans to increase its stake in the Khlebny Dom bakery to as much as 90 percent in the near future. Analysts are predicting that the bread sector, which has until now existed without the development of high-profile brand names, can expect further incursions from Moscow businesses.
 
Until now, the bread business has been one of the only foodstuffs sectors to remain untouched by the Russian food majors, according to Vitaly Ivanov, analyst for the St. Petersburg research company COMCON. 
 Ivanov said that such expansion must rely on boosting local production, rather than increasing deliveries to the region, due to the short shelf-life of products, and other product-related factors. 
 &quot;That's why Moscow-based food holdings have recently started acquiring local bakeries, with some of them even coming into conflict with local shareholders,&quot; Ivanov said.
 The first example of Moscow's appearance on the local scene was at the Kirov Leningrad Bakery (KLB), which found itself in the middle of a shareholders conflict, after Russian agricultural holding Agros began buying up shares. 
 Agros holding, affiliated to Interros holding, comprising 40 agricultural enterprises, has a capital of $100 million and operates in the grain and meat market sectors. The holding currently ranks first in terms of grain sales in Russia, and is the second largest operator in the poultry sector
 The KLB is the largest flour producer in St. Petersburg, manufacturing 250,000 tons of bread products per year. It had revenues of 1.5 billion rubles ($48.4 million) and profits of 143.7 million rubles ($4.7 million) in 2002.
 Vladimir Sklyarevsky, the development director for the AVK investment company, which bought up shares for Agros, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that Agros was close to acquiring a controlling stake in the Kirov Leningrad Bread Plant, and that the investment company was about to begin reregistration.
 At the beginning of May, Agros initiated an extraordinary shareholders meeting, at which a new general director, Boris Myzin, was elected. However, the old director, Alexander Andreyev, along with executive director, Yury Makarov, garnered support from the St. Petersburg-based foodstuffs holding Lenstro group (which runs the St. Petersburg Milling Plant and the First Macaroni Plant among others) which also started buying up shares. 
 Since then, Myzin has tried several times to enter the bakery, but on each occasion he has been met by armed guards who have refused to allow him entry. &quot;We believe the bakery has been taken over illegally,&quot; Sklyarevsky said.
 AVK's development director said that the conflict is already reaching a stage where legal proceedings must be opened, and that everything now depends on who will take who to court and whose shares will be frozen.
 Another recent major acquisition was the purchase of local bakery Petrokhleb by Moscow-based foodstuffs holding OGO. Vitaly Novikov, spokesperson for the Prolog investment company, said that the firm has bought up around 40 percent of the shares in the plant. Petrokhleb is one of the largest bakeries in the region. It produced 66,000 tons of bread products in 2002 and generated 800 million rubles ($28.4 million) in revenue. Petrokhleb also operates 15 bread plants in the Leningrad Oblast. 
 In the third major event in the local bread business, the Finnish company Fazer plans to increase its stake in local bakery Khlebny Dom from 58.3 percent up to 90.6 percent, by buying up new stock following a share emission. Khlebny Dom, which occupies 23 percent of the local bread market, produced 80,000 tons of bread in 2002, with revenues of 1.1 billion rubles ($35.5 million) and profits of 75 million rubles ($2.4 million). Last year Khlebny Dom acquired another two bread plants in St. Petersburg and launched itself on the Moscow market.

TITLE: Plan To Use Nuke Subs as Oil Tankers
AUTHOR: By Doug Mellgren
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OSLO, Norway - A Russian proposal to turn aging nuclear submarines into underwater oil tankers sent a shiver through neighboring Norway on Wednesday, amid fears of a double environmental disaster in its waters.
 
Northwestern Russia is home to the Northern Fleet, with many derelict nuclear submarines rusting in its harbors.
 The same Barents Sea area, bordering Norway, is also rich in petroleum reserves.
 Earlier this week, the governor of the Arkhangelsk region proposed refitting the submarines to use as underwater oil tankers, carrying oil beneath the nearly omnipresent ice pack.
 &quot;We see it as very realistic and economical to use nuclear submarines for oil and natural-gas transport,&quot; Anatoly Jefremov was quoted as saying at a meeting of businesspeople in the northern Norwegian town of Kirkenes on Monday.
 Norwegian Thomas Nilsen, of the Barents Sea Council, was at the meeting and confirmed Jefremov's comments. He said that Russia had considered the concept in the mid-1990s, but it was never implemented.
 Nilsen, who spent 12 years working as an expert on Northwestern Russia's environmental problems for Bellona, a Norwegian environmental group, said that the cost involved in retrofitting and updating the old nuclear-powered boats made it unlikely.
 Nilsen said that the United States studied the idea in the 1960s and dismissed it as too costly.
 Jefremov said that ways of converting old submarines to each carry 10,000 tons of oil under the polar ice pack were being studied, but offered no timeframe for the project.
 According to Bellona, 71 derelict submarines are mothballed in Kola bays, their nuclear fuel still aboard.

TITLE: IKEA To Step Up Local Production
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Swedish furniture giant IKEA has announced that it will build three wood-processing plants in Karelia, at a total cost of $25 million. 
 The projects include a timber plant in Kalevala district, a furniture-component plant in the town of Kostomuksha and a furniture plant in Petrozavodsk. 
 In July 2002, Swedwood, a company affiliated to IKEA, opened a timber plant in Tikhvin, in the Leningrad Oblast, 200 kilometers to the southeast of St. Petersburg, having invested $15 million in the project. The planned capacity of the Swedwood plant is 150,000 cubic meters of timber and 30,000 cubic meters of furniture components.

TITLE: EU Expansion Highlights Tensions With U.S.
AUTHOR: By Quentin Peel
TEXT: SLOWLY but surely, the peoples of 10 new member states are voting to join the European Union. On the weekend, Lithuania became the fourth to hold a referendum. An overwhelming majority - 91 percent of those who turned out - said yes to membership.
 
Some might say that is perfectly predictable. But it is not. It could still go wrong. Referendums have to be held in six more countries, and parliamentary ratification must be given in all the old ones, before enlargement can happen. Not all are so enthusiastic. And the transatlantic spat between &quot;old&quot; Europe and the U.S. administration is making matters worse.
 The new members are set to join what has hitherto been a club of the rich. All will end up as big net recipients from the EU budget. For the eight emerging from the democratic desert of the former Soviet empire, the EU represents a guarantee of prosperity and political stability. It will make the continent a safer and more predictable place. It will underpin democracy and reinforce the rule of law. In short, it should be a good thing for all - and not just in Europe.
 Yet negotiations have been painful, slow and bruising. Instead of being greeted with acclamation, the new members have been treated grudgingly and forced to accept every dot and comma of the EU rules from day 1, with very few exceptions.
 And now the new member states suddenly find themselves caught in the middle of the transatlantic divide. It is not just about Iraq. It is also about the longstanding U.S. hostility toward the International Criminal Court, the EU-supported institution supposed to try international war crimes. Washington is stepping up the pressure. The splits are in danger of souring the entire enlargement process just as it is about to happen. It could yet upset a few of the votes.
 Donald Rumsfeld, the irrepressible U.S. defense secretary, wants to divide Europe into the &quot;new,&quot; who back the United States and the &quot;old,&quot; with France and Germany. When they spoke out in favor of U.S. policy in Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac called them &quot;infantile.&quot;
 It is a choice that none of them wants to make. They want to have it both ways. But the diplomatic pressures are inexorable.
 Take the dilemma of Poland, for example. As far as &quot;hard&quot; military security is concerned, there is no doubt that Poles trust America more than their European neighbors. They still fear Russia as a potential invader.
 On questions of defense, they want to be under Washington's umbrella. That is why they sent special forces to Iraq, and why they have said that they will command one of the three military &quot;stabilization&quot; zones trying to preserve the peace there.
 The trouble is, they cannot afford it, and nor do they have the command and planning infrastructure. It is a splendid gesture, but it would need support from other European allies, not to mention the cash. In Brussels, people are already asking why Poland should expect to get big handouts from the EU budget if it promptly spends them on a U.S. exercise in Iraq.
 So Poland is lowering its ambitions - and insisting on a United Nations resolution to underpin the operation.
 Polish voters are still enthusiastic about joining the EU. The latest polls predict a yes vote of about 80 percent in the referendum to be held in early June. But they also have to get a 50-percent turnout for approval. That has never been achieved in any previous post-communist referendum.
 There is a hard core of anti-EU opposition, now campaigning for abstention to keep the voting figure down. They are exploiting the EU-U.S. divide for all it is worth. The result is still very much in the balance.
 In the Baltic republic of Latvia, where there is still a big Russian-speaking population, the outcome is much closer. Polls put the yes vote at about 50 percent, with opposition at about 33 percent. And they also have to get a 50 percent turnout.
 Latvia is one of the East European countries where the United States is stepping up pressure for a special deal on the ICC. Washington wants all U.S. citizens to be exempted from prosecution in the court. Albania and Romania have already agreed. Now Bosnia, Bulgaria and Latvia are under pressure to follow suit, even if it infuriates the EU, as Washington knows it will.
 The &quot;new&quot; Europeans from the old Soviet empire are adamant: They do not want to be forced to choose. They want to be good members of the EU; and they want to be good U.S. allies in NATO.
 In the near term, NATO is more important for most of them, as it is for Poland. That is why they all signed statements backing U.S. policy in Iraq. The Russian bear is still seen as a threat, though increasingly toothless.
 In the longer run, however, the &quot;soft&quot; security of EU membership will undoubtedly mean more - taking part in EU programs, qualifying for regional subsidies and sharing the internal market. The United States will never provide comparable economic support.
 The time has come for the &quot;new&quot; Europeans to draft a new statement to send to U.S. President George W. Bush. It does not have to take sides. It simply has to say they want it both ways: to be good allies and good Europeans. Why do they have to choose?
 
 <i>Quentin Peel is international-affairs editor of the Financial Times, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: Sacrificing Hares To Keep Economic Environment Green
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
TEXT: FOR the first time in my life, on April 30, I paid a bribe to an official. The background to this momentous occasion was a short trip I was taking to visit a friend in Poland during the annual May string of holidays. Opting to take the train to Poland so that I could get a look at Belarus on my way through, I was touched for the money by a Belarussian customs official.
 
According to the official, what I paid wasn't a bribe at all but, rather, an &quot;ecology tax&quot; that, apparently, is about 5,000 Belarussian rubles (they call their money <i>zaichiky </i>(&quot;hares&quot;) in this friendly country and, according to the local exchange rate, 5,000 hares are worth about $2).
 At first, the request for the money from the official frustrated me, but then I decided to treat the incident as just part of an adventure, like going back in time. Looking around me in the station, I realized that, had this been an historical film, the set director had definitely earned his paycheck.
 I really felt like I was in a scene 20 years ago, standing in the middle of the customs hall at an enormous Stalin-style train station, complete with a row of long, heavy tables that were totally devoid of anything that resembled modern technical equipment. At the tables, a number of customs officials were digging though bags of those leaving the country.
 One of them searched through my bag and found a small egg made of some green-blue precious - I think - stone that a friend of mine had given me a year ago, saying that it would bring me luck.
 &quot;Is this from the Hermitage?&quot; he asked, rolling the egg around in his hands, looking at me so accusingly that I thought I was about to learn a bit about Belarussian jails.
 &quot;I think this is too small for the Hermitage. They only have big ones,&quot; I answered, in a weak attempt at humor.
 &quot;No, they do have small ones. I'm sure of it,&quot; the official said, all the same placing the egg back into my bag.
 The next stage was the passport control, and this was where I finally joined the ranks of the world's bribe payers.
 &quot;Oh, you're from St. Petersburg!&quot; the official said while looking at my documents, before turning to address the people standing in line behind me. &quot;All of you move to a different line, we're going to have a long talk with him!&quot;
 The five people standing behind me vanished in a split second, leaving me alone facing the smug customs official through the glass of the booth. The whole situation had me off balance, and the following set of questions seemed aimed at keeping me in this state.
 &quot;Why did you take a local train instead of an international one?&quot; he asked.
 There was a perfectly good reason for my decision - I wanted to see what it was like to ride what is commonly called the &quot; smuggling train&quot; that runs between the Belarussian border town of Brest and the Polish town of Terespol. I heard that the locals use the train to smuggle vodka, ciagarettes and God knows what else into Poland. They stuff every crevice of the cars with bottles and cartons, some of which carry products other than the cigarettes indicated on the outside.
 Thinking about the question at the time, I decided that this was more information that the official needed.
 &quot;I just thought it would be fun,&quot; I answered lamely.
 &quot;Have you paid the ecology tax yet?&quot; he asked.
 The existence of such a tax was the first surprise for me, and the explanation of what a horrible person I was for not having paid the tax was the second.
 &quot;Put 5,000 [Belarussian] rubles in your ticket and pass it too me,&quot; he finally said, quietly. While I was searching for a note worth the requested number of hares I was expected to sacrifice, the official's boss showed up. He glanced at me, glanced at the pile of notes with numerous zeros almost falling out of my hands, and then disappeared.
 &quot;I have only 10,000 notes. Do you have change?&quot; I asked.
 &quot;Oh ... You're ... Well ... Hmm, St. Peterburgers ... Yeah ... Change?! Look, I too have only 10,000 notes on me!&quot; he said, showing me three such notes.
 &quot;Hey, you over there. Stop! I need to break 10,000&quot; he screamed at another passenger moving in the direction of the passport control.
 About two minutes later, I was seated in the train, with the change from the bribe safely in my pocket. I was all set to watch the action.
 The real action, I later discovered, takes place on the return trip. On the way there, it all looks quite innocent, with ordinary Belarussian pensioners and people who appeared to be unemployed trying to spread extra cigarette cartons and vodka bottles around among those who have less than the load allowed by Polish law, paying anyone willing to hang on to some extra goods $1 for their trouble. I refused the offer a few times, prompting people to start looking at me like I was some kind of idiot.
 On the way back, I was impressed by the professionalism of a group of young people jumping up on the seats in the train that was just about to depart to Belarus, ripping off certain parts of the ceiling and taking out tens of cigarette cartons from Belarus just after Polish customs officials closed the door on their way to check the next car. This was not the first time they'd done it - their moves are professional and exact, they're able to find the holes in the ceiling with their eyes closed ... And then one of them jumps from the train while it exhilarates and disappears behind a pile of garbage near the station. 
 Why do I have the feeling that the Polish customs officials are perfectly aware of what's going on? Because they must know.
 But they probably just close their eyes to the situation realizing that the majority of Belarussian people are simply poor. It was clear enough to me as I looked out of the train window at people working their fields with ploughs pulled by horses - something you would expect to see in a black-and-white documentary about the 1920s, but not in living color on a bright spring day in May 2003. 
 Looking at this, I realized that I would also let them &quot;smuggle&quot; a few more cigarettes than the law permitted (I think I might take a closer look first to make sure that this is what the cartons actually contain). It also made me feel a little less upset about having paid the bribe. Any way you look at it, I was just doing my part for the environment.

TITLE: carrying the electronica can
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: German experimental musican Holgar Czukay, a founding member of seminal Krautrock band Can, returns to St. Petersburg to play a solo concert this weekend.
 
The musical innovator is portrayed on his Web site as a medieval alchemist and, speaking by telephone from his home in Cologne, Germany, Czukay readily provided an explanation.
 &quot;An alchemist is someone who makes gold out of rubbish,&quot; he said. &quot;It is typical also for Can and for myself - to make something valuable out of garbage.&quot;
 &quot;This is [true] for young people, actually. When the electronic scene in Germany developed, young people mostly concentrated on garbage, which became suddenly kind of valuable thing, a special quality.&quot; 
 Born on 24 March, 1938, in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), Czukay says his last name (pronounced &quot;shook-eye&quot;) has Ukrainian and Polish roots meaning &quot;search,&quot; but he slightly changed the spelling to use it as his artistic name.
 After being expelled from Berlin's Music Academy for his disregard for musical conventions, Czukay studied with avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966, before joining Can as bassist in 1968.
 The pioneering band, which used everything from found sounds to state-of-the art electronics in a rock context, has influenced a wide range of musicians, from Buzzcocks leader Pete Shelley to The Sex Pistols/P.I.L.'s John Lydon, as well as contemporary electronic scene.
 Though it may seem strange that British punk rockers cite a Stockhausen student as an important influence, Czukay claimed it was only natural.
 &quot;You must understand, Stockhausen is a hero, he's a big master,&quot; he said. &quot;So when you want to do something new, you must get separated from your 'big father,' and a way to become separated is to become a punk. Can, actually, from the very beginning was kind of a punk band disguised as hippies.&quot;
 Having left Can in 1977, Czukay then worked with electronic composer Brian Eno (as Cluster), Jah Wobble, David Sylvian and Eurythmics, among others.
 When asked if there was a contradiction between traditional live music and electronic music, Czukay remarked that a &quot;'contradiction' might be the long word for it.&quot;
 &quot;It is not a contradiction,&quot; he said. &quot;It is a new way, when a musician gets integrated into a kind of automated musical process and he's participating in it.&quot;
 &quot;It was typical for Can's first recordings,&quot; he said. &quot;Our drummer was very pleased to hear something in the studio like feedback that he could react to, for example, an echo machine. 
 &quot;[With an] echo machine, the drummer had only to play half as [much as] usual, because the echo machine does the other half,&quot; he said. &quot;This is what characterizes making music with electronics - being integrated with the machine.&quot;
 Though electronic music is often seen as an easy way to cheat audiences, Czukay said that the question of deception is not relevant in this case.
 &quot;It doesn't matter if you are cheating or not,&quot; he said. &quot;The most important thing is that you find fascinating what comes out of it. The result is what counts. It's not how you achieve it.&quot;
 This week's visit to Russia will be Czukay's second. He first visited this country in December 1995, bringing with him his &quot;video-special&quot; show to Moscow and St. Petersburg, when he was impressed with Can's Russian popularity, mentioning that, for Russian fans, his former band was as important, as, for example, The Rolling Stones.
 &quot;[Russian fans] have heard from Radio Moscow, I think, that I would come to Russia, and they came from Kazakhstan, from Siberia, from Kaliningrad, from everywhere,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;They were very astonished that I was working together with very young electronic musicians,&quot; he said. &quot;They wouldn't expect an older man who could be interested in the development of music of young people. That's why I said to them that the best recipe to get on is to be open for the new development, and always to start from the very beginning, as Can did.&quot;
 &quot;Being in Russia was [an] extremely positive experience, not only because when I left Russia, fans came and said to me, 'Why don't you stay in Russia? You have already a Russian name, and you should belong to us, please stay here.'&quot;
 Czukay, who released his new album, &quot;The New Millenium,&quot; in late March, said that, in St. Petersburg, he will play a program beginning in 1968 and ending in 2003, representing the whole history of his work, both with Can and solo.
 Czukay will perform solo, using samplers, guitar, French horn and a short-wave radio set, which he sees as a &quot;strange synthesizer&quot; - &quot;sometimes a little bit [of an] unpredictable instrument, looking for surprises.&quot;
 
 <i>
Holgar Czukay plays Red Club at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Links: www.czukay.de </i>

TITLE: curtain to rise on chamber opera
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: After sixteen years of a wandering lifestyle, local chamber-opera company St. Petersburg Opera is finally ready to settle down.
 
The company's new home is an enviable 19th-century mansion at 33 Galernaya Ulitsa that boasts gorgeous interiors and a rich theatrical history.
 &quot;I am more agitated and happy than before any premiere,&quot; Yury Alexandrov, the company's founder and artistic director, said at a preview of the new building on Tuesday. &quot;Very few directors can manage to get their company such a luxurious home, or any home at all.&quot;
 &quot;My pride and joy is singing and dancing,&quot; he added.
 The award-winning company actually gained its new premises back in 1998, thanks to a long-awaited grant from the City Administration, but it has taken over four years to get it ready for use.
 When Alexandrov first entered the building in 1998, everything was in a state of disrepair, with all panels crying out for restoration and mirrors either tarnished or broken. One of the first tasks the director faced was to rid the building of rats and fleas.
 &quot;There was no electricity and no water, either,&quot; he recalled.
 The company's new home has been through many incarnations through its history. Before the revolutions of 1917, the mansion was the home of Baron Sergei von Derviz, a professional pianist and patron of the performing arts who regularly hosted concerts and shows.
 &quot;[Von Dervis] was the <i>genius loci, </i>the special fairy spirit of this place, and its atmosphere has miraculously survived,&quot; Olga Taratynova, deputy head of the City Administration's Committee for the Protection and Preservation of Historical Monuments, said on Tuesday. &quot;The mansion boasts one of the top five theatrical interiors in town. It is probably second best after the Yusupov Palace Theater.&quot;
 Von Derviz designed the mansion's interiors in various styles that included, for example, a Moorish hall, a rococo hall and a more modern-looking room. According to Taratynova, several halls still require massive repairs and are currently closed. She estimated that, with additional funding, the rest of the halls can be restored in two to three years' time.
 During the Soviet era, Alexandrov said, the building was home to a peculiar set of cohabitants.
 &quot;It hosted a disco club, a tuberculosis clinic and a vytrezvitel [police drunk tank],&quot; he said.
 From 1993 to 1995, the theater was known as the Mayak, and was home to one of St. Petersburg's first gay clubs. 
 Now, von Derviz' old quarters will host an opera repertoire that includes works by Donizetti, Verdi, Dmitry Bortnyansky, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, among others. The venue's seating capacity is 150 people, plus the possiblity to seat some 15 to 20 guests in an additional row.
 The theater's official opening is scheduled for May 27, St. Petersburg's official birthday, when the troupe will premiere its rendition of a long-lost Donizetti masterpiece, &quot;Peter the Great, or a Carpenter From Livonia.&quot;
 &quot;This is a little-known Donizetti [work]. The composer created this opera when he was only 19 years old, bursting with talent and ideas,&quot; Alexandrov said, adding that the opera is more than a purely musical delight. Those tired of the stilted, pompous image of Peter the Great, he said, will be relieved to see the founder of St. Petersburg as a relaxed and cheerful man.
 &quot;The opera definitely presents a new approach to the theme,&quot; Alexandrov said. 
 St. Petersburg Opera gave its first performances in the Yusupov Palace Theater, where it has been a frequent guest ever since. According to Alexandrov, the company will not forget its roots after it moves into its new home.
 &quot;[The Yusupov Palace] helped us so much at the start of our career,&quot; he said. &quot;We are grateful friends, we know they need us now, and we won't leave them.&quot;
 He said a special program called &quot;Music of the Yusupovs&quot; has been specifically prepared to be performed exclusively at the venue, the former home of one of Russia's best known noble families and infamous as the site of the murder of Grigory Rasputin, the notorious &quot;adviser&quot; to Tsar Nicholas II.
 &quot;The Yusupovs were people of profound musical education, refined taste and compositional ability,&quot; Alexandrov said. &quot;They loved and wrote music - they weren't just engaged in the Rasputin murder.&quot;
 To repay the favors granted to it by other city venues - including the Yusupov Palace Theater and the Hermitage Theater - St. Petersburg Opera will readily welcome guests to perform on its new stage. Prominent St. Petersburg artists Andrei Tolubeyev and Oleg Basilashvili have already expressed interest in giving one-person shows there, and internationally renowned clown Vyacheslav Polunin is said to be considering performing in the theater.
 &quot;I don't want to just reign here, not letting any other artist in,&quot; Alexandrov said. &quot;Nor do I want our life to be a mummified, museum sort of existence. What I hope and want to see here is talented theater and genuine art.&quot;

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Despite conflicting news from different sources, including the BBC, <strong>Paul McCartney </strong>will not play in St. Petersburg, according to Anthea Eno and Seva Gakkel, officially appointed by McCartney's management to look after a charity event during the former Beatle's visit to the city next week.
 
McCartney's visit to St. Petersburg is purely a private visit at the invitation of Anthea Eno, whose U.K.-registered charity operates in St. Petersburg for the benefit of musically gifted but deprived schoolchildren. 
 &quot;Paul [...] will officially inaugurate the work of the charity, called The Menshikov Foundation,&quot; said Eno. McCartney's scheduled masterclass at an unnamed musical college on May 23 has been canceled.
 &quot;Naturally, we all hope that he will have such a pleasant impression of the city that he will return for a concert at some time in the future,&quot; said Eno.
 McCartney will arrive in St. Petersburg on May 22 and leave on May 23 to play a huge open-air concert on Moscow's Red Square on May 24. The cheapest tickets will cost from 1,000 rubles ($32.25) to an unprecedented 10,000 rubles ($322.50).
 Meanwhile, British band Sneaker Pimps will play at Moscow's 16 Tons on Saturday and some St. Petersburg fans will probably head there. It turned out that many people still think that the Pimps are fronted by Kelli Dayton, who sang on their best-known hits but, actually, was dumped in 1998.
 &quot;We decided to go separate ways,&quot; the band's keyboard player and co-founder Liam Howe said by phone last week. &quot;Me and [guitarist] Chris [Corner] wrote all the music for 'Becoming X,' which was our first record and, when it came to our second record, Kelli wanted to become a writer in the band,&quot; he said.
 &quot;We weren't prepared to compromise our material at that point. And so we split. So, the only thing that really changed for album No. 2 was the person who sang the lyrics. Everything else stayed the same things.&quot; 
 (Since then, Dayton has appeared as a guest vocalist on Bryan Ferry's albums, 1999's &quot;As Time Goes By&quot; and 2002's &quot;Frantic,&quot; and emerged as a solo artist under the name Kelli Ali in November 2001.) Tickets for the Sneaker Pimps gig cost 600 rubles.
 <strong>Front, </strong>the bunker club famous for its rowdy crowd and rock-and-roll approach, finally reinvented itself with an opening concert by local bands Igrai Garmon, Mosquitos and Fine Street last week. Not for the meek, the place boasts a true rock-and-roll spirit, if with a slight feeling of danger. For the time being, the place will open on Friday through Sunday, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. See Club Guide for further details.
 More tough guys can be seen at the three-day <strong>Tattoo Convention </strong>at PORT Club, running from Friday to Sunday. The popular Tom Waits-style Billy's Band will play on the opening night.
 After bringing some great records by bands such as St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review, local small independent label Zvezda Records seems now to be concentrating on electronic music, promoting an all-night electronic event called <strong>Global Warming.</strong>
 The festival is scheduled to feature over 10 acts, divided into three sections, BrainDance, SoulDance and ElectroDance. Red Club, May 16, 11 p.m.
 This week's must, though, is <strong>Holger Czukay. </strong>A founding member of Germany's seminal prog-rock band Can, Czukay will appear solo at Red Club on Saturday. See article, page ii.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: something new from deja vu
AUTHOR: by Eric Bruns
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: I admit that I've seen the movie &quot;The Matrix&quot; more times than your average former engineer (which is saying a lot). But a reappearing black cat, indicating a case of deja vu in the movie, yesterday's U.S. release of &quot;The Matrix Reloaded,&quot; my impatience to see if the sequel is more than a repeat of the original, and this week's review of a French-Russian restaurant called Deja Vu (on Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki, across from the circus), all drove me to discover if everything in my St. Petersburg world is a programmed rehash of what's already there, or if it's possible to reach Zion in a city where much of the fare tastes like Tasty Wheat. Or was that chicken?
 
Stepping into Deja Vu's three rooms and three distinct themes instantly convinced us that the restaurant is, on the contrary, something that hasn't been seen before. My dining companion readily appreciated the cabaret atmosphere and only wished we were there on a Friday or Saturday night, when there's a regular program of comedy, live music, dancing and, according to our server, &quot;acrobatics and very pretty girls.&quot;
 In stark contrast, I felt like I had stepped into a rich grandmother's house, with every piece of gold-trimmed china, every glass and every utensil in the exact place prescribed by &quot;Fine Dining Etiquette,&quot; as would have theoretically been published around the time the Titanic went down. Having a napkin placed in my lap by the maitre d' as I sat down didn't help. At one point, our waiter even complimented my Russian, which is a sure sign of needless formality. During our entire stay, I felt like I had intruded upon an elders' bridge game, but maybe that's because I didn't get to see the weekend acrobatics.
 If the atmosphere feels a bit dead on week nights (even the can-can-girl mannequin seems to have aged since the Moulin Rouge opened in Paris), my pulse was defibrillated by the menu. We had to share the one English version with other tables, but the delightful dishes offered are captivating in any language. They include such delectables as smoked eel, eggs Benedict, veal brains flan, partridge, venison, crawfish tails and T-bone steak. I was initially tempted to begin with a nice bottle of French red table wine, Chavron, when I discovered that the 450 rubles ($14.50) price tag is significantly higher than the 105 rubles ($3.40) I usually pay at the local <i>produkty </i>store. We opted, instead, for 0.33-liter bottles of Pilsner Urquell for 80 rubles ($2.60) each, which had the recompense of being presented and opened as if they were wine bottles.
 Choosing one of the mouth-watering possibilities was a challenging but thoroughly enjoyable process of temptation. In the end, my companion settled on the &quot;Dvorianka&quot; smoked duck filet with &quot;original hips sauce&quot; for 190 rubles ($6.15) to start. As our impression of the menu predicted, it was an absolute delight. The duck had just a hint of smoke flavor, combined with a satisfying meaty, yet tender, texture. The &quot;hips sauce&quot; was light and based on some exotic forest berry. It came on top of a pile of deliciously well-mixed shredded apples and white celery.
 I began with half a dozen snails in a buttery pesto garlic sauce for 200 rubles ($6.45) but, before I get ahead of myself, we were also given the option of several different kinds of fresh warm bread. We chose short baguettes that came hot to the touch, crispy yet soft inside, and gave a satisfying crunch as we broke them apart and steam flowed out. They came with a wonderful soft herb butter, but I couldn't help but dunk my pieces in the escargot oil instead. The snails themselves were delicious, although they weren't overwhelmingly fresh. All of the necessary utensils accompanied the dish, so be sure to read up on Titanic-era &quot;Etiquette,&quot; or you'll end-up like Julia Roberts in &quot;Pretty Woman.&quot;
 My companion continued with the &quot;Lamb Shin&quot; (indicating a rolled presentation, rather than anatomy) baked in a honey-mustard sauce with beans and paprika vegetable rolls, baked potato wedges and fresh greens for 450 rubles ($14.50). At this point, it should be noted that each main course automatically comes with a garnish that complements the dish. No need to throw rice or fries into the mix just to add mass to your plate. The lamb was incredibly soft and seemed to have fallen off the bone. She didn't think much of the sauce, however, which was a bit heavy, at least for this time of the year and in comparison with her appetizer.
 I went for the &quot;Fried Duck Filet&quot; garnished with orange segments, grapes and strawberries and served with a baked apple stuffed with brown sugar for 550 rubles ($17.75). It was tender, juicy and perfectly prepared, the subtly-flavored likes of which I haven't experienced in a while. I would recommend it to anybody, any time of year and any time of day.
 We finished with a slice of cheesecake for 110 rubles ($3.55), a piece of tiramisu for 150 rubles ($4.85), and two espressos for 50 rubles ($1.60) each, all of which was perfectly respectable.
 We concluded that Deja Vu falls outside the matrix of the city's all-too-common restaurants and was certainly not produced by a glitch. No machine could possibly devise such wonderful flavors. Whether it is a world you'd like to live in, however, depends on your interpretation of the cabaret-or-rich-grandma atmosphere. That said, I didn't get to see the lady in the red dress.
 
 <i>
Deja Vu. 30 Nab. Reki Fontanki. Tel.: 273-4304. Open daily from noon until the last guest leaves. Menus in Russian; one menu in English. Credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, with alcohol: 2,110 rubles ($68.05). </i>

TITLE: according to a dostoyevsky fan
AUTHOR: by Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg, Russia's literary capital, has inspired or been the setting for an enormous number of novels by Russian writers. With the release this week of &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky,&quot; by long-term St. Petersburg resident Ingrid Bengis, the literary canon now has a contemporary novel exploring the city from the perspective of an &quot;outsider&quot; - although this label may not be entirely accurate.
 
Bengis, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants to America, grew up in New York in a multi-lingual household. Although Russian was spoken at home, Bengis thought she had forgotten it as she grew up. Despite this, her first visit to the then Soviet Union in 1977 - to Odessa in what is now Ukraine to look for her mother's old dacha, or summer house - produced a startling impression.
 &quot;I got on a bus, and people were arguing, a really striking argument,&quot; she said in an interview this week. &quot;It lasted about five minutes, and then they started to laugh. I suddenly had this feeling, 'My God, I'm at home.'&quot;
 &quot;It was so familiar to me, and it was so unlike what I was used to in America,&quot; she continued. &quot;I immediately felt this sense of connection, and I've always felt that very deeply.&quot;
 After visiting the country regulary for several years - including a trip in 1986 during which she became friends with &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky&quot;'s other central character, a woman known only as B - Bengis moved to St. Petersburg full-time in 1991, when the book starts. The book charts the course of Bengis' life over until 1996 in a series of episodic chapters written in the first person. 
 At the start of the book, Bengis' closest friendship is with B, who makes a living sewing clothes for what was then the Kirov Theater - now the Mariinsky Theater - where her husband was a conductor. Over the next few years, the friendship falls apart, ending in B betraying Bengis to get full ownership of the apartment they bought together. (Bengis subsequently won a court case against B, but &quot;there was nothing I could do about it.&quot;) Along the way, Bengis meets Dostoevsky's great-great-granddaughter, starts teaching English at Herzen Pedagogical University - she still teaches, but at St. Petersburg State University - has a long stay in hospital and almost hires a member of the local mafia to help her in her struggle with B.
 &quot;There's a tendency for Westerners, little by little, to drop a lot of their values, because you can get away with a lot here that you feel you couldn't get away with in the West. You have to fight against allowing yourself to do sleazy things that you would otherwise, under Western skies, not even consider,&quot; she said. &quot;It's the fact that the law means so little here, and that there's an anarchic character to so much of life here, and there's a part of that that's intoxicating and that people get hooked on. It's both attractive and frightening, it's a very mixed kind of thing. I think that the meeting with the mafia guy is an example of that. But I didn't give in.&quot;
 The book, subtitled &quot;Travels in Russian Time,&quot; recounts Bengis' life in a matter-of-fact way that often belies the seriousness of her situation. (For example, she came within a few hours of death at the hospital, but passes lightly over this in one sentence.) Much of the book gives the impression of an almost soul-sapping struggle to stay afloat in a turbulent country, but Bengis said this fits her character - &quot;I'm not oriented to things being easy; I have no interest in things being easy, I never have&quot; - and her love for Russia.
 &quot;To say 'I love Russia' makes it sounds as if you have this romanticized idea about Russia, but what I was thinking of was <i>lyubov zla, polyubish i kozla, </i>or 'Love is evil, you can love a goat,'&quot; she said. &quot;Love doesn't really have anything to do with the virtuous qualities. Either you feel it or you don't, and if you feel it, it doesn't mean you don't ever feel hate, it's just that the hate doesn't have the power to overwhelm the love, no matter what you feel. Ultimately, the love triumphs, and I think that's what I feel here.&quot;
 &quot;I love the place where I live,&quot; she said. &quot;In the winter sometimes, I hole up and I hardly go out.&quot;
 During the summer, Bengis lives in her house on an island off the coast of Maine in the United States, where she runs one of America's best-known seafood suppliers, providing seafood to four-star restaurants. 
 &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky&quot;'s epilogue, the only chapter that has a title - &quot;Meeting With Raskolnikov&quot; - rather than just a year, is a hallucinatory walk following the antihero of Dostoyevsky's &quot;Crime and Punishment&quot; through streets near Sennaya Ploshchad and ending up in the courtyard of the building in which Raskolnikov murdered the old pawnbroker. In her book, Bengis echoes Dostoyevsky's famous phrase that &quot;beauty will save the world,&quot; although she says the last chapter is far from a contrived scenario.
 &quot;It was strange, because I took that walk and actually made that discovery,&quot; she said. &quot;That last chapter really was this incredible release for me. I stood in the courtyard and looked out and saw Nikolsky [Cathedral] and the [Mariinsky Theater] and really felt the beauty of it, before I even thought about it.&quot;
 Although Bengis began writing the book in 1991, she said that she had &quot;no idea&quot; what it would eventually become.
 &quot;I didn't have a plan for the book when I wrote it,&quot; she said. &quot;The feelings that are described in the book are really feelings that I had. I was struggling with all these violent feelings and then, all of a sudden, I had this genuine sense that I needed to get back into 'Crime and Punishment,' find Raskolnikov. That last part [of the book] is obviously a fantasy, but it was a fantasy that really helped me.&quot;
 &quot;It was as if something inside of me just melted. The feeling came first, and it just washed through me,&quot; she said. &quot;It was the end of the feeling of rage, the sense that I had to fight. I let go of it. That was not a direct Dostoyevsky influence ... It was just, somehow, Dostoyevsky unconsciously acting on my whole experience of life.&quot;
 In her late 20s, while still in America, Bengis, now 58, wrote &quot;Combat in the Erogenous Zone,&quot; a finalist for the 1972 National Book Award that was described by one critic as &quot;an intensely personal musing on man-hating and lesbianism.&quot;
 Although she has, arguably, mellowed since then - her only comment about reading the first book was a brisk &quot;don't bother&quot; - some traits of her writing and her character, which she described as &quot;very extreme,&quot; have remained intact, such as her preference for questions over answers.
 &quot;I don't like it when every question has an answer, so I left ['Metro Stop Dostoevsky'] without a lot of answers, at a moment that seemed right to me,&quot; she said.
 &quot;Salvation is a pretty good ending, although that's not really adequate. I just felt that I was finished,&quot; she said. &quot;I wrote it and, after I wrote it, I thought, 'Oh, that's the end.' That's all.&quot;
 Bengis' love for all things cultural is apparent in the book, in which the then-Kirov Theater features heavily. She has been a culture afficionado since childhood, learning ballet until &quot;it became obvious that my body wasn't built for it&quot; and also writing. Her Russian husband, Eduard, danced for many years in the ballet troupe of renowned Soviet choreographer Leonid Yakobsen, some of whose ballets Bengis helped revive at the Mariinsky Theater a few years ago.
 &quot;The relationship [of Russians] to culture was such nourishment for me,&quot; she said. &quot;I would go to the [Mariinsky Theater] and see little kids with ribbons in their hair, six, seven, eight years old, hanging over the orchestra and looking, dressed up with the sense of an event, but an event that was a frequent event. That deep involvement with culture here was tremendously nourishing, and you can still see it. It plays a diminishing role, but it still plays a role.&quot;
 However, her appreciation of physical beauty - which &quot;plays a very large role in my life&quot; - is tempered by her distaste for an easy life.
 &quot;When I go to Paris, for example, it's incredibly beautiful, but I feel exhusted after three or four days,&quot; she said. &quot;It's like eating cream puffs all the time - it's too much.&quot;
 Although she was brought up in New York, Bengis said she feels uncomfortable there: &quot;There's a tremendous amount of energy, but I'm not sure in pursuit of what,&quot; as opposed to St. Petersburg, where &quot;the energy is involved in overcoming real hurdles.&quot;
 &quot;There's this mixture of joy and sadness, there's a big range of emotions that you feel in relation to this city,&quot; she said. &quot;You can't just feel 'Oh, this is a wonderful city.' You feel that this is a wonderful city and this is a tragic city. It fits with all of the huge spectrum of emotions that you can have about this place. So, no matter what your state of mind, it matches up with something.&quot;
 &quot;One of the emotions that has really dominated my life is a sense of nostalgia. I think I was not born quite in the right time, but I'm not sure what time I should have been born in,&quot; she said. &quot;I'm not modern, I don't like modern things, I don't like a lot about modern mentality, I'm uncomfortable with the technological world, I have no connection to it whatsoever. I like to walk a lot ... and think.&quot;
 &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky&quot; ends with Bengis feeling &quot;the heaviness in my bones that is the prelude to extreme rage,&quot; just before bringing her ailing mother, who had Alzheimer's disease, to St. Petersburg toward the end of her life; she subsequently died and is buried here. After finishing the novel, Bengis wrote a piece - although &quot;it wasn't a sequel&quot; - about her mother's life here that was published in the literary journal Zvezda.
 &quot;[My mother] didn't really know where she was, and you had to keep telling her,&quot; she said. &quot;She would go out on the street and would be hearing Russian, and she'd say, 'So interesting, everyone's speaking Russian.' I'd say, 'Mom, we're in Petersburg,' and she would say, '<i>Chudo!</i>' ['Miracle!']&quot;
 Although Bengis professes to being &quot;very influenced by Dostoyevsky,&quot; she said she did not consciously seek to emulate her hero in the book, even though the title includes his name. She called the Dostoevsky influence a &quot;process of discovery&quot; that began on her first day here, when she walked along Kanal Griboyedova and ended up near the pawnbroker's apartment from &quot;Crime and Punishment.&quot;
 &quot;Little by little, I began to feel the presence of Dostoyevsky here tremendously ... in the atmosphere of the city, in the people, in characters,&quot; she said. &quot;I began to feel as though it was more like Dostoyevsky's shadow was everywhere. Because I was so involved, in love with literature, that really became a very important element for me.&quot;
 &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky&quot;'s working title was originally &quot;According to Dostoevsky,&quot; which Bengis' publisher said &quot;made it sound like a collection of literary essays.&quot; It got its final title during a meeting with the publisher in New York during which Bengis regretted not having written about the metro station in St. Petersburg named after the writer.
 &quot;I thought it was amazing that there's a metro station called [Dostoyevskaya],&quot; she said. &quot;I used to go and just sit there. It's beautiful, it really has the feel.&quot;
 So what about the obvious question: Does Bengis have any idea what B is doing now?
 &quot;No. Haven't the foggiest.&quot;
 Any desire to find out?
 &quot;No. My life has changed tremendously since then.&quot;
 Like Russia?
 She smiled. &quot;Mm-hmm.&quot;
 
 <i>Ingrid Bengis reads from &quot;Metro Stop Dostoevsky&quot; at Brodyachaya Sobaka Art Basement, 5 Ploshchad Iskusstv, at 7 p.m. on Monday, and again at Angliya Bookstore, 40 Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki, at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday. Tickets for Monday's invitation-only event can be reserved by calling Brodyachaya Sobaka at 315-7764. </i>

TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: by Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: <i>Pervomai: </i>May Day, Labor Day.
 <i>
Dvoyeveriye </i>(dual beliefs, dual belief system) is a particularly apt concept in times of change like now: Old rituals and beliefs get mated with the new, and you have a lovely hybrid that satisfies everyone and no one. <i>Pervoye Maya, </i>or <i>Pervomai </i>(May Day) is an extreme example of this - it's not <i>dvoyeveriye, </i>but something like <i>pyativeriye, </i>or five sets of beliefs. For some people, the first set of <i>maiskiye prazdniki </i>(May holidays) are a nostalgic last gasp to unite the working class; for others, a good time to clear the dacha garden; and for still others, a good chance to zip down to the Canary Islands for some diving.
 In Europe, May Day started out as a nice pagan holiday to celebrate the spring planting, then turned into a holiday of love (complete with twirling ribbons around a Maypole). It began its metamorphosis into a working-class holiday at the end of the 19th century, in memory of a workers' demonstration in Chicago (calling, among other things, for an eight-hour working day), that ended in bloodshed. The idea of decent working conditions caught on with the Russian comrades. <i>Da zdravstvuyet vosem-chasovoi pabochy den! </i>(Here's to the eight-hour working day), an early Leninist May Day pamphlet read.
 In Soviet times, May 1 wasn't as much a show of military might as Nov. 7, so this was a <i>demonstratsiya </i>(demonstration, rally) and not a <i>parad </i>(which means a &quot;military parade&quot; in Russian). <i>Khodili na demonstratsii, podnimali plakat &quot;Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaites&quot; </i>(We took part in the demonstration, holding a placard that said &quot;Workers of the world, unite&quot;). There were lots of paper flowers and urgent pleas for workers of the world to throw off the shackles of oppression, mostly in the form of a demonic, well-armed Uncle Sam. <i>Net amerikanskomu imperializmu! </i>(No to American imperialism!); <i>Doloi amerikanskuyu voenshchinu! </i>(Down with American militarism) <i>Ruki proch ot Ostrova Svobody! </i>(Hands off Cuba, the Island of Freedom); <i>Dogonim i peregonim Ameriku! </i>(We'll catch up and surpass America!). And then quietly: <i>Poyedem skoreye na dachu - kartoshku sazhat </i>(Let's get out to the dacha as fast as we can to plant potatoes).
 This year, there is the America-bashing, although not on Red Square, and couched in different terms. &quot;Ruki proch&quot; is gone, and no one cares much about Cuba except as a tourist destination. Instead, it's <i>My reshitelno vystupayem protiv amerikanskoi agresii v Irake </i>(We strongly oppose American aggression in Iraq). And the UN is more important than working-class solidarity <i>Nado soblyudat mezhdunarodnoye pravo </i>(International law must be upheld).
 The second May holiday, <i>Den Pobedy </i>(Victory Day) is another matter. There's no duality or irony here at all - it's a somber and touching celebration of those who fought, and those who fell, in World War II - which Russians call <i>Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina </i>(the Great Patriotic War). It's a time for veterans to dust off and don their uniforms and pin on their medals (from neck to waist, on some) and sit on park benches reminiscing with their old friends. The slogans are so high toned, one can't call them slogans at all - they are almost religious in their fervor. <i>Slava Voinam! </i>(Glory to the fighting men); <i>Vechnaya pamyat pavshim geroiyam </i>(Our fallen heroes shall stay in our memories forever); <i>Nizky poklon pobedivshemu narodu </i>(We bow down before the victorious people); <i>Nikto ne zabyt, nichto ne zabyto </i>(No one is forgotten, no deed is forgotten).
 This is the true <i>prazdnik </i>in the <i>maiskiye prazdniki.</i>
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: examining a city's anatomy
AUTHOR: by Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine's line that &quot;Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben&quot; (&quot;The world and life are too fragmentary&quot;) could be taken as a motto for the photography. Some of Heine's &quot;fragmentation&quot; appears in the form of a paraphrase of Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the title of the photographic exhibition &quot;Streets. Faces. Years. Houses.&quot; that opened recently.
 
The exhibition, which runs through Tuesday at the Rumyantsev Mansion, was organized by the National Center of Photography and the St. Petersburg-based A-Ya Society, and displays around 250 photographs of St. Petersburg that cover the period from the appearance of photography in the second half of the 19th century through to the present day. 
 The older works, from the Russian National Library, the History of Material Culture Institute and the collection of Sergei Morozov, are juxtaposed here with contemporary works by local photo-artists including well-known names such as Yevgeny Mokhorev, Stanislav Chabutkin and Andrei Chezhin. The resulting mixture is the subject for some curious, engaging and sometimes unexpected comparisons.
 As all of this suggests, the current exhibition does not showcase a grandiose, homogeneous view of the city's photogenic front. Rather, it concentrates on a great many smaller locations, which become strange, ridiculous, funny, fantastic or capricious, creating an image of a problematic, yet simultaneously beautiful and living city. The current exhibition shifts its emphasis from time-honored architecture to the motion and emotions of St. Petersburg, bringing into focus the bustle and everyday rhythms of the city and the internal dynamic of courtyards, apartments and interiors that is usually hidden behind facades.
 According to the exhibition's curators, Arkady Ippolitov and Olga Korsunova, &quot;Very few are able to see the city from the inside, much less show it from inside. Borrowing into its insides, where the womb neighbors on the heart, and the rectum is indistinguishable from the brain, is too complex and thankless a task.&quot; Although the quality of some of the works on display is variable, the curators have coped well with the task at hand.
 It so happens that, to get to see &quot;Streets. Faces. Years. Houses.&quot; visitors have to pass through the Rumyantsev Mansion's huge, depressing permanent exhibition documenting the Siege of Leningrad, which also happens to include photographs. Involuntarily, this partially restores an ear missing from Ippolitov and Korsunova's exhibition, that of war-time and postwar Leningrad. At the same time, however, the deep contrast that this random coincidence provides becomes an interesting rhetorical construction that gives a new, human dimension to the current exhibition's principal message that &quot;the city is its own motion.&quot;
 Another interesting side-note accompanying the exhibition is the fact that Ippolitov recently won &quot;My St. Petersburg,&quot; a competition organized by the glossy women's magazine Elle to find the best essay dedicated to the city. &quot;My St. Petersburg,&quot; one of innumerable events claiming to be a birthday present to the city, produced a book of the same name including the best entries, as chosen by a high-powered jury that comprised well-known cultural figures including writer Tatyana Tolstaya, rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov, State Hermitage Museum Director Mikhail Piotrovsky and critic Tatyana Moskvina. Ippolitov's piece, &quot;St. Petersburg in a Porcelain Snuffbox,&quot; combined many ideas that also appeared in other entrants' works, and walked off with first prize.
 It is tempting to compare these, at first sight different, two views - exhibition and essay - of the same city. For Ippolitov the essayist, St. Petersburg no longer exists as a city, lost during the social upheavals in the second decade of the last century. The city has become a print on an antique plate, similar to a Florentine niello, or alloy-decorated surface, that might turn up in a porcelain snuffbox stored in one of St. Petersburg's many &quot;warehouse museums.&quot; For Ippolitov the curator, the city continues to live - as the current exhibition demonstrates - but it would be more appropriately named Petrograd.
 In other words, this St. Petersburg discourse shares a common nature with the thoughts of Italian artist Renzo Olivia for &quot;The Boundary Between Sacred and Profane,&quot; an exhibit of redesigned icons that he showed at last August's International Festival of Experimental Art and Performance at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall.
 Olivia wrote: &quot;Russian people in these days are at loss if they have to define a boundary-line between sacred and profane. Before, during the Communism, nothing was sacred (they were using churches as factories, as clubs, as swimming pools, as warehouses, etc.). Nowadays, in sort of superstition, they tend to consider sacred everything which concerns religion. They have not found yet the right approach to that matter: but a deconsecrated church is not anymore a church, an old <i>oklad</i> [icon frame] is just a scrap of metal - good for Scrap Art!&quot;
 
 <i>
&quot;Streets. Faces. Years. Houses.&quot; runs through Tuesday at the Rumyantsev Mansion. See Exhibits for details.
 
 &quot;My Petersburg&quot; is out now, published by Moscow publisher Vagrius, in Russian only. </i>

TITLE: playing with personal history
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: Roman Polanski's new movie, &quot;The Pianist,&quot; is based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a star of Polish radio and cafe society in the 1930's and a member of Warsaw's assimilated Jewish middle class, who lived through the Nazi occupation and the Warsaw ghetto. Szpilman's recollections, published shortly after the war, offer, like other such books, a deeply paradoxical impression of the Holocaust. Accounts of survival are both representative and anomalous; they at once record this all-but-unimaginable historical catastrophe and, without intentional mendacity or inaccuracy, distort it.
 
The reason for this could not be simpler. Most of the intended victims of Nazi genocide did not survive; the typical Jewish experience in 1940s Europe was death. One of the main genres that allows later generations access to this time thus presents an inevitably unrepresentative picture of it.
 We, naturally, identify with the protagonists of these books, and the characters based on them in movies and plays, and so imagine that we would have been among the lucky ones, even if the real odds suggest otherwise. (We also comfort ourselves in the vain belief that, had we been there, we would have bravely defied the Nazis, risking our own well-being to help their victims.) When it is not treated with the uneasy sentimentality reserved for miracles, survival - whether through dumb luck, resilience, the kindness of strangers or some combination of these - is often viewed with a deep and bitter sense of the absurd.
 Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion. When death is at once so systematically and so capriciously dispensed, survival becomes a kind of joke. By the end of the film, Szpilman, brilliantly played by Adrien Brody, comes to resemble one of Samuel Beckett's gaunt existential clowns, shambling through a barren, bombed-out landscape clutching a jar of pickles. He is like the walking punchline to a cosmic jest of unfathomable cruelty.
 Perhaps because of his own experiences, Polanski approaches this material with a calm, fierce authority. This is certainly the best work Polanski has done in many years (which, unfortunately, is not saying a lot), and it is also one of the very few nondocumentary movies about Jewish life and death under the Nazis that can be called definitive (which is saying a lot). And - again paradoxically - this is achieved by realizing the modest, deliberate intention to tell a single person's story, to recreate a specific and finite set of events. (Ronald Harwood's script does take some necessary liberties with Szpilman's account, but these seem justified by the demands of movie storytelling.)
 The ambition to produce a comprehensive vision - a single spectacle adequate to the Holocaust - ultimately defeated Steven Spielberg's admirable and serious &quot;Schindler's List.&quot; Polanski, in staging a narrow, partial slice of history, has made a film that is both drier and more resonant than Spielberg's.
 One of Polanski's trademarks is what might be called (to continue multiplying paradoxes) a humane sadism. He has always been fascinated by what happens to weak, ordinary people - Mia Farrow in &quot;Rosemary's Baby,&quot; for instance, or Jack Nicholson in &quot;Chinatown&quot; - when they are intruded upon by evil forces more powerful than they, and he punishes his actors, peeling back their vanity to make them show the face of humanity under duress.
 One of Brody's most appealing features - from &quot;King of the Hill&quot; 10 years ago through such varied and underseen pictures as &quot;Restaurant,&quot; &quot;Summer of Sam&quot; and &quot;Bread and Roses&quot; more recently - is his quick-witted, almost smart-alecky cockiness. His Szpilman, in the first section of &quot;The Pianist,&quot; has the gait of a self-satisfied dandy and the smug smile of a man who takes charm and good fortune as his birthright. As he plays piano in a broadcast studio, an explosion rattles the building. He ducks, wipes some plaster off his sleeve, and keeps playing. Later Szpilman refuses to allow the widespread panic at the German invasion to interfere with more pressing matters, like the seduction of a star-struck young woman named Dorota (Emilia Fox).
 History, the occupying Germans and Polanski then conspire to wipe the smirk off his face. The Nazi takeover is followed by a swift, brutal chronicle of violation and humiliation as the Szpilman family are stripped of their possessions, their dignity (the elderly father, played by Frank Finlay, is beaten by a German soldier for daring to use the sidewalk) and their home. With the other Jews of Warsaw, they are herded into the ghetto, a captive labor force subject to continual culling by disease, starvation and the random violence of their tormentors.
 Polanski, working in Poland for the first time in 40 years (and also in Prague), reconstructs the look and rhythm of life in the ghetto with care and sobriety. You feel the dread and confusion of the inhabitants, and you also observe their intuitive, futile attempts to master the situation - circulating underground newspapers, smuggling contraband through the walls and quietly arming themselves for resistance.
 The survival instinct is shown to exist in a weird, numb state that combines defiance and resignation. And Szpilman's evasion of death involves a curious combination of pluck, passivity and arrogance. He is the only member of his family who avoids being shipped to the extermination camps, and he later manages to escape from the ghetto altogether. During the 1943 ghetto uprising, he is locked in a secure apartment in the gentile part of the city, and he watches helplessly from the window as the partisans begin their brave, doomed resistance to the German occupiers.
 From this moment forward, &quot;The Pianist&quot; becomes a tour de force of claustrophobia and surreal desperation, and Polanski ruthlessly strips his Szpilman down to the bare human minimum. He is neither an especially heroic nor an entirely sympathetic fellow, and by the end he has been reduced to a nearly animal condition - sick, haggard and terrified. But then the film's climax offers the most dramatic paradox of all: a glimpse of how the impulses of civilization survive in the midst of unparalleled barbarism. When I first saw this film last spring in Cannes (where it won the Palme d'Or), I thought Szpilman's encounter, in the war's last days, with a music-loving Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann) courted sentimentality by associating the love of art with moral decency, an equation the Nazis themselves, steeped in Beethoven and Wagner, definitively refuted. But on a second viewing, the scene, scored to the ravishing, sorrowful music of Chopin, was a painful and ridiculous testament to just how bizarre the European catastrophe of the last century was.
 Szpilman may have been the butt of a monstrous joke, but the last laugh - appropriately deadpan - was his. &quot;What will you do when this is over?&quot; the officer asks. &quot;I'll play piano on Polish radio,&quot; Szpilman replies. Which is exactly what he did until his death two years ago. 
 
 <i>
&quot;The Pianist&quot; shows at Avrora cinema through May 23. </i>

TITLE: U.S. Forces Raid Iraqi Village, Sieze 200
AUTHOR: By David Rising
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEAR TIKRIT, Iraq - Heavily armed U.S. Army forces stormed into a village near Tikrit before dawn on Thursday, seizing more than 200 prisoners, including one man on the United States' &quot;most-wanted&quot; list of former Iraqi officials.
 
U.S. troops encountered no resistance during the 5-hour sweep, officers said.
 The northern city of Tikrit is the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's hometown and the region around it is known as a hotbed of Baath Party supporters and former high-ranking Iraqi military officials.
 U.S. officials said that one of those arrested Thursday was identified as being on the &quot;top 55&quot; list, but did not give the suspect's name. Two other Iraqi Army generals and one general from Hussein's security forces were also caught.
 Under military rules, the name of the village could not be released by reporters accompanying U.S. forces until the operation was over and permission was given.
 The operation had been planned for a week after U.S. officials received a tip that the men were in the area.
 It involved more than 500 soldiers, who sealed off the town and went from house to house.
 Seventeen bricks of plastic explosive were seized from one house, military officials said, and one man was apprehended in a sniper's perch toting an AK-47 assault rifle.
 Among the 200 people taken into custody were several teenage boys. Each was restrained and ordered to sit or kneel on the roads outside their homes.
 Patrols had been discreetly combing the streets of the village to gather intelligence, while a drone surveillance aircraft had been flying overhead for two days providing up-to-date photographs and real-time video of the area.
 At 2 a.m. on Thursday, troops formed a cordon around the outer perimeter of a 9-block area. Eighteen Bradley fighting vehicles, 12 Howitzers and 35 armored Humvees secured the area as forces moved in. Six boats patrolled the nearby Tigris river during the maneuver, and Apache helicopters hovered overhead. About 200 houses and outlying buildings were searched before the sweep ended at 7 a.m.
 Meanwhile, on Thursday, Iraqis continued to pull bodies from a mass grave located near the village of Mahaweel, 100 kilometers south of Baghdad. More than 3,000 bodies have been uncovered at the site, according to a doctor leading the excavation. The victims were believed to have been those killed when Hussein's forces stamped out a Shiite uprising following the 1991 Gulf War.

TITLE: Ducks Shut Out Wild Again To Move to Brink of Finals
AUTHOR: By Ken Peters
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANAHEIM, California - Anaheim Mighty Ducks goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere was a bit incredulous Wednesday night after he recorded his third consecutive shutout in the Western Conference finals. The Ducks beat the Minnesota Wild 4-0 for a 3-0 lead in the Western Conference finals. 
 
&quot;It is a little surreal,&quot; said Giguere, who made 35 saves. &quot;Obviously,0 the team has been playing unbelievably in front of me, the defensemen playing so well, the forwards are coming back to help them. They're blocking so many shots in front of me.&quot; 
 Playing in his first postseason, Giguere extended his sensational run by becoming the first goaltender in modern league history to record three consecutive shutouts in the next-to-last round of the playoffs. 
 &quot;He's unbelievable,&quot; Anaheim defenseman Keith Carney said. &quot;Three shutouts in a row in the conference finals is pretty amazing. They had some quality chances, but he was there every time.&quot; 
 The 25-year-old goaltender's scoreless streak reached 213 minutes, 17 seconds, going back to the third period of the Ducks' clinching Game 6 victory over Dallas. The playoff record is 248:32 by Detroit's Normie Smith in 1936. 
 &quot;They're playing so well. The goalie is a big part of it, no doubt,&quot; Minnesota coach Jacques Lemaire said. &quot;We tried to move the puck across, and he still made saves on it. We tried in the other games to shoot more. He still made saves.&quot; 
 Giguere, who has four shutouts in the playoffs, has stopped 98 Minnesota shots in the conference finals. He became the first goalie to open a series with three straight shutouts since Toronto's Frank McCool against Detroit in 1945. 
 In Anaheim's first one-sided win of the postseason, Steve Rucchin scored 4:59 into the game. In the second period, Paul Kariya scored, Stanislav Chistov scored, then Kariya scored again and suddenly the Ducks had the first big lead of the playoffs. 
 Lemaire, who has alternated goaltenders through the playoffs, pulled Dwayne Roloson after the Ducks scored their third goal. Manny Fernandez gave up another goal shortly afterward. 
 &quot;They had some good chances,&quot; Fernandez said. &quot;They really came through. Unlike the other two games, I felt they really showed up tonight.&quot;
 Kariya made it 2-0 with his slap shot from the slot after Adam Oates fed him a perfect pass from behind the net. Chistov scored four minutes later when he wristed a back-hander past Roloson. 
 Kariya scored his second goal of the game and team-high fifth of the playoffs just 1:35 later with a baseball-like swing after the puck bounced off Fernandez's pads into the air just to the goalie's left. Officials reviewed the play and determined his stick was not over the crossbar.

TITLE: 76ers Take 3-2 Lead in Conference Semifinals
AUTHOR: By Larry Lage
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUBURN HILLS, Michigan - Chucky Atkins' layup with less than a second left was goaltended by Derrick Coleman to give Detroit a 78-77 victory over the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday night and a 3-2 lead in their Eastern Conference semifinal series. 
 
&quot;Just please go in, that's all I was saying,&quot; said Atkins, who scored 17 points. 
 Richard Hamilton said the last thing Detroit wanted to do was face elimination in Philadelphia. 
 &quot;That was a big motivation for us,&quot; said Hamilton, who scored 14 of his 20 points during Detroit's dominant first quarter. 
 Detroit's Jon Barry said it simply: &quot;If you lose this game, you're in big trouble.&quot; 
 Allen Iverson missed a desperation heave as time expired to cap an awful shooting night. Iverson missed 20 of 25 shots and finished with 14 points, one more than his career playoff low. 
 Iverson blamed himself for losing Game 2 after missing two free throws with a two-point lead and 0:15 left, but he didn't choose to solely shoulder the blame for Game 5. 
 &quot;This is definitely a team loss,&quot; Iverson said. &quot;Every time we lose, I'm not going to put it on me.&quot; 
 He also didn't give Hamilton credit for hounding him. 
 &quot;The only person in this game that can stop me is me,&quot; Iverson said. &quot;I've been saying that since Day 1.&quot; 
 Eric Snow hit a 3-pointer with 0:09.4 left to give the 76ers their only lead of the game, 77-76. 
 Atkins, starting in place of injured Chauncey Billups, took an inbounds pass with 0:03.7 left and drove the right side for the winning shot that was in the basket when Coleman knocked it out from below with 0:00.9 left. 
 The Sixers trailed by 14 points early in the game, and by at least seven until early in the third quarter. 
 Before Snow's basket, it looked like Tayshaun Prince would be a star again. 
 Detroit's rookie made a spinning layup for his 13th point with 0:16.6 left to give the Pistons a 76-74 lead. Prince, who was barely used during the regular season, made a similar shot to force overtime in Game 2 before the Pistons won the game in the extra session. 
 Coleman had 23 points and 11 rebounds, while Snow had 16 points and Aaron McKie added 10. 
 Iverson was averaging 32.8 points in the playoffs, behind only Los Angeles' Kobe Bryant. 
 In his previous 10 playoff games, he had scored at least 22 points and led Philadelphia in scoring in each game. Iverson had scored at least 20 points in 22 straight postseason games. 
 The game was as exciting as one could be with two teams missing most of their shots. Detroit shot 39.2 percent and Philadelphia made just 36.7 percent of its shots. 
 &quot;We ended up with a game played at an unbelievable level of competitiveness,&quot; Detroit coach Rick Carlisle said. &quot;That's what playoff basketball is all about. It doesn't matter if the games are high scoring if they are played like this.&quot;