SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #883 (51), Friday, July 11, 2003
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TITLE: Moscow Bomb Blast Kills FSB Officer
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A bomb exploded Thursday in Moscow's city center, killing an FSB sapper trying to defuse it, in an attack the Interior Ministry linked to the recent double suicide bombings and said was organized by a terrorist ring training female suicide bombers.
The Basmanny district court authorized the arrest late Thursday of the Chechen woman detained in the latest attack. She was identified as Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, a 22-year-old ethnic Ingush from the Chechen village of Assinovskaya.
Muzhikhoyeva tried to enter the posh Imbir restaurant on 16 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ulitsa just after 11 p.m. Wednesday when security guards stopped her and called the police, a police spokesperson said.
Their suspicions were aroused because she was carrying a black sports bag and acting in an agitated manner, she said.
Police officers arrived at the scene minutes later and asked Muzhikhoyeva for her passport. But she refused and threatened to detonate a bomb, which she said was in her bag.
"We said, 'Let's carefully take a look at what is in your bag,' looked inside and saw wires and some kind of button," police sergeant Mikhail Galtsev said on Rossia television.
Muzhikhoyeva then tried to detonate the bomb, but the officers managed to handcuff her first, Rossia reported.
FSB sappers, who arrived shortly after the police, placed the bag on a cleared-off section of the sidewalk and spent more than two hours trying to disarm it, the police spokesperson said.
After a remote-controlled robot made several failed attempts to defuse it, the FSB called in one of its best sappers, Georgy Trofimov. The 29-year-old major had defused bombs at the Dubrovka theater after the hostage crisis in October and had disarmed the partially exploded bomb worn by the first suicide bomber on Saturday.
It was 2:15 a.m.
Trofimov, dressed in a bulky protective suit, approached the bag and started to pick it up. At that moment, the explosives went off in a burst of smoke and sparks, throwing him back several meters and killing him instantly.
The bomb contained the equivalent of 400 grams of TNT and was packed with ball bearings, the police said.
The force of the blast shattered dozens of shop windows and set off car alarms along Tverskaya.
It was unclear what set the bomb off.
"There always is a very small chance that an accidental explosion will occur," Vladimir Yeryomin, the deputy head of the FSB's Criminology Institute, told NTV television.
Police and FSB officials reached by telephone declined to comment.
Some local media speculated that the bomb might have been detonated by remote control or a timer. Adolf Mishuyev, an explosives expert at the Moscow State Construction Institute, said that an accomplice watching the efforts to disarm the bomb could have easily decided to push the button when he saw Trofimov pick it up.
Muzhikhoyeva, who was being held Thursday night at the FSB's Lefortovo prison, had been living with an aunt in Chechnya but left in February and her whereabouts had been unknown, Itar-Tass reported, citing the police.
When she was detained, she was carrying a Nazran-Moscow plane ticket dated July 3, according to television reports.
Muzhikhoyeva's husband joined the Chechen rebels a few years ago and was killed, and her family's house was destroyed in the first Chechen war, Rossia said.
Itar-Tass reported that the police detained a suspected male accomplice later Thursday who was born in Chechnya and worked for a Moscow-based company.
Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov denied the report and said that the police were not looking for any accomplices. Instead, he said, they were hunting for the leaders of the terrorist ring that plotted Saturday's suicide bombings, which killed 14 people at a rock concert in Tushino, and the most recent attack.
He said that the group was training female suicide bombers to carry out attacks in Moscow and in other cities across the country.
"We have information that will enable us to shortly hunt down this unit training female suicide bombers," Gryzlov said in televised remarks. He declined to elaborate.
He said that all Russians, "not only Muscovites, but also residents of other cities, should be vigilant."
TITLE: Khodorovsky Makes Veiled Threat About Energy
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Pressure mounted on President Vladimir Putin to take a stand on the escalating investigations into Yukos as a worn out looking Mikhail Khodorkovsky went on TV on Thursday night to issue a very public warning to the Kremlin that he might cut off oil supplies to some regions if it did not back down.
"We understand our responsibilities. We are responsible for supplying energy to a large number of regions," Khodorkovsky said on NTV. "The company has huge reserves of strength and in this respect we are ready to take on our responsibility. But the authorities should understand their responsibility too."
He said that the campaign against his company appeared to have come as the result of "inadequate" maneuverings in "petty internal political intrigues." He said that the company had lost "enough" as a result of the slide in its share price in recent days as spooked investors sold down its stock. "But this is nothing compared to what Russia has lost as a country," he said.
The leaders of the business elite, meanwhile, pow-wowed behind the scenes to agree on a final version of an appeal to be presented to Putin on
Friday.
Market players, businesspeople and political observers are waiting to see which way Putin will turn in what many say could be one of the most weighty decisions of his presidency. Putin has kept silent so far on the mushrooming embezzlement, murder and tax-evasion charges leveled against the company, which many see as politically inspired, even as concerns grow that the case could set a precedent for a full-scale redistribution of property.
Analysts say that if Putin moves to rein in the investigations, he risks looking like he is siding with big business before an electorate still bitter over the corrupt gains made by the oligarchs in the 1990s. And in doing so, the man who has made consolidating his hold on power a key tenet of his presidency would also risk stepping back before Khodorkovsky, who is growing in influence and has been funding opposition parties. On the other hand, analysts say, if the investigations are allowed to strengthen, he risks setting a precedent for a redistribution of property, plunging the country into instability and undermining the achievements of his term so far.
Russia's big-business barons are set to try to persuade him to step back from the brink, or risk turning the clocks back to a wave of chaos.
According to the latest version of a letter being drafted by members of big business' main lobbying organization, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the oligarchs will call on Putin "to take steps to stop the short-sighted campaign created by forces that see stability as a threat."
"The actions of some politicians, supported by members of the security services, are aimed at undermining the country's stability, at reexamining the results of privatization and at portraying businesspeople as the enemy. We see this as an extremely dangerous situation," says the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times from a source close to the RSPP.
The onslaught against Yukos began when the man seen as the "financial genius" behind the company, Platon Lebedev, was arrested last week on charges of theft of state property. Since then, prosecutors have widened the probe to look into other Yukos asset deals and tax evasion by the company.
Analysts have said that the attack was launched by Putin's St. Petersburg allies in the Kremlin, former KGB men Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin and FSB head Nikolai Patrushev, in a bid to seize the political and economic clout wielded by the old oligarchic elite.
Judging by the carefully worded language of the RSPP letter, although no names are named, it looks like most of the country's business barons agree. Neither Yukos nor the alleged men behind the attack are named, but the business barons make clear they see the hand of the security services as being behind an attempt to redistribute property.
"The actions of law enforcement agents in the economy have often gone beyond the framework of the law recently, and in essence are being based on political expediency," the letter says. "An independent player on the economic field has been created out of these agencies with [an aim of] redistributing markets with the use of an entire arsenal of strongarm tactics.
"In our view, political and economic stability in Russia is the main guarantee of economic growth and the main stay against systemic crises," it says.
In the letter, which is signed by RSPP president Arkady Volsky, who is set to personally present the letter to Putin on Friday, the businesspeople also pledge to concentrate their efforts on stopping the use of law enforcement agencies to decide their own battles.
"Of course, unfair competition with the use of law enforcement agencies is to some extent a child of business itself," it says. "The RSPP is making a huge effort to bring this corrupt practice to an end."
Most of Russia's major businesses have created their own armed security services, which have been used in many a past corporate takeover battle. In addition, many observers have said parts of Russia's myriad of law enforcement agencies were essentially "privatized" by different oligarchic groups.
TITLE: Gref Tries To Lower Tension In Market
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Seeking to calm investors and restore stability to the market, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Thursday that the government has no plans to challenge the shady privatization deals of the 1990s.
"The government's position has not changed: The results of privatization will not be revisited," Gref said.
But he did not completely do away with the uncertainty that has arisen since prosecutors began looking into Yukos, the No. 2 oil major, and its major shareholders.
"In any case, I don't think privatization will be revisited under the current team serving under the president," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Fears that private-property rights could be reassessed arose when Platon Lebedev, the third-largest shareholder in Yukos' parent company, Group Menatep, was arrested last week and charged with fraud in the 1994 privatization of a fertilizer producer. The attack on Yukos shifted to the oil company itself on Wednesday when the Prosecutor General's Office said it was investigating it for tax evasion.
Sergei Stepashin, the head of the Audit Chamber, also tried to induce a measure of calm by toning down his remarks of earlier in the week that oil majors were not paying enough taxes. On Monday, Stepashin had flat out called Sibneft a "tax cheat" and said "we have to change the way we collect taxes from our largest oil companies."
On Thursday, Stepashin said that about 100 billion rubles ($3 billion) were not received by the state in 2002, but he said that the blame lay not with the companies themselves but with loopholes in the tax laws. "The State Duma must now take steps to close the remaining loopholes," he told Interfax.
Prosecutors said that the investigation into possible tax invasion by Yukos and other oil majors was begun in response to a written request from State Duma Deputy Mikhail Bugera.
Bugera was not available for comment Thursday, but an aide who picked up the phone in the deputy's office at the Duma sounded surprised that Bugera's petition had suddenly become a cause for an investigation.
"You know there are dozens of requests from deputies lying around the Prosecutor General's Office. And it's never clear when and which deputy's request they are going to pull out from the stack," said the aide, who asked not to be identified.
"It's terrible that he [Bugera] was made into such a celebrity in one day. And how could it have happened that one man led to a 5-percent plunge in the stock price in one day [Wednesday]," he added.
Yukos shares fell throughout the week, giving in to investors' growing concern that it has become the victim of a power struggle within the Kremlin.
The slide continued Thursday as the oil major's stock fell another 6.3 percent to close at $12.51 per share. The market as a whole also fell, though not as sharply, with the benchmark RTS losing 3.2 percent to close at 478 points.
Sibneft, which is in the process of merging with Yukos, also saw its stock tumble, but it seemed to have fallen victim to conflicting and possibly false reports.
Sibneft shares lost 8.8 percent at one point during the day following an Interfax report, citing unnamed sources, that the company's financials are being investigated by the Tax Ministry and Prosecutor General's Office.
But the Tax Ministry denied the report. "We are not running any queries regarding Sibneft at the moment," a Tax Ministry spokesperson said on Thursday afternoon. The Prosecutor General's Office said it was still checking the report and did not come up with a definitive answer by the end of the working day.
Sibneft went through a tax-related investigation last year and was not found to have violated any laws.
But despite the pessimistic mood on the market, analysts said Thursday there were signs that the clouds around Yukos and big business as a whole might be thinning.
"Gref's announcement is the third sign in just a couple of days indicating that the government is trying to calm investors down," said Katya Malofeyeva, vice president of Renaissance Capital investment bank's research team.
The first two were Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov calling Lebedev's arrest an excessive measure and the State Property Fund announcing that it has no complaints regarding the privatization of the Apatit fertilizer producer, the basis for the charges against Lebedev.
Stepashin's comments can be seen in the same light. "In fact it's a good sign that he has shifted the blame from individual companies to problems with the laws," Malofeyeva said. "And anyway, the Audit Chamber has made a number of queries into oil companies' tax payments, but none of them resulted in companies having to pay extra for previous years."
Stephen O'Sullivan, the co-head of research at United Financial Group, said Stepashin's comments reflected the true state of affairs. "Stating the fact that companies are paying less taxes than the state would want them to pay because of the legal problems and those problems need to be fixed is a sensible thing to say for a state auditor," he said.
According to both O'Sullivan and Malofeyeva, the market's slide, although certainly prompted by the events around Yukos, also reflects an expected correction after a three-month rally.
"It's clear that despite the remarkable political stability observed over the past several years, Russia still has a number of issues to solve," Malofeyeva said. "It would be wrong to expect that a democracy as young as Russia's democracy is would be able to smoothly survive election seasons."
TITLE: Cabinet Gives Nod to Army Reform
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Cabinet on Thursday approved a program to switch more than 30 military units with almost 150,000 personnel into all-volunteer forces by 2007, even as liberal Union of Right Forces activists rallied against the plan outside the White House.
"This is not a military reform. This is a small part of the military reform," Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told the Cabinet before the vote.
The 79-billion-ruble ($2.6-billion) program will end up making contract service personel out of 49 percent of all soldiers and sergeants, with some 147,500 joining the 130,000 who already are enlistees. The switch will allow the military to cut the time served by conscripts from two years to 12 months in 2008.
Kasyanov said that contract soldiers alone will serve in troubled areas such as Chechnya, Interfax reported.
He said the government will consider switching other units - not just so-called the permanent readiness units named in the reform - into all-volunteer forces.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said that this was not likely to happen any time soon.
"We will have a mixed - a volunteer and conscript - system for many years," Ivanov was quoted by Interfax as saying.
"I cannot give you the timing [because] that would be like me going back to the 1960s and predicting when true communism would be created," Ivanov said, referring to a promise made by the Soviet government in 1980 that it would embrace pure communism.
The Cabinet's plan - which was drafted mainly by the Defense Ministry - has met sharp criticism from SPS leader Boris Nemtsov, who has offered an alternative program of his own that would turn the entire military in all-volunteer force in three years.
Nemtsov sent a letter to Kasyanov denouncing the reform ahead of Thursday's Cabinet meeting.
Speaking after the vote, Nemtsov said the approved program is a "serious political mistake" and "destructive for the country," Interfax reported.
Nemtsov said that the program will divide the armed forces into elite and second-rate units, causing tensions to grow in the ranks and allowing hazing to continue.
About 300 young men and women supporting SPS gathered at the White House to protest the program, Interfax reported. Some of them banged military helmets on the sidewalk, in a nod to previous protests by coal miners over low and delayed wages.
TITLE: Local Porn Tsar Dreams of Ruling in City
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sergei Pryanishnikov, who filed documents on Tuesday to run in the city's Sept. 21 gubernatorial elections, says that his main goal as governor would be to rationalize the business situation in the city so that economic activity in all sectors will be more robust. And two sectors - adult entertainment and prostitution - he says, would be a great place to start.
"If everything was put in order, including the erotica business, there would be more investment, business would be developing and people would be getting richer," Pryanishnikov said in an interview after a press conference he held on Thursday in Klubnichka, a sex shop on Vasiliyevsky Island. "That is how we will improve the social situation."
Pryanishnikov's announcement was one of eight made since Tuesday by hopefuls to replace former Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, who resigned to become a deputy prime minister on June 16. A total of 17 people have filed with the City Election Commission (CEC) to date.
Pryanishnikov's platform, including the legalization of prostitution as a business, has drawn the most attention this week
"Legalizing prostitution would allow us to bring it under [government] control and see that it was safer and cleaner," Pryanishnikov said.
When talking about the sex industry in St. Petersburg, he is certainly speaking from experience. Pryanishnikov, through his production firm SP Company, has produced over 40 erotic films and is also the local distributor for some of the world's largest erotic-film companies.
His work at SP Company has also brought him attention from the Prosecutor's office, which has been trying, unsuccessfully, to have him convicted for distributing pornographic material - activity prohibited by Russia's Criminal Code. He has also been charged with the production of pornographic materials. He was arrested in July 2000 and kept in custody until September 2001, when he was released on the condition he not leave the city, Vedomosti reported. His case has yet to be decided.
Pryanishnikov said that he releases one homemade pornographic film per month and distributes dozens more from some of the world's biggest studios, including Private, Magma and Wicked Pictures. He said his annual sales reach nearly $2 million.
The latest scandal in which he was involved flared up last year, when a four-film series he produced entitled "White Nights" drew fire for filming people having sex in and around some of the city's most famous monuments and architectural sites.
Last June, one scene in particular, filmed in front of the Church on the Spilled Blood, drew the ire of the Culture Ministry, which filed charges, saying that the scene would be offensive to religious people.
The chief reason that Pryanishnikov has never heard a judgement in a case is that, while pornography is illegal in Russia, there is no agreement among law-enforcement agencies on what the definition of pornography - as opposed to erotica - should be.
"According to one draft, which has not been signed by the president, pornography would be defined as material depicting human sex organs," Pryanishnikov said. "So this would include dildos and vibrators, as well as many statues and paintings in the State Hermitage. Haven't you seen them yourself?"
Neither the Culture nor the Media ministry could be reached for comment on Monday.
"This has yet to be defined precisely in the legal code and the argument on the subject still goes on," Alexander Ulanov, a lawyer and a member of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, said in a telephone interview on Monday. "As far as prostitution is concerned, working as a pimp is illegal, but there is no prohibition about performing sexual acts in exchange for money. The only way to charge someone is if they haven't paid taxes on the income."
Pryanishnikov's plan, which he says would increase tourist revenue to the city by creating a sort of "Second Amsterdam," would face problems, as running a brothel is against the law. More importantly, say some analysts, the city's residents are unlikely to favor the idea.
"I don't think that anybody is going to take a platform of this kind seriously at all," Yury Vdovin, the a representative of the St. Petersburg branch of Citizen's Watch, an international human-rights organization, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
"This is a federal question and the first thing that should be done by the state is to provide those women with the opportunity to earn a living by other methods," he added. "Only then could their be a discussion about legalizing it. Right now there is clearly far more supply than demand."
Most analysts give Pryanishnikov little chance of actually winning the election, but some suggest that his candidacy may be part of a mud-slinging plan. They argue that he might withdraw his candidacy later and try to discredit another candidate by giving his endorsement, an idea at which he bridles.
"There is no way that I will withdraw my candidacy. I'm here until election day," he said.
Porn and politics are not entirely strange bedfellows. The best-known success story is Italian soft-core porn star Alessandra Mussolini, a granddaughter of the fascist dictator and current parliament deputy.
Jodie Moore, a porn star who appears in some of the films that Pryanishnikov distributes, plans to run for senator in Australia in 2004. One of her campaign promises is for mandatory AIDS tests in Australia.
Staff Writer Kevin O'Flynn contributed to this report.
TITLE: Luzhkov Defends the Handling of Terror Blast
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Flags flew at half-mast across Moscow on a rainy Tuesday as officials defended their handling of the suicide bombings at a rock concert that killed 14 people over the weekend.
Inna Svyatenko, a senior member of the city's security committee, told reporters that the authorities decided to let the Krylya rock festival continue to prevent a stampede at the Tushino airfield among the 40,000 attendees.
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov defended his decision not to cancel the city's annual beer festival, which started Saturday.
"We did the right thing by sending a clear answer to the terrorists that they will not be able to intimidate us or destroy, stop or spoil the city's life," Luzhkov said at a City Hall meeting that began with a moment of silence.
Critics have said that the city's actions were potentially dangerous and disrespectful to the victims.
Luzhkov earlier asked that televised entertainment programs and performances at city venues be canceled out of respect for the victims.
Television channels canceled some programs, but the owners of a few nightclubs refused to call off their live performances, RIA Novosti reported.
Two of those killed were buried in the Pykhtinskoye and Kurovskoye cemeteries in the Moscow Oblast on Tuesday. The others will be buried later this week in Moscow, the Kaluga region town of Kirov and Donsko, in the Tula region, Interfax reported.
A 25-year-old woman died in the hospital on Tuesday afternoon, bringing the death toll up to 14 plus the two female suicide bombers. Thirty-seven of the more than 50 people injured in the blasts remained in the hospital.
President Vladimir Putin wore a black armband at a meeting with a delegation of French officials in the Kremlin on Tuesday. The delegation, led by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, expressed their condolences.
Putin later sat down with legal aides and law-enforcement officials to discuss ways of modifying the law to help the authorities cope better with terrorist threats, Interfax reported.
Authorities confirmed on Tuesday that one of the two suicide bombers was Zalikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, a 20-year-old resident of the Chechen village of Kurchaloi. Her passport was found near her body. Chechen rebels forced Elikhadzhiyeva to take up arms six months ago to avenge the death of a relative who had fought against federal forces, Kommersant reported on Tuesday.
One of the women was carrying a cellphone, and Nezavisimaya Gazeta speculated that the Federal Security Service might be able to use it to determine whether the suicide bombers coordinated the attack with accomplices. A cellphone's SIM card shows who called and at what time.
An accomplice might have used a remote control to detonate the explosives, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported. Kommersant said that the explosives were probably purchased on the black market in Moscow.
Law-enforcement officials on Tuesday denied earlier reports that Elikhadzhiyeva might have arrived by plane from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on Friday, RIA Novesti reported. They said they were investigating whether one of the bombers had traveled to the capital from Ingushetia.
TITLE: Gryzlov Calls for Looser Rules
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Stealing a page from the United States in its fight against terrorism, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said on Wednesday that the law should be changed to allow law-enforcement officials to detain terror suspects for up to 30 days without charges being filed.
Gryzlov, speaking days after a double suicide bombing in Moscow killed 14 people, told a meeting of senior police officials from the Central Federal District that he would send the necessary amendment to the Criminal Procedural Code to the State Duma when it reconvenes in September.
Civil-liberties advocates warned that such an amendment would open the door to gross human-rights abuses - echoing concerns expressed by their U.S. counterparts when Washington passed the USA Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"Any attempt to toughen the Criminal Procedural Code in order to make progress in an investigation will most certainly lead to the abuse of suspects' rights without any boundaries or controls," said Human Rights Watch's representative in Russia, Anna Neistat.
A recent study by HRW found that most human-rights violations - physical abuse and coerced confessions - take place shortly after a suspect's detention, when he or she has restricted access to a lawyer, Neistat said.
Under the Criminal Procedural Code, which went into force last July, a suspect can be detained for only 48 hours without being charged. The detention can be extended by three days with a court ruling.
"I do not see what an extra 25 days will give investigators other than time to force confessions from the suspects," said Valentin Gefter of the Human Rights Institute.
He cautioned that investigators might end up questioning other suspects at length, not just those suspected of terrorism.
The USA Patriot Act allows U.S. law-enforcement officials to detain terror suspects indefinitely and grants them sweeping powers, including the use of wiretaps, electronic and computer eavesdropping and searches.
They also have the authority to access a wide range of financial and other information in their investigations.
The U.S. law expires in October 2005.
Gryzlov did not say whether his proposal was a temporary measure.
He said that terrorist attacks are directly connected with the activities of organized crime and that the police do not have adequate resources to fight terrorism.
He suggested that a special investigator be assigned to each known criminal group who would be personally responsible for keeping tabs on its activities.
The police are investigating criminal groups that control 20 to 50 businesses and either have representatives on the companies' boards or are directly receiving part of the companies' profits.
According to Interior Ministry statistics, criminal groups have committed 89 crimes so far this year, including 43 in the Central Federal District, which encompasses Moscow and the Moscow Oblast. Police say that they have solved 48 of the crimes countrywide and 16 in the Central Federal District.
Gryzlov also said Wednesday that investigators have fully reconstructed the crime scene at the Tushino airfield, where the two female suicide bombers struck Saturday. He said that investigators have preliminary information about the parties who might be behind the deadly blasts.
He ordered the police to step up document checks to find people staying in cities and towns around the country without proper registration permits.
"I think the tactic of pinpointing citizens who have no residence registration is a very important one," Gryzlov said in televised remarks.
"Police have been specifically ordered to look after this particular category of citizens with heightened scrutiny."
Interfax reported that investigators have put together a composite sketch of the second suicide bomber. The first bomber, Zalikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, 20, was identified by a passport found near her body.
TITLE: Human-Rights Group Targets Torture in Chechnya
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - Europe's top human rights watchdog Thursday accused Russian forces of using beatings, electric shocks and other torture methods against prisoners in Chechnya.
In a rare public rebuke, the Council of Europe published a statement by its anti-torture committee, reporting on its latest visits to the troubled region.
"There is continued resort to torture and other forms of ill-treatment by members of the law enforcement agencies and federal forces," the statement said.
The organization, based in Strasbourg, France, said that Russian authorities had "failed to tackle effectively major problems" raised by the anti-torture committee on successive visits.
It added that action to bring to justice members of the security forces accused of torture have been "slow and - in many cases - ultimately ineffective."
The anti-torture committee rarely makes public statements, but has powers to do so if a member of the Council of Europe "fails to cooperate or refuses to improve the situation in the light of the committee recommendations."
Russia, which joined the 45-member council in 1996, is bound by its 1950 European Convention on Human rights which forbids torture.
The anti-torture committee said that it had made six visits to Chechnya since the resumption of hostilities there in 1999, most recently in May.
It condemned deadly attacks by separatist rebels and expressed understanding for the difficulties of Russian authorities attempting to restore order. However, it added, the "response must never degenerate into acts of torture. ... A state must avoid the trap of abandoning civilized values."
During its most recent visit, the committee said that it saw evidence of torture from "a considerable number" of people detained by security forces, including severe beatings, electric shocks and asphyxiation using plastic bags or gas masks.
The committee said that 17 detainees being held there during a visit in May "were extremely reluctant to speak to the delegation and appeared to be terrified.
The committee said that prosecutors should have more resources to investigate complaints against the security forces, including improved forensic services.
(AP, Reuters)
TITLE: Suicide Stats Have Jumped For Russians
AUTHOR: By Rebecca Reich
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russians are nearly three times more likely to commit suicide than the world average, according to a new report by the Health Ministry's Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry.
The suicide rate has jumped from 26.5 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 39.7 in 2001, according to the report released Monday.
Valery Krasnov, director of the Institute of Psychiatry, blamed the leap on social, political and economic problems that have flourished since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Suicide is not just a mental-health problem," he said in a telephone interview. "It occurs relatively more often among healthy people than among the mentally ill."
Indeed, the ups and downs of Russia's suicide rate follow the country's fortunes. Suicides hit a high in 1994 of 42.1 per 100,000 people.
As overall well-being improved over the following years, the suicide rate went down. But in 1999, one year after the devaluation of the ruble, the suicide rate shot up again.
As high as it may be, Russia's suicide rate has largely leveled off since 1999. While Krasnov tentatively attributed the improvement to increased employment since the 1998 crisis, he insisted that the motives for suicide are never simple.
Chief among them, according to the report, are alcohol abuse and depressive disorders.
Suicide rates are six times higher among men than women, and peak much earlier.
Men are most likely to commit suicide between the ages of 45 and 54, whereas the rate for women is highest above the age of 75.
TITLE: Putin Powers Up in the Far East
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday opened a hydroelectric station in the country's Far East that is the largest built in the post-Soviet era, pushing the start button on the central control panel of the plant that will fill some of the gaps in the region's power supply.
Construction of the Bureya dam and power station began in the mid-1970s, but construction was virtually frozen for years in the 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Putin, accompanied by Anatoly Chubais, head of national electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems, said completion of the first unit of the plant was "a virtual miracle," according to Itar-Tass.
Chubais called the plant "the first large construction project of Russian capitalism."
The power plant, on the Bureya River in the Amur region about 5,500 kilometers southeast of Moscow, is designed to have a capacity of 2,000 megawatts when it reaches full operation in 2008.
The Far East is resource-rich but sparsely populated and remote from Moscow, and regional leaders have complained of neglect by the Kremlin. Power shortages have plagued the region in several recent winters.
Putin said that the hydroelectric plant opening was one step in the federal plan for developing the region and "it is necessary to see that all other elements of the program be implemented, too."
"In time this station will become the most powerful in the Far East, and its finished product will solve the energy problems of regions like Amur and Khabarovsk," Putin said. "Once running at full power, the station will prevent energy crisises and add spark to the economic development of the Far East," he said.
Chubais said that getting the first unit at Bureya to come online had cost around $1.2 billion and that he was ready to entertain the idea of attracting $1 billion from the private sector to finish the project.
(SPT, AP)
TITLE: Oil Major Offloads Stake In Izvestie Paper Publisher
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - LUKoil has sold a 38-percent stake in the Izvestia newspaper publishing house to the Mediainvest mutual fund for 24.8 million rubles ($826,000), parties to the deal said Wednesday.
The sale took place sometime this spring, but information on the deal only became public July 1, said Roman Shemendyuk, head of business development at Management-Center, which manages the Mediainvest fund.
As professional investors, the mutual fund is in a better position to monitor the stock's performance than LUKoil, whose energy sector expertise is worlds away in business terms from media management. For that reason, LUKoil was happy to transfer ownership responsibility to Mediainvest.
Shemendyuk said that the fund would work to improve Izvestia's financial indicators, profits and transparency. "We are focused on carrying out the functions of a strategic investor," he said.
Until the stake can be sold to another investor for a profit, that is.
Shemendyuk expected companies would start offering to purchase the 38-percent stake now that the deal has become public. "If we find a buyer who offers a good price, we will consider it. But we are not actively looking," he said.
Despite shedding the Izvestia stake, a noncore asset, LUKoil's fundamental structure is unchanged, a source close to the deal said, adding that Management-Center is not connected with LUKoil - not formally, in any case.
Mediainvest's shareholders have not been disclosed. The fund manager also holds 31 percent of a company called Russian Mediagroup and 76 percent of the Smena publishing house.
Shemendyuk denied suggestions published in Izvestia that Russian Mediagroup had been behind the sale.
Izvestia is owned by 300 private individuals and legal entities. Until recently, two major blocs of shares belonged to Vladimir Potanin's Interros group, via his Prof-Media holding, and 48-percent belonged to LUKoil, via its LUKoil-Garant investment fund.
Subsequent to Mediainvest's purchase of the 38-percent stake, the value of those shares rocketed by a factor of 16 to 408 million rubles ($13.6 million), following their valuation by an independent auditor.
In March, LUKoil-Garant had offered to sell the shares to Prof-Media for $20 million, though Oleg Khodenkov, Prof-Media's first deputy general director who is also chairperson of the Izvestia board of directors, said the talks had not gone far.
The $20-million price tag would have included a share of the Izvestia building on Pushkin Square, but the presidential property department challenged its privatization and the deal was called off.
Media sector analysts said that the sale was a sensible move by LUKoil.
"LUKoil has always been a strange investor," said Alexei Pankin, editor of Sreda magazine. "It always bought things without really understanding why it needed them, then it got rid of them. It's one of those oligarchic empires that always tries but never manages to use their media resources as a means of PR," he said.
"This is natural," Prof-Media's Khodenkov said. "Managing media resources has its peculiarities that are not integral to other parts of their business."
TITLE: Brunswick Ready To Roll With $500 Million
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - From real estate to railroad cars and points in between, a newly formed holding company said Wednesday that it will invest between $400 million and $500 million in Russia over the next five years.
"We are here to do business through joint ventures," Christopher Mackenzie, Brunswick Capital's chairperson and chief executive, said in an interview.
"The common theme among them will be Brunswick's name," said Mackenzie, the former head of the European division of GE Capital, which itself is the financial services arm of the giant U.S. conglomerate General Electric.
Brunswick, which together with the Union Bank of Switzerland already owns Brunswick UBS, one of Moscow's leading investment banks, said that the investment capital would come in the form of debt and equity from private and institutional investors, both foreign and domestic.
TITLE: Defense and Civil Rights - A Delicate Balance
AUTHOR: By Gary Hart
TEXT: The United States currently finds itself in the midst of a confused search for a central principle around which to organize its foreign and defense policies. For almost a half-century, until the collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s, containing communism was the core doctrine guiding U.S. national-security policies. The "war on terrorism" has come to serve as a handy substitute. But it fails to provide a solid (or particularly admirable) foundation upon which to base the United States's role in the world in the 21st century.
The search for a new grand strategy, or at the very least a new organizing principle, is confounded by the revolutionary times in which we live- an unprecedented era of several simultaneous revolutions, all of which are epic and historic.
Globalization is internationalizing markets, finance and commerce, while the information revolution is changing the way we work, learn, and communicate. Both revolutions are benefiting the developed, Western world but further dividing the "haves" from the "have-nots," in this case those without finished products, services, or resources to trade or without access to new technologies.
They are also contributing to a third revolution, the erosion of the sovereignty - and thus the authority - of the nation state. The failure of states, especially those artificially constructed by great powers after wars or cobbled together by older colonial powers, is becoming a serious international issue and promises to remain so. As the authority of the state erodes, the fourth, and potentially most dangerous, revolution emerges: The transformation of war and the changing nature of conflict.
This is the revolution that arrived at the United States' doorstep on Sept. 11, 2001. There were, of course, many warnings. The first attack on the World Trade Center itself occurred in 1993. Then came the bombings of the U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000.
On Sept. 15, 1999, the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, on which I served, issued a report entitled "New World Coming." Its first conclusion was as follows: "The United States will be attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction and Americans will lose their lives on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
On Jan. 31, 2001, the same Commission urged the new president, George W. Bush, to prepare the country for these attacks by consolidating dispersed federal-government agencies into a new national homeland-security agency. Our warnings and recommendations were not heeded. Three thousand people died in the first terrorist attack in the United States in the new century. Everyone agrees that others will follow. Many experts believe that, two years later, the United States has still not begun to take the urgent steps necessary to defend itself against further attacks.
Another important issue that has been too little discussed is the tradeoff of liberty and security. This is probably because most of those inconvenienced by preliminary counter-terrorism measures in the United States are Arab-Americans, while the broader American community has not been bothered. But the United States is, and prides itself on being, an advanced liberal democracy where individual liberties are guaranteed by a written constitution and bill of rights, and whose freedoms are protected by an independent judiciary established as an equal third branch of government.
The U.S. legal community, and some in the wider society, are beginning to awake to the complex issues confronting the United States as it seeks to protect itself from outside attacks for the first time since 1812. Should the national government be able to monitor the computer and telephonic communications of citizens and residents? Should suspects be placed under surveillance because they belong to a particular religious or ethnic community? Should due process - including habeas corpus, the right to counsel, and the right to trial by jury - be suspended for "enemy combatants" or others who are simply suspects?
These and other questions go to the very nature of democracy and the values of the American republic. They will not become any easier to answer over time. Indeed, they threaten to become much more frequent and troubling.
One of the great issues for democratic societies in the New World of the early 21st century is achieving a proper balance between security and liberty. Err too far on the side of liberty and the society is open to attack. But creating a high-security state hands terrorists a victory by choking democratic freedom. Policymakers with the wisdom of Solomon, of whom there are precious few, are required.
In this search for the right balance, democracy knows no boundaries. The United States might learn from the experience of other countries and share its experience with them. Freedom belongs to no particular nation or system. It is a universal good that all must seek. Whether threatened by fascism, communism, terrorism, or any other form of fanaticism, freedom must defend itself in ways that do not become self-destructive.
In this age of profound and multiple revolutions, perhaps the greatest revolution will involve the invention of new ways to make democratic freedoms survive and flourish.
Gary Hart is a former U.S. Senator from Colorado. Copyright Project Syndicate.
TITLE: It Isn't an Election If We Don't Get To Choose
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: This Monday I saw a glimmer of hope that St. Petersburg's residents might not yet have been reduced to a silent mass to be moved around by state-controlled television stations. The hope came in the form of an open letter signed by a number of well known local figures, including film director Alexander Sokurov, author Boris Strugatsky and television journalist Sergei Sholokhov.
"St. Petersburg television stations have been put in line to work towards a single goal: To convince local voters that there is no other credible candidate for governor than [Valentina] Matviyenko ..."
"At the same time, all journalists who disagree or can not be managed are being taken off the air at local stations."
It's about time that some people have finally lost their patience and come out to say it publicly.
I would even put it more plainly. The Kremlin is running a Soviet-style campaign, essentially appointing the city's next governor while labeling the whole process an election. What sounds bad enough in English is even worse in Russia, where the word for elections is "Vybory" - literally "choices".
To make a choice, people have to have at least a little awareness of what the different options are, which is not the case here. If the Kremlin is looking to duplicate its success in the Chechen referendum earlier this year (96 percent voted for the proposed constitution), this would be one way to go about it.
Of course, you can't use exactly the same methods in St. Petersburg as you would in Grozny, so there won't be any special forces exercises to break into people's apartments with ballots and the only clean-up operations here take place in the local media.
You might be able to find hope in the experience of the Primorye elections, where the Kremlin-backed gubernatorial candidate, Gennady Apanasyenko, was foiled in his bid for office in June 2001. Apanasyenko, the first deputy head of the presidential representative's office in the region, finished a poor third in the first round, polling just 14.13 percent of votes cast, behind Sergei Darkin (24.09 percent), a local businessperson working in the fishing industry and State Duma Deputy Victor Cherepkov (19.75 percent), who was extremely popular in the region.
To fix it so Apanasyenko made it into the second round, a local court voided Cherepkov's candidacy, but to no avail, as Darkin won in the run off. The courts bounced a popular local democrat only to have a member of one of Russia's most corrupt industries win the race. As choices go, it's not the best you could hope for.
At the time, Sergei Mitrokhin, a State Duma deputy with the Yabloko faction, pointed out that Primorye wasn't the only example of the Kremlin coming up short in getting its way in local votes.
"Today, Primorye is not the only region famous for pre-election scandals. Something similar has already happened in the Kurskaya and Tulskaya oblasts and it looks like it will continue to occur where the pre-election situation will not develop according to the center's preferred scenario," Mitrokhin said.
Good News, right? If you take the Kurskaya Oblast as an example, not really.
In November 2000, Viktor Suzhnikove, a former FSB general who was being backed by the Kremlin in the oblast-governor campaign, lost the election there. This would also offer some hope for our present situation, if not for the fact that he lost to Alexander Mikhailov, a member of the Communist Party and an unabashed anti-Semite.
Consider this quote from the winner:
"Pay attention to the fact that this is not only the problem of the Kurskaya Oblast ... Do you know what the WJC is? The World Jewish Congress ... We have defeated them here," Mikhailov said in an interview with Kommersant at the time. "I think that this fact show that a process has begun in Russia to liberate [the country] entirely from the dirt that has accumulated here over the last 10 years. We are not allies, not enemies of the president, [Putin], who, by the way, is Russian, just as I am ..."
This clearly isn't the choice for St. Petersburg.
So where does that leave us?
I'm afraid that it leaves us to hope that one of the present candidates will manage to get enough press coverage to turn this into more of a race against Matviyenko (unlikely, given the complaint in the letter cited above) or that a candidate with a high enough profile will appear with a high enough profile that the press will have to cover him or her (also unlikely, as a number of people of this stature have already announced that they will not run, with many of them including an endorsement for Matviyenko in their statements.)
So we're back where we started - with no choices, no Vybory.
TITLE: Fiddlers Find Roof in City
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Next week's seventh annual "KlezFest" - a celebration of Jewish music - will bring many international Klezmer musicians, as well as their counterparts from various corners of the former Soviet Union, to St. Petersburg. Among those expected to appear are Amsterdam-based Yiddish singer Shura Lipovski and Berlin-based clarinetist Christian Dawid.
This year's KlezFest will consist of two different events. The first, a free event, will take place on Sunday evening at the Hesed Avraam Welfare Center in the city's Vyborg Side. The main event, the KlezFest Gala, will be held at the Beloselskikh-Belozerskikh Palace on Nevsky Prospekt and starts next Wednesday.
Michael Alpert, a musician and music teacher from New York who has been a pioneering figure in the klezmer renaissance for over 25 years, will be a headliner at both events. Alpert was scheduled to play at last year's festival, but failed to arrive due to illness.
This year's KlezFest will also feature the Chisinau, Moldova-based singer and composer Yefim Chyorny, Ukraine's Stas Raiko and the Kharkov Klezmer Band, and local folk band Dobranotch. These artists, plus some other, less well-known acts, will appear at both shows.
Although he is not, strictly speaking, a folk musician, Klezmer-influenced singer/songwriter Psoi Korolenko will be appearing at the festival for the second time.
Korolenko (real name Pavel Lion), a coarse-voiced singer, who backs himself on a basic Casio synthesizer, which he calls a "garmokha" (a diminutive for harmonica) is a rare sight in St. Petersburg but very popular on the Moscow club circuit and frequently tours U.S. universities.
The festival's headliner, Michael Alpert, internationally known for his performances and recordings with groups such as Brave Old World, Khevrisa and Kapelye, explained some of the reasons for the current prevalence of klezmer music, speaking with The St. Petersburg Times by phone from his home in New York last year.
"In Odessa and other big cities of the former Russian Empire - for instance, Warsaw - there were a great number of Jews, and they were represented in all the strata of the city's life," he said. "This is why there has been such a great influence of Jewish music."
The term klezmer - which means musician in Yiddish - was coined to describe the traditional instrumental music of the Yiddish-speaking people of eastern Europe, whose origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages.
Klezmer music grew out of the shtetls, or small villages, of Russia and eastern Europe, and provided toe-tapping music for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other festivities. Early klezmer bands consisted of two to four klezmorim - members - but, by the turn of the century, bands had grown to include between six and 12 players.
Around that time, klezmer was introduced in the U.S., where it became hybridized with jazz and other popular-music styles. By the 1950s, however the genre was in decline - largely due to the Nazi destruction of Jewish communities in Europe and the cultural assimilation of Jews in America.
But a new generation of klezmer performers revived the genre in the 1980s, when it became remarkably popular as part of the world-music scene.
"First of all, I think that Jewish music is a very rich and particularly sophisticated musical language," said Alpert. "Much of it was developed by professional musicians and singers. Instrumental klezmer music is analogous to the music of the gypsies - in other words, you had people who, for centuries, were involved in making music professionally - not only as a spare-time thing."
"That [created] a high degree of musical sophistication and a very broad and diverse repertoire of music," he added.
Dobranotch, a local folk band taking part in the event, has two separate programs - one of Balkan folk and another of Klezmer material - and frequently performs at local rock clubs.
"I like different kinds of folk music: I've been interested in folk for a long time, mostly European," said the band's violin player, Mitya Khramtsov, who once played with the popular local Afro-Cuban band Markscheider Kunst.
"As for klezmer, I simply like it. I like its intonations - they touch your heart, I don't know why."
Khramtsov claims that despite dating back to older times, the music still ignites response from the audiences.
"It's not as relevant as house or drum 'n' bass, but when we play it with Dobranotch we get a response - it doesn't go to the void. People react to it."
For the first time in KlezFest's history, there will also be two concerts outside St. Petersburg - at the club Project O.G.I. in Moscow (July 18) and at the Chekhov Russian Drama Theater at Chisinau, Moldova (July 19).
KlezFest's free show starts at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday at the Hesed Avraam Welfare Center, 45 Bolshoi Sampsoniyevsky Pr. The KlezFest Gala will start at 7 p.m. on July 16 at Beloselskikh-Belozerskikh Palace, 41 Nevsky Pr. Admission will be between 60 and 120 rubles. For more information, call the Jewish Association of St. Petersburg at 113-3889.
TITLE: Icelandic Oddplay Plays Ice Palace
AUTHOR: By Kirill Galetski
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: 1986 was a banner year for Iceland - not only was it the year of the historic Ronald Reagan-Mikhail Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, but the Icelandic music scene was booming, and on the brink of garnering international attention.
Largely responsible for the latter was Bjork Gudmundsdottir, then fronting the newly-formed post-punk outfit The Sugarcubes.
Today called simply Bjork - which means "birch" in Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish - the singer has since earned a reputation for wearing outrageous outfits, hitting very high notes and generally thumbing her nose at convention.
Bjork performs her first Russian show on Thursday at the Olimpiisky Sports Complex in Moscow, and will be performing in St. Petersburg at the Ice Palace on July 19.
Born in Reykjavik in 1965, Bjork recorded her first album - a collection of Icelandic folk songs and one original tune - at the age of 11. In the mid-1980s, she became involved in the punk scene, at the time in its heyday in Iceland, nearly 10 years after it had peaked in the rest of the world.
Bjork formed The Sugarcubes with five friends in 1986, releasing the song that put them on the map, "Birthday," later that year. Originally recorded in Icelandic, the band later rerecorded its vocals in English, a move that led to a British recording contract, the eventual release of four albums and regular play for several years on college and alternative radio stations in both the United States and Britain.
Despite the role of the band in forming the foundation for Björk's current stardom, however, Bjork has since said that The Sugarcubes were just a hobby.
"We'd all get drunk and write these weirdo pop songs," she is quoted as saying on her web site (www.bjork.com). "When we'd had enough, we went on holiday as The Sugarcubes. It was just a group of friends traveling all over the world and thinking 'this is crazy.' Nobody expected it to last as long as it did."
The Sugarcubes disbanded in 1992 and, a year later, Bjork released her first solo album, "Debut." Characterized by the kind of powerful soprano vocals that might once have been credited with shattering glass, Björk's music is a collage of diverse influences that has provided music for several cinematic soundtracks and even led to her starring role in Lars von Trier's 2000 film "Dancer in the Dark."
She is currently on tour to support two recent compilation CDs, "Family Tree," which features a number of previously unheard tracks from the last decade, and "Greatest Hits."
"I guess I'm on this stupid mission," Bjork is quoted as saying on the site. "I know it sounds like a silly fairy tale, but I'd like to try to make the perfect song. I still haven't, and I've got 50 years to try. I'm willing to do whatever it takes."
Bjork performs at 7 p.m. on July 19 at the Ice Palace, 1 Pr. Pyatiletok. M: Prospect Bolshevikov. Tel.: 118-6313, 118-6318.
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Due to the terrorist attacks at Moscow's Krylya rock festival last week, Nashestviye, an even bigger two-day event scheduled for August 2 and August 3 has been canceled, bringing the future of massive open-air events in Russia into doubt.
Despite early reports of a possible cancellation of Bjork's concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, local promoters continue to maintain that the Icelandic singer and actress will perform. Though perhaps a somewhat strange choice, there is a chance that she will be supported by Peaches, the Canadian-born, German-based techno-punk diva, who brought her notorious act, centered around sex, to Red Club last year.
Those who have not yet been to the new Stary Dom rock club, opened by the punk band Korol I Shut in May, have to either hurry up or wait for another month. According to management, the venue will take a "little break" after the concerts on Friday and Saturday and will reopen on August 12.
"We've just been testing our equipment and wanted to see if there's a need for a club like us," said the venue's spokesperson this week.
"We found that there is, and now we want to review our work."
Orlandina will be closed from July 21 through August 14, while Red Club will hold its last concert on July 22 and will be inactive until sometime in August.
The French folk-punk band Les Hurlements d'Leo, a popular favorite among locals, which has been described by Tequilajazzz's Zhenya Fyodorov as "France's Leningrad," is again in the city.
The eight-member band will take part in the Bastille Plage festival promoted by The French Institute in St. Petersburg, which is celebrating France's main national holiday.
The festival, which also features the electronic act Zimpala, will take place on the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress at 8:30 p.m. this Saturday.
After midnight, the celebrations will continue at the Molodyozhny Theater and in its gardens which will host the Stereoleto festival's French party the same night. The French electronic act Rubin Steiner headlines.
Stereoleto's Amorphous Androgynous open-air concert last week was something of a disappointment, though. The band, formed by Garry Cobain of The Future Sound of London, played soft Oriental psychedelic music and was clearly not what most of the public, who seemed to have come to dance to electronic beats, were expecting.
There were electronic beats, too - sounding from the nearby theater where people were dancing - which annoyingly intermingled with the Amorphous performance, demanding a high degree of concentration.
- by Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Breakfast of Blini and Pelmeni
AUTHOR: By Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: WILMINGTON, Delaware - Before going on vacation, I agreed to write this week's edition of The Dish, partly to make the lives of my long-suffering colleagues a little easier, and partly in penance for last week's excesses at Sedmoi Gost.
While waiting at London's Heathrow Airport for a flight to the United States, I went in search of breakfast - and it struck me that it is much simpler to find a good, cheap way to start the day in St. Petersburg than it is at one of the world's busiest airports. A few minutes walk up Ulitsa Tchaikovskogo toward the Fontanka River from Liteiny Prospect brings you to Gagarinskaya Ulitsa. Turning left and walking for 50 meters or so brings you to not one, but two of the city's best-kept culinary secrets:
A pair of cafes specializing in bliny and pelmeny, respectively, both of which make a great choice for a breakfast on which you would be hard pressed to spend more than 150 rubles per person. Over the last few months, I have become a regular at the bliny café - originally named Russkiye Bliny - but the recent visit of a friend bent on discovering proper pelmeny lead to a first visit to Russkiye Bliny's sister café, Olyushka.
Both eateries are run by the same firm, Olga - I wonder how long it took them to think of that one - and, as far as I know, they are both run out of the same kitchen.
Both are also tiny - Olyushka has four tables, while Russkiye Bliny weighs in with eight. Finally, both are quiet, with quick and efficient service, even if the servers are not always incredibly communicative.
Olyushka's pelmeny come in three sorts - stuffed with meat, mushrooms and dried apricots, respectively - and all three can be ordered either plain, with butter or with smetana. The café also has a small selection of salads and, a fact I was pleased to note, bread comes free with all orders.
We both chose mushroom pelmeny with smetana (48 rubles), and I also ordered the beetroot-and-apple salad. The pelmeny came in a fairly copious quantity - although my friend said he could probably have managed another bowl - and were extremely good, moist and tasty, with none of the sliminess that often characterizes the pelmeny you can buy in stores.
The salad was also fine, with julienne strips of beetroot and a few chunks of apple that provided a nicely acidic offset to the more bland vegetable. The menu at Russkiye Bliny offers bliny and blinchiki - the wrapped bliny parcels - which come with about half a dozen different toppings (for the bliny) and stuffings (for the blinchiki). My personal favorites are the blinchiki with mushrooms (44 rubles, I think), for which I am reliably informed the mushrooms are home-prepared, and the bliny with strawberry jam (the price of which I unfortunately can't remember), a combination that goes really well with 50 grams of smetana (a bank-breaking 5 rubles) and a cup of coffee (of which more anon).
A very unscientific survey of eating habits in Russkiye Bliny over the last few months has revealed that the most popular bliny are probably those with minced herring (selyodochny farsh), while it is a toss-up for the most popular blinchiky between those stuffed with cabbage and those with minced chicken (kuriiny farsh). I'm not really a big fan of salty fish, so have steered clear of the herring variant thus far, but I'm sure that I'll be talked into it one day. Both places charge a whopping 5 rubles for tea (without sugar or lemon, both of which add a few extra rubles), while coffee is more expensive at 20-something rubles.
While at Heathrow, I found myself longing for somewhere offering comparably cheap, decent food with minimum hassle. Answer, of course, came there none. Maybe there's a business opportunity in there somewhere. In fact, I think I'll broach the subject with whoever runs these two cafes when I get back.
Olyushka and Russkiye Bliny. Gagarinskaya Ulitsa. No tel. Open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Menu in Russian and English. Breakfast for two, without alcohol: 125 rubles (Olyushka); 170 rubles (Russkiye Bliny).
TITLE: U.S. Summer School Arrives
AUTHOR: By Aliona Bocharova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It has long since become common practice for Russian students to go abroad on exchange programs or take language courses at local language centers. The New York Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies, a summer school taking place at the St. Petersburg State University from July 4 through July 25, however, offers a different concept. American and some European professors from various educational backgrounds will be meeting with Russian students to experience a series of intensive inter-disciplinary seminars in humanities and social sciences.
The project idea belongs to John Bailyn, Professor of Linguistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Director of the Stony Brook Study Abroad program for St. Petersburg, and Anna Maslennikova, Professor at the Department of English Philology of the St. Petersburg State University, and founder of the university-based Center for American and British Studies, the official host institution for the course.
The goal of the New York Institute is to create a program that does more than just teach English. "We would like to expose students to entirely new teaching styles, as well as innovative cutting-edge approaches to cultural and cognitive studies," said Maslennikova. "A great variety of courses is offered that unites two areas of modern research: cognitive science, which cuts across traditional boundaries of linguistics, psychology and philosophy and cross-cultural studies, which cuts across literature, history, and translation and includes gender studies and media studies. We will also have a 'teaching team' - two professors representing different cultural backgrounds - that provides a broader perspective on the issues discussed," said Maslennikova.
"Another unique feature of the New York Institute is that its participants major in different fields, including philology, psychology, sociology and even Eastern languages," Bailyn said. "It is truly fascinating to watch linguists and psychologists debate over approaches to evolution theory in the 'Evolution of Language' class". Other classes taught are 'Studying the Human Mind', 'Entertainment, Media and American Politics', and 'Film and Cultural Anxiety'."
The 120 participants in the New York Institute - all selected on a competitive basis - are students from various local institutions such as the St. Petersburg State University, the Herzen University, the Institute of Foreign Languages, as well as students from Moscow, Ivanovo, Cherepovets, and three students from the U.S., Bosnia and Austria. However, three quarters of the students and a majority of the teaching staff have backgrounds in lingusitics, which often results in a philological inclination in some courses. "Although I study linguistics at the Herzen University, I was more interested in cross-cultural issues, as it is useful for my future job at an agency for the adoption of children by American families," says Natalya Balyasnikova. "But even courses on cultural studies seem to bear a linguistic touch".
However, the majority of students are very excited about the program, "I really appreciate the personal approach in classes and the wide variety of courses to choose from," said Anton Poletayev, also a Herzen University student. "The way of teaching is really liberal, and the discussions are great; they are exactly what we lack in our authoritative educational system", said Balyasnikova.
The faculty consists of 15 professors from prominent universities, including Stanford, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SUNY, and Warsaw University. "It should be noted that the professors do not receive a salary for teaching at the New York Institute, as students do not pay for the program," said Bailyn. "Free accommodation is provided and part of their air fare is covered by the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg and the Fulbright Program, but generally the teachers work on a voluntary basis."
Yet the teachers seem to be satisfied, as all of them have a personal interest in Russian culture and have other, non-material, reasons to be part of the program. It is a good start for Gregory Garvey, who teaches American history and culture at SUNY to prepare for heading the SUNY/Moscow State Center on the United States and Russia next year as a Fulbright scholar. He also sees the New York Institute seminars as an opportunity to express his views on American history which "American students - taught to view their history as a constant progression towards liberty and freedom - might find rather surprising".
Polly Gannon, a professor at the Fyodorov Translation Center affiliated to the St. Petersburg State University, says, "I love teaching Russian students; they are very candid and generous in expressing their ideas, and even more so in this program. Besides, after living in Russia for six years I have made a sort of sacrifice and have accepted values that differ from the traditional Western ones."
"In no way do we try to promote American culture, as [the New York Institute] is a joint initiative that incorporates both American and Russian visions and, so far, they have been co-existing harmoniously," said Bailyn. "I am also impressed that my expectations of a state institution being a bureaucratic structure to be struggled with were not justified: the Center and the Department of Philology have been very supportive, the Center even 'lent' its staff and premises for the New York Institute."
As Bailyn and Maslennikova think of the program's future, they hope to engage more students and teachers next year, expand the range of classes offered and improve the balance of participants in order "to fill the gap in international educational cooperation between Russia and the U.S."
TITLE: the word's worth
TEXT: S menya magarych: I'll pay up afterward
The past week's press was full of reports about a magical being: oboroten, a changeling, or more commonly, a werewolf. But this wasn't Harry Potter. This was Operatsiya "oborotnei v pogonakh" - Operation Corrupt Cop. Here the werewolves are "wolves in sheep's clothing," i.e., cops who are on the take. (Pogony refers to the shoulder straps on which an officer's stars of rank are fixed. It's used to refer to an officer in any branch of the service.)
This sting operation brings us to the fine art of bribery. In Russian, bribery or bribe-taking is vzyatochnichestvo, a bribe is vzyatka, and a bribe-taker is a vzyatochnik - all from the word vzyat, to take. This translates nicely as "to be on the take." An old word for bribe is mzda, which originally meant "payment." From that we get mzdoimstvo (bribery) and mzdoimets (bribe-taker). Most people know this from the movie Beloye Solntse Pustyni ("White Sun of the Desert"): Ty zhe znaesh, chto ya mzdy ne beru. Za derzhavu obidno. (You know I don't take bribes. It would shame our homeland.)
When you want to say that an office is corrupt, you can say, Tam vsyo kupleno (they're all on the take), usually adding ... tak chto nado dat sverkhu (so you have to add something on top, i.e., you need to pay a bribe). Dat sverkhu (to give something on top, on the side) is just one colloquial phrase for "sweetening the pot." Alternatively, try dat na lapu: literally, "to put something in his paw." Gaishnik ostanovil menya vchera - prishlos dat emu na lapu. (A traffic cop stopped me yesterday - I had to pay him off.) Or you can say podmazat, as in: Slesar nichego ne sdelaet, esli ego ne podmazat. (The plumber won't do anything unless you give something extra.) Or simply use the common aphorism, Ne podmazhesh, ne poedesh (you need to grease some palms, literally, "you won't go anywhere unless you grease the wheels).
Or you can just slip your cash in an envelope: Mne prishlos dat v konvert. This expression and procedure is so common that one doesn't like to have an envelope on one's desk, lest co-workers suspect you're on the take. In other cases, as we know from Gogol, cash might not be the preferred currency. He wrote of one of his characters: On beryot vzyatki borzymi shchenkami (he accepts bribes in borzoi puppies) - that is, in-kind donations are also welcome.
People who arrange things for you get a kickback: otkat. (This original meaning is a recoil on a gun.) Or you can use the verb otstengut (literally "to unbutton, to unfasten").
The trick of bribe giving is knowing how to do it without actually saying you are doing it. A subtle way is to say, My vas ne zabudem (We won't forget you) or, if that doesn't work, My vas otblagodarim (We'll take care of you, we'll thank you properly). In Russia there is a fine line between "bribery" and "payment for services," or "a thank you gift." When you ask someone to do something for you, you can say s menya prichitaetsya (I'll take care of you, I'll pay up) or s menya magarych. Magarych is an Arabic word that came to Russian through Turkish, and originally meant "a drink after a deal is concluded." Now it has the meaning of "payment after a task is done."
Is this a bribe? Well, if the person is paid a salary to do the job and you're paying extra, I guess it is. But the moral line gets fuzzier when the person's monthly salary is less than what you paid for dinner the night before. I say: Otblagodarim!
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator.
TITLE: Reading the Verdict on Putin
AUTHOR: By Lynn Berry
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Lilia Shevtsova tells readers of her new book, "Putin's Russia," that she has written a political diary and, even if that were all she has done - it is not - the book would be an interesting read.
Like a diary, the book moves chronologically, beginning with the transition of power from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin and continuing through Putin's first three years in the Kremlin.
The events are still familiar to those of us living in Russia, but they take on new life through Shevtsova's eyes. She puts the pieces together, and the puzzle that is Vladimir Putin begins to take shape.
Shevtsova, who splits her time between the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Carnegie Moscow Center, benefits not only from hindsight but exceptional insight.
The book moves quickly, slowing only in spots where she uses polling data to back up some of her assertions. Her language is active and vibrant, her images colorful. Although Shevtsova holds a PhD, she writes more like a journalist than an academic, drawing comparisons to "The Russia Hand" by Strobe Talbott, who was a journalist before he joined then U.S. President Bill Clinton's team.
Picking up where her 1999 book "Yeltsin's Russia" leaves off, Shevtsova starts "Putin's Russia" with Yeltsin's decision to make Putin his heir. After Putin was elected president in March 2000 and began to assemble his team and form the cabinet, she reminds us how few of his own people he was able to bring in initially - Yeltsin's Family was keeping him on a short leash.
"If anyone still labored under the illusion of Putin's independence, or wondered who really ran Russia, then their doubts were settled once the prosecutor general was appointed," she writes.
Putin wanted to name Dmitry Kozak, an old friend from his days in St. Petersburg, as general prosecutor, and had reportedly even written the decree appointing him to the post but, under extraordinary pressure from the old Yeltsin entourage, he backed down and appointed Vladimir Ustinov. Ustinov, who remains in the post, was Yeltsin's prosecutor general and was seen as guaranteeing Yeltsin and his extended Family that they would be allowed to live in peace.
To make up for his defeat in forming his cabinet, Putin charged ahead with his efforts to create what Shevtsova calls a "superpresidential regime" by limiting the independence of Russia's regions.
As Shevtsova sees it, the summer of 2000 was a triumph for Putin. "He succeeded in everything - taming the governors, fighting the oligarchs, liquidating the independence of the Federation Council, pocketing the Duma, weakening all the other political institutions, and cowing the press."
Putin seemed invincible but, then, in August, unpleasant things started to happen. The explosion at Pushkin Square was followed by the loss of the Kursk nuclear submarine and all 118 of its crew members, and then the fire in the Ostankino tower.
"The Ostankino fire demonstrated to the full the drawbacks of Putin's 'transmission belt' of governance. For three long hours, firefighters could not start putting out the blaze because no one ... wanted to take responsibility for turning off the electricity. Only President Putin could. Similarly, the military leaders during rescue operations for the Kursk did nothing at all while they waited for a command from above."
The country's bigger problems also started to catch up with the president by the end of 2000. The war in Chechnya was getting bogged down, and the government was unable to come up with an economic strategy. But, instead of taking on the controversial economic issues, Putin turned to simpler things and asked State Duma deputies to extend their session so they could approve a package of new state symbols before the new year. "The president evidently had decided that the country could get by without a clear strategy for economic development but absolutely must have a new seal and anthem to enter the new millennium."
In 2000, Putin succeeded in consolidating power in his hands, but otherwise had few achievements to which to point, Shevtsova says, naming the Duma's approval of START II and the new flat 13-percent income tax as his only two.
She scolds Putin for contenting himself with the status quo. Why did he want power, she asks, if not to use it to push through reforms?
After a year in office, Putin came into his own in spring 2001. "It was obvious in his manner, his gait and his gaze, which had lost their former strain. The president no longer seemed stiff and reserved; he began speaking off the cuff. He stopped avoiding public appearances. The time had come for Russia's leader to show why he wanted a concentration of power."
In his state of the nation address in April, Putin declared his determination to push ahead with market reforms, and he followed up his speech by delivering to the Duma a package of legislation that encompassed judicial reform, a land code, pension reform, changes in tax legislation, the regulation of business, a new labor code.
"What he did in the spring of 2001 looked like a revolution," Shevtsova writes. But Putin was hedging. When deputies began studying the legislation, they saw that the proposed reforms seemed "designed not only to preserve the political weight of the higher echelon of the state apparatus but also to help oligarchic businesses." Shevtsova acknowledges, however, that Putin might not have succeeded with more radical reforms.
It was about this time that the court squabbling that was so much a part of Yeltsin's rule resumed, as various groups began to fight for control over the president and his policies. The main clash was between the "Putinists" and the old Yeltsin Family, a clash still evident today as political forces maneuver ahead of the upcoming elections.
Putin allowed the conflict to continue because he did not want to become hostage to whichever faction triumphed, and because he knew his people were still too inexperienced to run Russia, Shevtsova reasons. To this day, Putin has kept Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, both holdovers from the Yeltsin era and committed Family members.
Putin's foreign policy got less attention until Sept. 11, 2001, when, Shevtsova says, "the terrorist attacks on the United States forced the Russian president to make a choice that turned a mediocre politician into a leader who amazed the world by proposing a completely new role for Russia."
Putin's decision to make Russia an ally of the West in the counter-terrorism fight and to accept a U.S. presence in Central Asia was tantamount to rejecting Russia's great-power ambitions, Shevtsova says. "This was a step that shocked even his comrades in arms."
"Unless he gained the support of the political class for that breakthrough, however, and unless he created a new team that included people free from the old mentality and Cold War stereotypes, Putin's new policy was unlikely to be durable and sustainable."
Sure enough, the old anti-West - and particularly anti-U.S. - sentiments soon returned, particularly as the diplomatic wrangling over Iraq intensified.
Shevtsova puts much of the blame on the West, which she says was busy with its own problems and "seemed not to have the strength or desire to think about how to include Russia in its orbit." Her assessment holds up in the light of the behavior of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in the run up to the war in Iraq this year.
Using one of her favorite terms, Shevtsova describes the alliance struck between Russia and the West as a Faustian bargain. The West includes Russia where it needs Russia, such as in fighting terrorism, while shutting its eyes to how far Russia still is from being a liberal democracy. Genuine integration, she says, depends on shared values, not just political convenience.
Throughout the book, Shevtsova comes down hard on Russia's political class: in foreign policy for being afraid to move beyond great-power politics and redefine Russia's role in the world; and domestically for being afraid of a society outside of state control. "Even the liberals in power fear the energy of the free masses." She suggests that society is ready to move forward toward a liberal democracy but must wait for a new political elite to lead the way.
Shevtsova's political diary ends in December 2002, but her book moves forward. With it she has created a framework not only for looking back on Putin's time in office but for watching Putin's Russia in the months and likely years to come. She has articulated the unanswered questions. She has asked us to ponder how Putin can continue to combine his authoritarian ways with economic liberalism and a pro-Western policy, how he can keep stability from again turning into stagnation, and how Russia can break out of its past while avoiding chaos.
For Russia's president, she says, the dilemma is this: "whether to stay a stabilizing leader of corrupt capitalism and of a country doomed to living in the waiting room of Western civilization, or to become a transformer and start building a new system that would allow Russia to become a full-fledged liberal democracy and enter the industrial world as an equal."
The second option is riskier for Putin, but Shevtsova challenges him not to squander the chance to transform Russia. It is his chance, she says, to make history.
Lynn Berry is the editor of The Moscow Times.
"Putin's Russia." By Lilia Shevtsova. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 298 pages. $19.95.
TITLE: Little To Marvel at in Over-Hyped Hulk
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: A story about a nice guy who turns as big, bad and green as King Kong on a bender, "Hulk" is based on the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who launched their monster around the time that Kennedy and Khrushchev were set to launch their missiles. Directed by Ang Lee, the film stars Eric Bana as the Hulk's human alter ego and Nick Nolte as an Oedipal figure by way of Hubert Selby Jr., which helps explain its ambitions as well as the eccentric fact that the scariest thing in this likable if tame monster movie is Nolte's hair.
Like all Jekyll-Hyde stories, "Hulk" is essentially about the defining dualities that make us human - nature versus nurture, freewill versus repression, child versus parent, paper versus plastic - and that sometimes bring out the monster in us. But unlike in the original comic book, the defining battle here isn't waged between a pencil-neck scientist and his rampaging twin (or Soviet spies and good guys in lab coats), but between Stan Lee and Sigmund Freud. In one corner there's Lee, the Marvel Comics genius and World War II veteran who translated postwar existentialism into multiple-panel vernacular. In the other corner: Herr Doktor, paterfamilias of the ego, id and superego, and now often dismissed as hopelessly old-world hypothetical in our new DNA-driven world.
As conceived by Ang Lee's longtime producer, James Schamus (with co-writers John Turman and Michael France), Stan Lee and Kirby's 1962 creation has been brought up to modern speed, notably with a personal history that would make Oprah and Sophocles weep. Adopted as a young child, scientist Bruce Banner (Bana) has no memory of his earliest years. Now hard at work in a genetic engineering lab in Berkeley, Bruce comes across as a good guy partial to dressing in earth tones, and, like so many men, he has a hard time expressing emotion. Being bottled up has cost Bruce an intimate relationship with his lab partner, research babe Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), and while he doesn't seem broken up about the affair, in a strange twist, she's racked by nightmares.
The story opens with an extended prologue involving reams of scientific mumbo jumbo and radiant images of swarming cell life. In the mid-1960s, Bruce's father, David (Paul Kersey in the flashback, Nolte the rest of the time), worked for the military doing exceedingly vile things to rhesus monkeys and various coldblooded critters. Obsessed with manipulating the human immune system, David begins a round of self-experimentation that brings about alarming physiological changes ("hints of genetic mutation") which he subsequently passes onto his son. The evil seeds of David's recklessness lie dormant in the younger Banner until a lab accident doses Bruce with gamma rays. Even then, it isn't until Bruce loses his temper - triggering a change in body chemistry - that the combination of genetic engineering and scientific hubris liberates his demon.
Monstrously large, the comic-book Hulk was a descendant of the creature played by Boris Karloff in James Whale's "Frankenstein," newly pumped up for the atomic age. The Jekyll-Hyde dualism of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner - originally a nuclear scientist - and his monster within was a brilliant distillation of the split between the rational and irrational, protector and destroyer. Mostly, though, the Hulk was essential Marvel Comics - cool incarnate and, like Spider-Man, proof that when push came to schoolyard shove, the nerds would have their sweet revenge. For if nothing else, even with that acid Kool-Aid green skin color and angry thatch of hair, alternately smooth as a schoolboy's fringe and wild as an electric-shock halo, the Hulk was never less than recognizably human - one of us.
In the film, the Hulk's emerald flesh remains much as it was, but now the musculature beneath the skin curves more gently, more softly, with little of the original's chiseled hard angles and chiaroscuro. Online movie sites have been aflame for months with nasty scuttlebutt about the film's computer-generated imagery, caused in part by Hulk's chintzy appearance in preview trailers. As a humanoid aberration, he is not unpersuasive, but the finished Hulk does look pretty rubbery around the gills, as well as his shoulders, monumental six-pack and thunder thighs. Still, for all the fetishism of the computer-graphic detail, when compared with his flesh-and-blood co-actors, this Hulk is no more believable than the animated Br'er Rabbit walking alongside Uncle Remus in Disney's 1946 "Song of the South."
The monster's monstrosity is even less persuasive. Petulant rather than angry, the movie Hulk manages all the fury of a brooding high school wrestler. Inexplicably, he also looks younger the bigger he grows, which undermines the idea that it's an adult who's shedding his skin and social prohibitions to embrace (willingly or not) his worst self. Nearly devoid of complex physical expression, the digital face can twist into a plastic snarl but has none of the pure animal rage-that shrieking baboon intensity, those spittle-flecked gnashing teeth-that makes the pen-and-ink portrayal so fearsome. Ang Lee pays direct homage to the sentimentalism of monsters like King Kong and Frankenstein, but doesn't tap into the irrational molten core of the best monsters - his Hulk gets unwound, never unbound.
Part of the appeal of the Hulk as a character is the return of the repressed, the concept that we're all either cursed or blessed with an asocial demon that lurks dangerously under the surface. That theme holds terrific appeal for kids who read comic books (and watch movies), but it doesn't quite seize the imagination without a context like the Cold War to give it heft and meaning. The screenwriters attempt to raise the contemporary stakes with a father-son conflict, and although Ang Lee has shown a talent for wringing fine drama from the father-son dynamic, here the Oedipal machinations are a drag. However clever, the film's "Freud for Dummies" subtext seems calculated to tickle the fancies of middle-age movie critics whose closest encounter with comics arrives with the latest issue of the New Yorker.
Bana and Nolte play their parts with the touching sincerity of actors performing great tragedy, while the equally sympathetic Connelly spends a surprising amount of time weeping. But what's missing from their performances and almost every frame is the overblown pleasures of mass art, that quality of fun, fizz and freakiness that makes pop not just an adjective but a verb. Maybe Lee is too nice for the hard sell. There are beautiful set pieces in "Hulk" - the image of a human eye morphing into a detonated bomb is breathtaking - and Lee even dices his mise-en-scène into pieces to replicate the paneled look of comic books. However nifty, his Cubist gambit fails to capture the graphic tension that makes great comic-book art jump off the page and great pop movies jump off the screen with pow, zap and wow!
It isn't until late in the film, in a long sequence in the desert, that the movie finally pops. Here, as the Hulk ricochets from dune to butte like a super-ball, you get a sense of his pleasure in being bigger than life. There's an infectious sense of play in the sequence, as if, finally freed from the strained sobriety of the script, Lee had shaken off the film's lachrymose vibe to indulge in some fun. Still, as the Hulk bounced about in the bright desert light, there was something undeniably, even touchingly, puny about him too. However enormous, there is something diminished about this Hulk. I kept expecting a dog to come along and scoop him up in his mouth-a runaway squeaky toy back where he belonged.
The Hulk is currently showing at Kolizei.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Talk or Fight?
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A North Korean envoy said on Thursday that his country was ready for "both war and dialogue" and insisted on direct talks with the United States to resolve a nine-month-old nuclear standoff.
South Korean said on Wednesday that the communist North has taken a key step toward building nuclear bombs by reprocessing a small number of spent nuclear-fuel rods.
The report escalated a standoff that began last October when U.S. officials said Pyongyang admitted having a secret nuclear program, in violation of international agreements. Washington wants the North to abandon such programs.
"Our basic position is that we want to resolve the (nuclear) issue peacefully," North Korean negotiator Kim Ryong Song said Thursday before talks with South Korean delegates in Seoul. "But if outside forces ignore our position and try to use force, we will face them boldly and show our strength."
Tough Find
LONDON (Reuters) - Almost four months after the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, a senior British official said on Thursday that it would be "extremely difficult" to find the banned weapons they said justified war.
The British official, who has closely monitored Iraq's military capability, said that it was more likely Iraqi scientists or army officers would eventually come forward with evidence to support the U.S.-British charges - instead of leading them to the weapons themselves.
"The fact that the Iraqis did not use any (weapons of mass destruction) during the conflict clearly indicates that they decided to do something else with the weapons that we genuinely believe that they had," said the official, who declined to be identified. "So they've either hidden, destroyed or dismantled them. And it's going to be extremely difficult to come up with the evidence. Not impossible, but it would be difficult."
Two GIs Killed
BAGHDAD (AP) - Two U.S. soldiers were killed and a third wounded in separate attacks on their convoys in Iraq, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
The first soldier was fatally shot late Wednesday near the city of Mahmudiyah, 25 kilometers south of Baghdad, said Specialist Nicci Trent, a spokesperson for the military.
Another soldier was killed and one wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack near Tikrit, 200 kilometers north of Baghdad, Trent said. That attack also took place on Wednesday night.
Bull Run
MADRID (AP) - Bulls gored three Spaniards and cut or bruised at least 10 other people in a particularly dangerous stampede during the San Fremin Fiesta.
None of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening from the bull run through Pamplona's crowded cobblestone streets on the festival's fourth day.
Mariano Lorente, 27, of Pamplona, was in serious condition at Navarre Hospital after surgery for an injury to his abdomen, the hospital said.
Two other men from Pamplona were attacked in the shoulder and buttock by the charging bulls from the Jandina ranch, famous for their speed.
As on the previous three days of the festival, six heavily muscled bulls plodded through the streets in a four-minute dash to the arena, where they would face bullfighters later in the day.
TITLE: Pirate Arrested After Assault on Sausage
AUTHOR: By Ben Walker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin - Pittsburgh first baseman Randall Simon whacked a mascot with his bat during a popular sausage race at Miller Park, and prosecutors are considering whether to file charges.
As the mascots raced past the third-base dugout during Wednesday night's Pirates-Brewers game, Simon delivered a two-handed, half swing that knocked over a woman dressed in costume.
Simon was booked for misdemeanor battery and released after Milwaukee's 2-1 victory in 12 innings. He was scheduled to meet with the district attorney's office on Thursday, and it will be up to prosecutors to determine whether formal charges are filed.
"It was very strange," Pirates outfielder Reggie Sanders said.
The race is a fan favorite at Miller Park. Held between the sixth and seventh innings, people dress as bratwursts, hot dogs, Polish sausages and Italian sausages and run around the field.
Simon reached over a railing and hit the Italian sausage character from behind, causing the 19-year-old woman wearing the outfit to tumble. When she fell, she also knocked over the woman dressed as the hot dog.
"They both were treated at the scene for scraped knees, but at this point I don't think they have any other complaints," said Deputy Inspector Sherry Warichak of the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department.
Sanders said he thought the weight of the head on the sausage costume contributed to the fall.
"It maybe made it look worse than it was," Sanders said. "It was an unfortunate situation and, hopefully, it gets resolved."
Simon was booed by many fans when he came up as a pinch-hitter in the seventh inning. He grounded out.
Later, the two women inside the costumes and Simon were interviewed at the stadium.
The Pirates said they would address Simon's behavior internally.
"The Pirates do not condone Randall Simon's behavior during last night's Pirates-Brewers game," the team said in a statement Thursday. "The Pittsburgh Pirates apologize to the Milwaukee Brewers organization and to the Brewers' fans for this unfortunate incident."
It's not the first time this year that a mascot had problems with a member of an opposing team. In an NHL game in January, Edmonton Oilers coach Craig MacTavish ripped out the tongue of Calgary Flames mascot Harvey the Hound after the 2-meter dog repeatedly taunted him at the bench.
Harvey, a 90-kilogram white dog with a 30 centimeter red tongue, was mocking MacTavish. During a stoppage, Harvey leaned over the glass behind the bench, prompting MacTavish to grab the tongue, rip it out and throw it into the crowd.
Ryan Borghoff, portraying the bratwurst, said that Simon "just hit the costume and she fell over."
"These things are so top-heavy that it doesn't take much," he said.
With the Italian sausage and hot dog down and out, Borghoff went on to win the race.
"Somebody had to, I guess," he said.
TITLE: After Year of Recharging, Hasek Returning to Wings
AUTHOR: By Mike Householder
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DETROIT - The Dominator is back. Now the Detroit Red Wings have to figure out what to do with last season's replacement for Dominik Hasek, Curtis Joseph.
The 38-year-old Hasek, who led Detroit to a Stanley Cup title a year ago, announced on Tuesday that he plans to come out of retirement to rejoin the Red Wings.
"My batteries are recharged, and I have the fire for competing for the Cup again," he said during a conference call.
The Red Wings late last month exercised an $8 million option on Hasek, who lives in the Czech Republic. It wasn't clear until Tuesday whether he would play this season.
Joseph was signed last summer to a three-year, $24 million deal as a free agent. That contract includes a no-trade clause.
"Ideally, as quickly as possible, I'd like to get a goaltender moved," general manager Ken Holland said on Tuesday. "We're going to have to be creative with some other teams to try to put something together."
Holland said that he planned to talk later to the 36-year-old Joseph. Don Meehan, Joseph's agent, said that he intends to work with Holland, but also will protect Joseph's rights.
"Ken hopes to try and trade Curtis within the foreseeable future and he's going to involve himself in due diligence in talking to other teams, and when he's done that work, he'll come back to me," Meehan said.
Joseph has not expressed a preference for a new team.
"I know about the situation with Cujo, about his no-trade clause," Hasek said. "My decision also unfortunately affects other people. However, my desire is to play with the Detroit Red Wings."
Coach Dave Lewis said on Tuesday that he would reserve comment until the goaltending situation was resolved.
Hasek hasn't played as much as a pickup game as a goaltender since Game 5 of the Cup finals against Carolina in 2002. But he said on Tuesday that he felt he had more to contribute to the game.
"I will work hard to get into the same shape like I was before," said Hasek, who is three kilograms lighter than his playing weight. "I want to be 'The Dominator' like I used to."
During his year away from the NHL, Hasek played squash, roller hockey as a defenseman and soccer. He said he does not regret the decision to retire.
"After I won the Cup, I had the feeling that I had achieved everything in hockey," he said. "Without motivation, you shouldn't play - at least in my case. After one year not playing in goal ... I feel I am ready to play professional hockey again."
Hasek is a six-time Vezina Trophy winner as the NHL's best goalie, two-time Hart Trophy winner as the league's most valuable player and a gold medalist from the 1998 Nagano Olympics.
TITLE: SPORT WATCH
TEXT: Shopping Around
MILAN (Reuters) - Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich met with Inter Milan president Massimo Moratti on Thursday after Italian champions Juventus turned down his offer for their Dutch midfielder, Edgar Davids.
The Russian billionaire's visit to Italy sparked a frenzy of speculation in local media about possible Chelsea targets, but both Juventus and Inter said no deals had been done.
Inter's Moratti said Abramovich had inquired of the club's "best players" but said the Serie A side were not interested in selling their key men.
Juventus said an offer had been made for the combative Davids but that the Turin club had rejected the approach.
"I can confirm that we have turned down an offer from Chelsea," Gazzetta dello Sport's Web site quoted Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi as saying. "Davids is part of this club's project for the future."
Chelsea has been linked with moves for some of the biggest names in European soccer since Abramovich took the club over last week.
Tyson Hates Self
NEW YORK (AP) - Mike Tyson says he has lost his soul as a human being and hates himself.
"Maybe in my next life, I'll have a better life," Tyson said in an interview for Fox Sports Net's "Beyond the Glory," to be broadcast on July 16. "And that's why I'm just looking forward to go to the other world. 'Cause I really hate the way I live now. And I hate my life now."
Tyson's former wife, actress Robin Givens, also talks on the program about being abused by the boxer. According to transcripts of the show, Givens says Tyson would choke and kick her, often causing her to vomit. He would then begin to cry while she consoled him.
"It just started getting dangerous," Givens said.
Last month, Tyson was charged with misdemeanor assault after fighting with two men outside a Brooklyn hotel. He is due in court on July 24.
Ready To Go
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian teenager Maria Sharapova, who caused quite a sensation by reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon, thinks she is ready to take on the Williams sisters.
"Of course. I have to be ready," the 16-year-old was quoted as saying in Tuesday's Sport-Express newspaper when asked if she could challenge the powerful Americans.
Sharapova's dreams of becoming the first wildcard to reach the women's quarter-finals at Wimbledon were ended when she lost in three sets to compatriot Svetlana Kuznetsova.
World number one Serena Williams beat her elder sister Venus 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 in the Wimbledon final last Saturday.
"I'm not that interested [in] what's going to happen five years from now, tomorrow is more important for me," Sharapova said.