SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #885 (53), Friday, July 18, 2003
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TITLE: Premier Moves To Calm Markets
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Thursday moved to assuage investor fears that past privatizations may not be final, but his grip on the government appeared to weaken and the stock market continued to plummet as the tense legal assault on Mikhail Khodorkovsky's empire entered week three.
"Our position is and has always been that the results of past privatizations are irreversible," Kasyanov told his Cabinet as they met to hammer out the government's privatization program through 2006.
After that meeting, however, the Property Ministry contradicted Kasyanov, saying it would not rule out overturning "some" past sell-offs.
"As far as certain privatization deals are concerned, then an analysis of whether they were in line with the law can certainly be conducted," First Deputy Property Minister Alexander Braverman said in televised remarks.
Braverman said, however, that such investigations need to be carried out quietly in order to avoid a stock market collapse.
With no clear position yet articulated by President Vladimir Putin over the efficacy of the attack on Khodorkovsky's $24 billion oil company Yukos, Russia's largest, divisions within the government appear to be widening.
The move against Yukos and its parent company Group Menatep began with July 2 arrest of Menatep chairperson Platon Lebedev for allegedly stealing state property in a 1994 privatization deal, and has ballooned into a wider probe of possible tax evasion and other controversial acquisitions by the company.
Khodorkovsky has called the case a petty political intrigue that has come as the result of Kremlin infighting. But that "petty" intrigue has already knocked some $8 billion off the value of Yukos and billions more off the value of Russian stocks as a whole as concerns mount that a full-scale review of the skewed privatizations of the 1990s is unfolding.
Analysts said confusion surrounding the government's own position on privatization was sending investors running. Yukos shares shed another 6 percent Thursday and the benchmark RTS index fell nearly 5 percent, a day after the stock market posted its biggest one-day decline since December 1998 as the possibility of a quick solution to the conflict grew increasingly remote.
"Braverman announced a series of privatizations for next year while at the same time questioning privatizations that he conducted previously. Who would ever buy anything from this man?" said Ian Hague, CEO of the Firebird Fund, a Russia-dedicated hedge fund that operates out of New York.
Braverman has been involved with government privatization organizations since 1992.
"Any statement like this in the current market is going to cause concern," said Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at United Financial Group, on the conflicting signals sent by Braverman.
"There is a clash within the Kremlin and nobody knows which side Putin is going to come out on," he said, adding that Braverman's addendum to Kasyanov's remarks indicated the split now appeared to be spreading to the government.
"The market does not think Kasyanov can fix this. Kasyanov has said there will be no re-examination of privatization before and that hasn't fixed anything. It s not going to fix anything now."
O'Sullivan said that, at some stage, "Putin has to say something."
Putin, however, has made no direct statement on what his policy is on past privatizations since the affair began, but Arkady Volsky, president of the main lobbying group for Russia's business barons, told Vedomosti after meeting with Putin on Wednesday that Putin said he would not interfere in the case.
Some foreign investors are seeing the fall as a time to buy what had been seen as overvalued stocks. "Having been through several bouts of chaos in Russia now, to us this looks like a buying opportunity, said Hague. "But we just don't know exactly when to buy in."
"The Russian stock market has a tendency to overshoot in both directions. There's every reason to think its overshooting again," said Roland Nash, the head of research at Renaissance Capital. "This is just a wakeup call that Russian politics are not stable yet."
Staff writer Simon Saradzhyan contributed to this report.
TITLE: Smolny Calls Foul On Court
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The City Charter court Ruled on Tuesday to shut down the City Hall Administrative Committee, based on the argument that it is not provided for in the City Charter, which acts as St. Petersburg's constitution.
The group that filed the request with the court welcomed the decision, saying that it normalized the situation in Smolny. But some city-administration officials and analysts countered that the ruling was a politically motivated move against vice governor and gubernatorial candidate Anna Markova, who heads the committee, and that it bore many of the characteristics of a vendetta.
The hearing was initiated by a group Legislative Assembly lawmakers, who argued that the committee, which was set up in 2000 as a separate entity from the governor's management office, does not have the right to engaged in political or legislative activities. They argued that the preparation of draft legislation or the coordination of relations between the Legislative Assembly and City Hall were rightfully the purview of the governor's management office.
"[The decision] has put an end to judicial nihilism," Yury Gladkov, the head of SPS faction in the assembly and one of the deputies who filed the inquiry, was quoted as saying by his press-service on Tuesday.
Gladkov said that Mikhail Mikhailovsky, the former head of the committee, had been behind City Hall's earlier refusals to abolish it. Mikhailovsky had justified the establishment of the committee in 2000 on the basis of what he called the "dual nature of the person of the governor". He argued that it was the place of the City Hall Management Office to work in the governor's sphere of responsibility as the head of the city administration, while the administrative committee was necessary to coordinate the activities associated with the governor's role as the city's senior official and representative.
The court had already passed down a ruling that the Administrative Committee was inconsistent with the provisions of the City Charter, in February 2002, ordering that the committee be disbanded within 14 days. City hall simply ignored the ruling.
"It took us more than a year to deal with the case of the 'split personality' of the governor," Gladkov said. "Now it is clear to everyone that the City Charter Court is not just a structure for some kind of consultation, but it is also a body that issues decisions that are binding."
Gladkov said that inquiries had been sent to Ivan Sydoruk, the City's Prosecutor General at time, after Smolny refused to adhere to the court's decision, but that Sydoruk, who was generally seen as an ally of then Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, also failed to take any action.
In March, the Federal Prosecutor General's Office reassigned Sydoruk to a new post in Moscow and replaced him with Nikolai Vinichenko, the former deputy presidential representative to the Northwest Region.
Some analysts say that the decision had more to do with the continuation of a Kremlin-backed campaign against Yakovlev, who resigned to take a post of one of the six deputy premiers under Mikhail Kasyanov.
"It's clearly a case of making sure that they finish off their victim, but it seems that, in the process, they have lost all sense of proportion. Now it's not enough just to defeat somebody, they have to go even farther.," Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst with the Sociology Department at the Russian Academy of Science, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "It is a new logic of some kind that is very difficult to understand."
Gladkov said that Markova, who added her name to the list of candidates running to replace Yakovlev on Monday, was not the target of the request or the court's decision. Administrative Committee officials contacted this week think otherwise.
"Today, [Markova] doesn't have an office or a secretary. She has the title of vice governor, but she doesn't have any responsibilities," Vladimir Anikeyev, the Administrative Committee spokesperson, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Around ten of the 65 committee employees are going to lose their jobs, including myself, just because we worked with Markova."
Markova's application to run for governor came over a month after a speech she delivered in the Legislative Assembly, where she first said publicly that she would seek the post. In the address, she pointed the finger at the Kremlin for what she said was its role in moving Yakovlev out of office early, saying that her decision to run was made "in order to save democracy in the city."
Anikeyev said that her position had helped prompt the move to abolish the committee that she headed.
"This is linked to the announcement Markova made at the Legislative Assembly session. Of course it is," Anikeyev said.
TITLE: The Short Path From Newsroom to Boiler Room
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A month ago, Vladimir Kara-Murza was one of the faces of the country's only national private television station, TVS. Now, he is happy to work in a boiler room.
The third time didn't prove to be the charm for the journalist, who, before TVS, was forced to leave NTV and TV6. So, shortly after the Press Ministry pulled the plug on TVS on June 22, he decided it was time for a career change rather than a career turn.
Moving to the boiler room was kind of a step back to Soviet times. Back then, Kara-Murza deliberately spurned work that might be considered a career, opting instead to tutor schoolchildren in history and later to sweep courtyards.
"I didn't think it was right to profit under a criminal regime," said Kara-Murza, 43. "I believe that we have returned to a regime where it is shameful to prosper."
Working as a courtyard cleaner or boiler tender were the chosen jobs of disillusioned Soviet intellectuals, since the work came with free housing and flexible working hours. Most importantly, it meant that they were not working directly with the state. Rock singers Boris Grebenschikov and Viktor Tsoi, a friend of Kara-Murza's, both worked in boiler rooms.
Kara-Murza, sitting in the kitchen of his apartment in Moscow's Baumanskaya district and just a few minutes' walk from his boiler room, animatedly and wittily explained on Wednesday his career move and vented his anger at the decision to switch off TVS.
"They destroyed my program," he said. Pointing to his television set, he added, "I don't watch Soviet television anymore, just videos."
Kara-Murza is a Tartar name meaning "Black Prince." The name is linked to a number of famous characters, including 18th-century historian and author Nikolai Karamzin. Karamzin is the Russified version of Kara-Murza.
Although Kara-Murza said that he is not linked to any political party, his family is. A brother, Sergei, is a leftist who regularly writes for the Zaftra newspaper and is a founding member of a new party set up by former Communist Sergei Glaziyev. Another brother, Alexei, is believed to be the political ideologist behind the liberal Union of Right Forces party.
"One of them is a red, another a white," Kara-Murza said. "But we still sit down and eat together."
His son, Vladimir, is expected to run as an SPS candidate in December's parliamentary elections.
Kara-Murza's apartment is cozy, with a feel of messy clutter and Soviet simplicity, and looks as if it hasn't been renovated since it was built in the 1930s.
Opening one of the cupboards, Kara-Murza pointed to marks where a child had his height measured. They move up the cupboard door a few millimeters at a time before abruptly stopping at Sept. 12, 1937. Kara-Murza explained that the parents, who worked in the Tupolev factory, were taken away by the KGB on that date and shot.
The only striking modernities in the apartment are an electronic dartboard and pool table in one room. Around the table hang paintings by Dmitry Vrubel, best known for his picture of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing. One painting shows Kara-Murza taking an ordinary straight shot on a pool table. Another is of President Vladimir Putin playing a trick shot. Kara-Murza is an avid player, and he showed off a collection of trophies.
Asked if Putin can actually play pool, he said scornfully, "He can't play at all."
Kara-Murza, a history graduate from Moscow State University, got his break in television when he was offered a job by a close friend from MGU, NTV co-founder Oleg Dobrodeyev. In one swift move, he switched from being a courtyard cleaner to the editor of "Itogi" on NTV.
If Dobrodeyev had not been working in television, Kara-Murza would have had a completely different career.
"If he had been the coal minister, I would have been the director of a mine," Kara-Murza said.
But the two stopped talking when Dovrodeyev threw in the towel at NTV and became chairperson of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Co., the state-owned media holding.
Kara-Murza clearly remains upset about the events at NTV, TV6 and TVS. He pulled out a magazine showing the high ratings off his programs in the month before TVS was taken off the air.
"If we were still working, the Yukos and Deripaska affairs would be over already," he said, adding that NTV's coverage of Vladimir Gusinksy's arrest in 2000 had secured his release. "Now we do not exist, and they are being questioned."
He is disappointed with his former colleagues who returned to NTV, and he turned to an elongated metaphor to explain the two types of journalists. "There are ants and flying ants," he explained, his fingers fidgeting on the pool table. "But if you pull off the wings, that doesn't make them ants. ... There are millions of years of evolution between them."
Once hot water is turned on again in his district after the monthlong summer break, Kara-Murza will return to work in the boiler room - two days on, two days off ~ for 4,500 rubles ($150) per month.
Kara-Murza said that he will not make a career of journalism again. He said that the work he intermittently does now for Gusinsky's RTV International channel - which broadcasts in Israel and the United States - and Ekho Moskvy is for free.
"I'm not a professional television presenter. I lived in a particular pool," he said, referring to the group of journalists that hopped from NTV to TV6 to TVS. "I can't go to another collective."
But should he ever decide to return to news, he said, there's always the option of using the method he talked about with cartoon characters Stepan and Khrun on the TVS series "Tushite Svet." They discussed simply going from domophone to domophone presenting the news.
TITLE: Motorcycle Bomb Kills Four in Dagestan
AUTHOR: By Yuri Bagrov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A powerful shrapnel-filled bomb exploded near a police station in Dagestan on Thursday, killing at least four people and injuring 18 others, officials said.
The bomb, attached to a motorcycle or scooter parked near the police station in the city of Khasavyurt, exploded at about 10:00 a.m., the press service of the regional Interior Ministry said. The blast killed two police officers, a woman and a 5-year-old girl, the ministry said.
One of the officers, the head of a branch of the city police that provides security to private companies and state-run enterprises, was killed in his office, about 15 meters from the site of the blast, it said. The other was a member of a squad that fights organized crime, it said.
The ministry said that 18 people were hospitalized, three of them in critical condition.
A spokesperson for the Emergency Situations Ministry in southern Russia, Andrei Somishchenko, later said that 12 people were in the hospital, including the three in critical condition. He said a total of 35 people were hurt in the explosion.
The explosive device was filled with nuts, bolts and ball bearings, the ministry said.
The blast damaged 11 cars, including one that authorities initially believed contained the bomb.
Televised footage showed a street that looked like a firestorm had passed through, with gutted cars and heavily damaged buildings. Somishchenko said that the explosion had the force of between one to three kilograms of TNT.
Dagestan, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia, is plagued by violence both related and unrelated to the fighting in neighboring Chechnya, and Khasavyurt is in the western part of Dagestan near the Chechen border.
Dagestani Interior Minister Adilgirei Magomed-Tagirov said that he believed the attack was carried out by members of the Wahhabi sect, referring to militant Muslims in Chechnya and Dagestan, and was aimed at hampering the work of police and security officials in the region.
The site of the blast was also close to an office of the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
Magomed-Tagirov also said the explosion could be linked to deadly blasts in Moscow this month that Russian officials blamed on female suicide bombers from Chechnya, and to suicide bombings in Chechnya itself.
In May, a truck-bomb blast outside a government compound in Chechnya that included an FSB building killed at least 59 people.
Speaking on NTV television, Dagestan FSB chief Vladimir Muratov said the motive in Thursday's attack might have been Islamic militancy or a vendetta.
TITLE: Budanov Ignoring Hearings
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia - The prosecutor pressing murder charges against Colonel Yury Budanov, who is accused of killing a Chechen woman, asked the court on Thursday to find the Russian Army officer guilty and hand down a sentence of 12 years in prison.
Prosecutor Vladimir Milovanov also asked the Rostov-na-Donu court to strip Budanov of his military rank and military awards.
In December, Budanov was found not criminally responsible for killing 18-year-old Elza Kungayeva, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision and ordered that a new trial be held.
"Our position ... remains unchanged," said Milovanov, asking that Budanov be found guilty of abuse of power, abduction and murder.
Budanov has admitted to killing Kungayeva in March 2000 but said that he had suspected her of being a rebel sniper and had strangled her in a fit of rage.
Kungayeva's family said that she was dragged from her home in a Chechen village, raped and murdered.
Budanov's lawyers are seeking the same outcome as in the first trial, a ruling of temporary insanity that could lead to Budanov's freedom or a lighter sentence. But a new psychiatric report delivered to the court last month delivered a blow to their efforts. A panel of experts concluded that Budanov was sane but in a "highly agitated state" at the time of the killing.
Budanov's lawyer, Alexei Dulimov, said Thursday that he was not surprised by the prosecutor's request, "but don't forget that the decision on the punishment will be made by the court."
Budanov, who has repeatedly protested his retrial, showed no reaction on Thursday. He stuffed his ears with cotton balls and read a book, as he has done repeatedly during the proceedings.
TITLE: Human Rights Watch: Ingushetia Sweeps Breeding Insecurity
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Federal forces have been carrying out abusive security sweeps for suspected Chechen rebels in Ingushetia, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.
The New York-based human-rights group said that it has documented numerous cases of arbitrary detention, ill treatment and looting during so-called mopping-up raids in Ingushetia.
"In Ingushetia, Russian forces are showing the same patterns of brutal behavior that we've seen in Chechnya," Elizabeth Andersen, the executive director of the group's Europe and Central Asia division, said in a statement. "The Russian government must rein them in or risk spreading insecurity to Ingushetia."
Anna Neistat, the head of the organization's Moscow office, who recently returned from a trip to Ingushetia, said that the operations in Ingushetia had targeted both Chechen refugees and ethnic Ingush. There are an estimated 86,000 Chechen refugees in the region.
In one incident, federal forces were suspected of killing an Ingush man and wounding his mother, and in another a Russian soldier allegedly shot and wounded a 16-year-old Ingush boy in the leg, she said.
Neistat said that military prosecutors refused to investigate either incident despite requests from local officials in Ingushetia, the mostly Muslim republic that borders Chechnya to the west and shares a language and culture with it.
"If such arbitrariness and impunity continues, we will get a second Chechnya in just a few months," Neistat said at a news conference.
She said that a likely goal of the raids and other alleged abuses in Ingushetia is to force Chechen refugees to move back home by creating a feeling of fear and insecurity.
Russian officials were not immediately available for comment.
Federal authorities have long urged the refugees to return to Chechnya in an attempt to show that life in the region is returning to normal. The authorities shut one refugee camp in Ingushetia last fall, but international protests and logistical difficulties have apparently saved other settlements from closure.
Daily clashes and violence continue in Chechnya, with rebels targeting federal servicemen in raids and bombings. A pro-Moscow Chechen police officer was killed and another wounded in a rebel shelling Tuesday in Grozny.
In a separate incident in Grozny, a sapper was killed Tuesday while trying to defuse a rebel land mine, an official in the Mocow-backed administration in Chechnya said on condition of anonymity.
Neistat said that the Kremlin's amnesty for some rebels who agree to disarm and Oct. 5 presidential elections in Chechnya would not be sufficient to end hostilities.
"It's necessary to end military abuses, bring those responsible to justice and try to win the population's trust," she said.
TITLE: Another Church on the Blood
AUTHOR: By Alexei Vladykin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: YEKATERINBURG, Ural Mountains - Surrounded by crowds of Russian Orthodox faithful, clerics on Wednesday consecrated a golden-domed memorial church on the spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were shot to death by the Bolsheviks 85 years ago.
Russian Orthodox priests wearing gilt-edged red robes chanted and carried crosses under lowering skies in Yekaterinburg, where the last tsar, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were executed in a cellar on July 17, 1918.
The Church on the Blood, a white-walled structure topped by several shining gold-colored onion domes at different levels, was built on the murder site at a cost of 328 million rubles (about $10 million), much of it donated by large companies, Itar-Tass reported.
"I am delighted that I am here on this historic day. This place is known to everyone as the Russian Calvary," a descendant of the Romanovs, Olga Kulikovskaya-Romanova said at the ceremony.
Other family members and well-known people, including Mstislav Rostropovich, joined about 1,000 pilgrims who arrived for the consecration.
Some traveled hundreds of kilometers on foot and stayed at a tent camp set up in a nearby field, NTV television reported.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II has been ill lately and was advised by his doctors not to travel to Yekaterinburg, Itar-Tass reported.
In a message, Alexy said that the consecration suggests "a possible historic turn" for Russia and called for unity between the Russian Orthodox Church, the state and the Russian people. In imperial Russia, church and state were extremely close and the tsar was considered to have the divine right to rule.
At the main entrance to the church stands a sculpture depicting the last minutes of the Romanov's lives - surrounded by members of his family, Nicholas clutches his son, Alexis, to his chest.
Nicholas, who abdicated in March 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, was canonized by the church in 2000, along with his family, after years of debate on the issue following the collapse of the Soviet regime.
Nicholas and his family were detained and, in April 1918, they were sent to Yekaterinburg. Three months later, a firing squad lined them up in the basement of a merchant's house and shot them. The building was demolished in 1977 on orders from Boris Yeltsin, who was the top regional official at the time.
TITLE: Russia Ponders Troops in Iraq
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A top Russian diplomat said on Thursday that Moscow is prepared to consider a U.S. proposal for a UN Security Council resolution aimed at bringing more international troops to Iraq and would weigh sending its own peacekeepers there under a UN mandate, the Interfax news agency reported.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday that there has been discussion about the possibility of a new UN resolution.
Annan said that the aim of the resolution would be to broaden the UN mandate in Iraq and internationalize the U.S. and British operation.
Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov reiterated that Russia will not contribute any troops to the U.S.-led coalition of forces in Iraq, Interfax reported. But he suggested that Moscow would consider participation in a broader force approved by the UN Security Council, of which it is a permanent veto-wielding member.
"As for the possible creation of a new format for an international presence in the sphere of security in Iraq under the aegis of the United Nations, and by a mandate of the Security Council, we will determine our attitude to possible participation in such forces based on concrete circumstances and the further development of the situation," Interfax quoted him as saying.
The new focus on the United Nations appears to have taken shape in the past week after France, Germany and India refused a U.S. request to provide troops for the U.S.-led force in Iraq unless there is a UN mandate.
Russia strongly opposed the U.S.-led war and has called for a stronger UN role in postwar Iraq.
"We do not rule out the adoption of another UN Security Council resolution broadening the UN's participation in Iraqi affairs," Interfax quoted Fedotov as saying.
He said that Russia is concerned about the persistent disorder in Iraq, saying that "what is happening in Iraq is effectively fueling extremist sentiments and playing into the hands of terrorist groups."
Fedotov said that "no specific suggestions" for altering the international presence in Iraq have been proposed and stressed that "any proposals must be considered within the UN Security Council," according to Interfax. He said that Russia "attached great importance" to a council session on Iraq scheduled for next Tuesday.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov discussed the upcoming session with Powell by telephone on Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said.
TITLE: Government PR Chief Quits
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Government deputy chief of staff Alexei Volin, who was in charge of public relations for Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's Cabinet, said Thursday that he has submitted his resignation.
Volin was the Russian media's primary source of information in the government. He was known as an outspoken official who had no qualms about criticizing Cabinet decisions and on occasion acting more as a spokesman for the Kremlin than the Cabinet.
Volin told NTV television that he felt it was time for him to leave government service and that originally he had not planned to stay in the post for more than two years. He held the post for three years.
Kommersant reported Thursday that Volin's resignation was no surprise after his boss, government chief of staff Igor Shuvalov, quit last month. Both men are considered part of the team of presidential chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, whose relations with Kasyanov are strained amid a dispute over administrative reform, according to local media reports.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Missile Hits Village
MOSCOW (AP) - A missile fired by a warplane during training exercises exploded in a northwestern village on Tuesday, injuring one civilian slightly, Interfax reported.
The report cited Air Force spokesperson Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky as saying that the errant missile was fired by an Su-24 that was taking part in exercises at the Kingisepp testing range, 120 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg.
Drobyshevsky said that it was not clear where the missile landed or if there were any injuries. But Interfax cited an unnamed regional law-enforcement official as saying that the missile exploded in the yard of a resident of Ragulovo, about 20 kilometers from the testing range, injuring the man slightly and destroying some outbuildings.
The report did not specify whether the missile was fired on an incorrect trajectory or whether it malfunctioned and went off-course. Air Force officials could not be reached for comment.
Armenia Extradition
MOSCOW (SPT) - An Armenian wanted in connection with a 1999 bloodbath in Armenia's parliament that left the prime minister and seven lawmakers dead will be extradited from St. Petersburg this week, Agence France Press reported Wednesday.
The suspect, Surely Petrosian, 47, was arrested two months ago after police discovered he was living in St. Petersburg without a proper residency permit.
Armenia had put out an international warrant for his arrest.
Police told AFP that Petrosian will be extradited to Armenia within two days.
Gunmen broke into the Armenian parliament on Oct. 27, 1999, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian, parliamentary Speaker Karen Demirchian and six others.
Prince Charles in Gulag
MOSCOW (AP) - Britain's Prince Charles on Wednesday visited a famous White Sea monastery and former Stalin-era prison camp considered the cradle of the Soviet gulag system.
Charles flew to the Solovetskiye archipelago, the site of a 15th-century monastery in northwestern Russia, Itar-Tass reported.
Between the 1917 revolution and 1939, the monastery served as the Solovki labor camp, the first such camp in the Soviet Union and a symbol of Stalinist repression.
The monastery is now being renovated in a project sponsored by a foundation dedicated to the late Russian literary historian Dmitry Likhachyov, who was imprisoned in the camp from 1928 to 1932.
The trip to Solovki caps a three-day visit by the prince to St. Petersburg, in celebration of the city's tercentenary and on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of British-Russian relations.
Kodanyov Kept in Jail
MOSCOW (AP) - A Moscow court ruled Tuesday that Liberal Russia's Mikhail Kodanyov, who is suspected of killing Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, will be kept in custody as police investigate.
The Moscow City Court endorsed the ruling of a lower court that sanctioned the arrest of Kodanyov and his assistant, Alexander Vinnik, last month. It rejected an appeal by Kodanyov's lawyers, who said he should be freed, Interfax reported.
Strelas Stolen
MOSCOW (AP) - At least eight shoulder-fired missile launchers have been stolen from a naval arsenal, Interfax quoted a military official as saying Tuesday.
The Strela missile launchers were stolen from an arsenal in Bolshiye Izhory, outside St. Petersburg, Leningrad Military District prosecutor Igor Lebed said.
The report did not specify when the theft took place or how thieves may have gained access to the weapons. Defense Ministry officials could not be reached for clarification.
Shoulder-fired missiles have been used by insurgents in Chechnya to shoot down military helicopters, including three that were shot down last year at the main military base near Grozny.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said last month that a Russian Strela system was used to fire missiles that just missed an Israeli charter plane after it took off from Mombasa, Kenya, last November with 271 people on board. U.S. officials believe al-Qaida launched the attack.
TITLE: Models Bare All For Megafon Marketing
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - By dangling its mobile phones from the necks of Penthouse models, some advertising experts say that Megafon - the No. 3 mobile telephone operator in the country - is following an honorable tradition that was born in the studio of Russia's most famous film director.
He may not have known it, but by hand-painting crimson communist flags into his black-and-white classic "Battleship Potemkin," Sergei Eisenstein was tapping the power of a hitherto undiscovered advertising technology.
"This was true product placement," said Vadim Byrkin, general director of the Anno Domini company, in a telephone interview. "It was the advertisement of communist values."
Now the latest Hollywood films draw fire for containing too many ads. The 1997 James Bond flick "Tomorrow Never Dies" was loaded with product placements: Visa Card, Avis Car rentals, BMW cars and motorcycles, Smirnoff vodka, Heineken beer, Omega watches, Ericsson cellphones and L'Oreal makeup.
By comparison, Russia's product placement market is in an early stage of development. But a number of agencies are devoted to getting companies' wares on the air, into magazines, and even into novels.
"One of the key advances is that now Russian companies are concluding annual contracts for product placement servicing," said Pavel Shvaikovsky, a producer with TVIN, a product-placement agency.
In a union like that between Samsung and the "Matrix" movie franchise, Panasonic will place its mobile phones in the upcoming gangster picture "Antikiller 2," while the movie's actors will anchor the company's advertising campaigns.
For Megafon, playing catch-up with two well-established domestic operators - MTS and Vimpelcom - can't be compared to Eisentstein's goal of promoting the international revolution.
But analysts say that the company has its work cut out.
"In terms of getting subscribers, yes, its tough," said Alexander Kazbegi, telecommunications analyst at Renaissance Capital. "Megafon is coming late into a market that is 60-percent penetrated."
"To be frank: How do you differentiate yourself?" Kazbegi said. "OK, you have a different tariff plan. But so what? Everyone will probably match it some day."
With nudity, Megafon executives may have found a way to stand out.
The July-August issue of Penthouse features two series of photographs in which Megafon's trademark is subtly - and sometimes not-so-subtly - incorporated.
Two dancers from Moscow's Flash cabaret are pictured relaxing at Turkey's popular Bodrum resort.
In one photograph, a woman with a Megafon bag on her arm inspects a bra in one of the hotel's boutiques. In another, a telephone bearing the company logo hangs from the woman's neck as she reclines in a peddle-boat.
Roman Prokolov, adviser to Megafon's general director, said that the location for the shoot had been carefully chosen to highlight the launch of the company's multimedia messaging, or MMS roaming services, in Turkey this May.
MMS allows subscribers to exchange photographs and short video clips, and, as Prokolov explained, "the new Megafon technologies make the fantasies with the magazine's heroines all the more picturesque. You can meet a girl on holiday, take photographs and send them to your mother."
This is not the first time Megafon has collaborated with Penthouse.
The company's multimedia messaging service - MMS Klubnichka, or "strawberry," which beams Penthouse images to subscribers' telephones - has proven to be more popular than its MMS weather updates.
"It has more variety than the weather in Moscow," Prokolov said.
And there was another reason for the service's success, he said. About 70 percent of Megafon subscribers are men between the ages of 24 and 40.
Hotels, vodkas, whiskies, car stereos and motorbikes have all been featured in Penthouse photoshoots before, but Penthouse Commercial Director Andrei Protopopov said that this was the first time a mobile-phone operator had placed its brand with the magazine.
Protopopov said that the collaboration will continue. Penthouse has slated its second Megafon shoot to run in the September issue of the magazine.
"We have invited representatives of Megafon to choose the models with us," Protopopov said.
TITLE: Nuclear-Assistance Hand a Tricky One To Play
AUTHOR: By Ilan Berman
TEXT: Of late, mounting international concern over Iran's nuclear efforts has once again made Russia the center of attention. More than a decade after its inception, the strategic dialogue between Moscow and Tehran has blossomed into a major partnership.
Militarily, Russia has become Iran's main international ally, principally responsible for its rapid rearmament and regional re-emergence. Ideologically, the two countries have drawn closer on an array of geopolitical issues - ranging from opposition to U.S. influence in the Middle East to security in Central Asia - under the guidance of the political leadership in both Moscow and Tehran.
This status quo, however, may not hold for much longer. Growing evidence suggests that Iran is emerging as a serious threat to Russian security. Take nuclear cooperation. Since the mid-1990s, Russia has launched a major effort to assist Iran's nuclear aspirations, most prominently through the construction of a massive $800-million light-water reactor at Bushehr. Although both countries publicly deny that this cooperation is intended for anything other than civilian energy development, international worries abound that Moscow's assistance has been a boon to Iran's military capabilities. And, amid mounting pressure for Iran to submit to more intensive International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, work on Bushehr - which Western officials worry could provide Iran with substantial weapons-grade nuclear material - is now nearing completion.
Though touted domestically as a major success, this partnership could have ominous consequences for Russia. According to a recent report by the respected Moscow-based PIR Center, Tehran's aggressive pursuit of an offensive atomic capability, coupled with its advances in ballistic-missile development, could allow it to field a nuclear-capable rocket by 2006 - far sooner than previously expected. With that kind of a capability - the policy center predicts - Iran would be able to threaten some 20 million people in the south of Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Even without nuclear weapons, Iran is likely to pose a long-term strategic challenge. Fears of Iranian meddling in the Caucasus were among the Kremlin's principal rationales for cooperation at the start of the strategic partnership.
Moscow, worried about the destabilizing potential of an Iranian presence in places like Chechnya and Dagestan, moved quickly to secure Tehran's good behavior in exchange for arms and nuclear assistance. That gamble has paid off: Iran has consistently steered clear of the Chechen conflict, despite repeated calls from regime hardliners to assist co-religionists in Central Asia.
Still, Tehran may not stay on the sidelines indefinitely. At some point, Iran's mullahs might not be able to resist playing the Chechnya card, particularly if they feel threatened by Russia's strides toward Europe or the United States. A shift toward support for terrorism in Central Asia could also become a distinct possibility if Iran perceives the Kremlin to be scaling back its nuclear assistance as a result of pressure from the international community. With this kind of leverage, and plagued by ongoing unrest in Chechnya, Moscow might one day find itself no longer in the driver's seat of the relationship between the two countries.
A growing rift over the demarcation of the resource-rich Caspian Sea, meanwhile, hints at the potential for a major confrontation. Russia's efforts to establish a regional consensus on the Caspian Sea's delineation have increasingly pitted Iran against a trilateral Russia-Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan bloc, prompting Tehran to expand its regional military presence and assume a belligerent posture toward ongoing energy projects. In response, Moscow held massive military exercises in the Caspian Sea last summer, and Astana has since aggressively pursued the establishment of its own navy. If Russia and Iran are overtly seeking a diplomatic solution, both are covertly preparing for the possibility that negotiations may fail.
Small wonder, then, that the Russian consensus regarding cooperation has begun to crumble. In response to Iran's expanding WMD capabilities and its mounting international ambitions, a domestic chorus of concern is beginning to emerge. Prominent policymakers like former secretary of the Security Council Andrei Kokoshin and Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairperson of the State Duma defense committee, now worry publicly about the Iranian threat.
Nevertheless, a Russian-Iranian divorce may still be far off. Shrugging off domestic and international worries, President Vladimir Putin has recently made clear that he has no plans to abandon cooperation with the Islamic Republic.
What is increasingly undeniable, however, is that the Moscow-Tehran partnership has become a perilous enterprise. Blinded by the benefits of alliance, the Kremlin has ignored the growing threat posed by Iran. The competing interests of the two countries, coupled with Iran's nuclear advances, meanwhile suggest that strategic ties could fall by the wayside in the not-too-distant future.
If that happens, Moscow is likely to find its substantial military and political investment in Tehran to be a distinct liability, rather than an asset.
Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: SPS May Be Counting Too Much on an Idea
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: There is a popular Russian saying about expectations: "Tsyplyat po oseny schitayut". It translates roughly as "don't count your chickens until the fall," meaning that a large number of those hatched in the spring won't make it through to the end of the year. It's the basic equivalent of the English saying "don't count your chickens until they're hatched," within an extended time reference.
The reason I'm mentioning this here is that the saying popped into my mind at the begining of this month, immediately after the Union of Right Forces (SPS) faction in the Legislative Assembly suggested that the post of "city government chairperson" be created in the city administration.
That the proposal, which would mean altering the City Charter, the local analog of a constitution, was introduced just before the chamber recessed for a couple of months to the dacha, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's standard procedure to suggest sweeping changes of this sort when people are least likely to notice.
For anyone who followed the machinations before the beginning of the campaign ahead of the Sept. 21 election for city governor, the plan behind introducing the new position should be pretty clear: Valentina Matviyenko (to whom this week the SPS announced they were giving their endorsement and support in the campaign) will win the election and the chairperson post will go to a person of her choosing, with the appointment to be confirmed by a vote in the assembly. The governor would be the face of the local administration, the top dog, while the chairperson would be more involved in the day-to-day operation of the city's government.
It's also pretty clear who they have in mind for the chaiperson's spot - Andrei Likhachyov, the chief of local power and heating utility Lenenergo. Likhachyov announced earlier this year that he planned to run for the big job, but then backed off, saying that he would support Matviyenko if she ran. He then offered Matviyenko his own plan for the economic reform of the city, which was drawn up by the Petersburg 2015 entrepreneurs' club, of which Likhachyov is a member. Matviyenko answered that she would definitely be interested in implementing at least part of the plan.
At first glance, the deal seems like a good one, both for SPS and, it seems to me, the city. Likhachyov is an experienced manager who has been the driving force behind promising developments at Lenenergo. Though locked to a certain degree within the larger Unified Energy Systems (UES) family and faced with limited resources, he has opened up accounting procedures, moved the company into placing ADRs on foreign capital markets and generally reshaped the image of the company into that of a modern, rationally run enterprise.
At the same time, getting him elected as governor looks like it would have been a tall order. What many of the changes at Lenenergo, economically rational and necessary as they were, have meant is a rise in the cost of electricity, heat and hot water in St. Petersburg. In a city where the largest block of voters are pensioners with painfully low incomes, it's hard to be popular when you are perceived to be the one behind rising utilities costs.
As Boris Vishnevsky, a local Yabloko member put it in March, the Lenenergo chief is "followed around by a dark shadow" a 300-percent jump in electricity rates over a three-year period when the inflation rate was about 60 percent and the growth in incomes lagging far behind. Hardly the ideal candidate.
So SPS seems to be on the right track in finding a way for a positive force to make its way into the city's government. Basically, they will be making the electable person the figurehead of the city government and an able manager the person responsible for getting things done.
But, if you take a look at the see-sawing relations, for example, between UES chief Anatoly Chubais and the government of President Vladimir Putin (of which Matviyenko is still a member) over the last couple of years, you can see where the whole chicken-counting dilemma arises. Unlike the Russian saying, the autumn may be too soon to count on Likhachyov.
Matviyenko is the Kremlin's candidate, pure and simple. After the last few years of bringing Vladimir Yakovlev to heel, the Kremlin is looking forward to welcoming a governor this fall who is already in its pocket. One more victory for managed democracy and the vertical integration of power.
It's hard to see how Likhachyov, should he also arrive on the Smolny scene, could avoid having his hands tied. It probably wouldn't take long for one of his proposals to run foul of the folks above and for the situation to sour.
By the spring, the accountants for the SPS and the other backers of the city-chairperson plan will likely have to count one less chicken.
TITLE: Swede Icon To Play Festival
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Swedish singer Jay-Jay Johanson, an unlikely combination of a retro crooner and a cutting-edge electronic artist, is arguably the most anticipated participant in the Stereoleto festival.
Phenomenally popular in Russia, Johanson is famous for his melodical, whispering hits, such as "On the Radio," which is rather traditional in structure but almost exclusively uses electronic instruments - a tendency most fully manifested on his most recent album, the 2002 "Antenna."
"My first three albums, and my soundtrack, were basically acoustic, with piano, guitars and a drummer involved," wrote Johanson in an email interview from his home in Stockholm, Sweden last week.
"Only 'Antenna' has been treated totally electronically, without samplers. And I have always played live with my 'acoustic musicians' ... until now."
"Antenna" also saw a radical change in Johanson's image - with cover art reminiscent of David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane." According to Johanson, it was not a deliberate reference.
"Well. I'm not a Bowie fan, but I do like 'Heroes' and 'Ashes to Ashes,' and especially the video for 'Ashes.' But sure, I admire his courage to play with his androgenous features. But no, we were not looking at Bowie for the photoshoot. That picture was just one of many, but maybe the most Bowie-like ... I don't know."
Jay-Jay (his real first name is Jaje) Johanson was born in 1969 in Sweden and grew up in the small city of Skara. According to his official biography, his jazz-enthusiast father put speakers in his crib to play him music by jazz legends such as Chet Baker and Scott Walker.
Now, Johanson admits that Baker was the central influence on his singing style.
"I have always adored Chet Baker. And in some of my teenage years I liked David Sylvian," he wrote.
"But Kraftwerk and Daft Punk have been far more influential ... My dad is a jazz addict and my mum likes Elvis, my older sister ABBA, and my older brother likes the glam thing."
Apart from Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, Johanson's favorite artists include Felix Da Housecat, Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Missy Elliott and Boy George.
In the early 1990s, Johanson, who did a brief stint at a conservatory but got bored and left, studied architecture and contemporary art at a university in Stockholm, while DJing in clubs at night to pay for his studies.
"I have always loved making music, but I never wanted to be a pop-star or anything," he wrote.
"I wanted to work as an art director of a fashion magazine. But it was this record label person who heard some of my songs and forced me into a studio...."
Starting with a more traditional style, Johanson's music has been continually changing. "From more acoustic, to more electronic. And from more depressed, to more positive. From more naïve, to more skilled, I hope..." he wrote.
Despite his success as a singer, Johanson is active in contemporary art, his best known work being "Cosmodrome", a collaboration with French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, which was described as "an enormous 9-minute installation involving a Johanson ambiance and light events generated by a spacecraft control panel."
"Yes, I do art and have exhibitions here and there, now and then," he wrote.
"Cosmodrome was a piece I'm very proud of. And it's now travelling around the world."
Cosmodrome will be on display at the 7th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, which opens on Sept. 17. It has been acquired by the National Contemporary Art Collection and, after the Biennale, will be housed in the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art.
Despite Johanson's current ambitions to break through in the U.S., his popularity there is so far limited to the gay community, according to a recent issue of "Metro Weekly," a magazine for gays and lesbians based in Washington, D.C.
"Every fan is a great fan," wrote Johanson.
"And it has only just begun in the U.S., and yes, the gay community seems to be the first over there to pick it up. Actually I think it was the same in Spain as well..."
Johanson's recorded work includes the albums "Whiskey" (1996), "Tattoo" (1999), "Poison" (2000) and "Antenna" (2002), as well as the soundtrack to the 2000 French comedy "Confusion of Genders" about a bi-sexual attorney.
What is sold at local record shops as Johanson's most recent album "On the Radio" is, in reality, an unauthorized collection compiled by Russian pirates. However, Johanson does plan to release a compilation.
"Well, I write constantly, but it seems that my next release will be a compilation, mostly because of the U.S.A.," he wrote.
"But I am working on new songs, in the same direction as 'Antenna,' but with more drums and less mess."
According to Johanson, his Stereoleto appearance will be "mostly new material: 'Antenna,' of course, just a few old things, and some surprises. And with me on stage there will be just two guys on machines."
Jay-Jay Johanson performs at 11 p.m. on July 26 at Molodyozhny Theater, 114 Nab. Reki Fontanki. For more information, call 315-4919. Links: www.jayjayjohanson.com
TITLE: Finnish Band Rides Lo-Fi Wave
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Aavikko, the lo-fi electronic surf trio from Finland, featuring a live drummer, with the rest of the sounds, including the twanging guitars, coming from two synthesizer players, has been visiting Russia since 2000. One of a new batch of Finnish bands which has started to conquer the rest of Europe and the world, the group will play on the Finnish night of the Stereoleto festival this Saturday.
Aavikko's fans include the U.K.'s legendary radio DJ John Peel, who recorded a session with the band for his Radio One show in 2001.
"We met him after the session, in Sonar," wrote the band's drummer Tomi Leppanen in an e-mail interview last week.
"He is a real gentleman, and always interested in new music. He was in Finland once, and when asked about Finnish music on a mainstream chart program, he only mentioned Aavikko."
Aavikko's members - all of them 26-year olds - are old elementary school friends who have been playing together in different groups for years. "Each new school week there'd be a new name for the band," wrote Leppanen.
As well as Leppanen, Aavikko includes Tomi Kosonen and Paul Staufenbiel, who both play synthesizers, frequently performing guitar parts on them. "It's so hard to tune the guitar and carry it and change the strings..." wrote Leppanen, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek.
Aavikko which means "desert," draws its name from the landscape of Siilinjarvi, the band's home town of 20,000 inhabitants, in the province of Savo, about 450 kilometers, or six hours by train, Northwest of Helsinki.
"[It] had a huge hole full of sand in the center in the beginning of the 1990s, and nobody knew why it was there. Now they've started to plant trees in it. [...] It was chosen as the ugliest town in Finland in the beginning of the 1990s, because of the aavikko in the center."
Aavikko's lo-fi approach had much to do to a lack of proper equipment in their early days. "We started with what we had, like a Yamaha PSR 21 home organ - and the first record was recorded with a mono cassette player," wrote Leppanen.
"But now we think more about what sounds we need. For example, we bought this old Russian synthesizer, a RITM2 - it's so perfect!!"
Apart from surf, Aavikko's sound owes much to electronica, punk, jazz, as well as themes from spaghetti Westerns and 1960s spy thrillers.
Leppanen cited Kraftwerk, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Sun Ra, Goblin, and John Carpenter's horror soundtracks as influences, and mentioned the Hamburg-based experimenter Felix Kubin as one of his favorite current artists. The band collaborated with Kubin in 2001. Leppanen also named the internationally famous Finnish surf band Laika and the Cosmonauts as an early influence on Aavikko.
There is also a certain influence from Eastern European and Slavic pop. Leppanen wrote that the band has drawn on Soviet-era schlagers ("hits") that its members heard when they were little, imported from Italy or Russia.
He is enthusiastic about Zodiac, the early 1980s instrumental disco band from Riga, Latvia, and considers St. Petersburg's lounge act Messer Chups, whom Aavikko met in Germany in 1999, the "best from Russia."
The band, which has released two albums, "Derek!" (1996) and "Multi Muysic" (2002) is now busy on a compilation of its shorter format records, which will also be released in Russia on the Moscow-based Solntse label. The label will also re-release Aavikko's debut for the Russian market.
Finland's pop and rock music had been largely unknown beyond its borders until the 1990s, when such acts as Laika and the Cosmonauts and Jimi Tenor broke through internationally.
"I think that there's been good music in Finland always, but it's been so closely related to Finnish culture that it's been hard to export it," wrote Leppanen.
"Then, in the 1980s, the bands completely forgot Finnish culture and tried to sound 'international,' but, of course, it failed. And now, in the 1990s and 2000s, it seems to be that bands can make a good mixture of 'international' sound and the Finnish sound. And the unity of Europe surely helps in hearing more of these sounds."
Aavikko performs at 11 p.m. on Saturday at the Molodyozhny Theater, 114 Nab. Reki Fontanki. Links: www.aavikko.net
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Tequilajazzz, one of the city's leading alternative acts, will play its annual summer concert at Moloko this Friday. The original date was changed, as the band wanted to take a glimpse at Bjork who will perform at the Ice Palace on Saturday.
"We came to Moloko naturally; first as members of the crowd, and then as performers," says Yevgeny Fyodorov of Tequilajazzz, which has made a tradition of playing at Moloko twice a year, in summer and winter. In 2000, the band released a double CD called "Moloko" that was recorded at its 1999 summer concert at the venue.
"Moloko has a very delicate approach; the people try to follow an independent musical ideology. I doubt that any extreme heavy metal or commercial rapcore will ever get in there," he says. "It's a hippy place, in a good way - just as TaMtAm was a punk place in a good way. It has a little bit of hippy spirit - just at the right level, before it starts to become irritating."
The concert will not feature new songs, however. According to Fyodorov, the band has been touring for the last few months, with concerts in Germany, Iceland and Finland, and has had no time to work on new material.
Moloko is now in the middle of legal proceedings, suing the city property committee. The committee, in turn is suing the club for refusing to leave the basement that it continues to occupy for the remainder of its rental agreement.
According to the management, the club now hopes to remain in its location at least until December.
Meanwhile, the Red Club, located a 10-minute walk from Moloko, will host an all-night Markshcheider Kunst concert and party.
Though normal opening time at the club is 8 p.m., this concert will start at 11 p.m. and will be followed by Afro-Carribean DJ sets from DJ Nguba (a.k.a. Markscheider Kunst's guitar player Vladimir Matushkin) and DJ Yelkashu.
Kunst has signed a contract with EMI recently, but the band's leader Sergei Yefremenko, reached by phone while fishing in the Moscow Oblast this week, did not elaborate.
On Saturday, the venue will host Imposila 2, an all-night improv music festival, but mostly featuring electronic artists, such as EU and Fizzarum - the two acts the local scene is especially proud of for their success abroad. Only the duo of trumpeter Slava Gaivoronsky and double bass player Vladimir Volkov will be providing acoustic improvizations. See gigs for details.
The Stereoleto festival will continue this Saturday with the Finnish night featuring Jimi Tenor and Aavikko, but probably the most anticipated will be the Swedish night, headlined by Jay-Jay Johanson on July 26. See articles, this page.
- By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Bistro Strong on Turkish Delights
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Having a quick but substantial and inexpensive lunch is often something of a problem in St. Petersburg. Very few of the places advertising themselves as bistros really live up to that description and manage to serve decent food in a flash. And, where the food is served fast, your meal is often brought to you only lukewarm, revealing that its not freshly cooked by simply given a bare minimum of micro-waving.
Antalya, a Turkish bistro recently opened on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, serves you fast and doesn't use microwaves. When we entered the bistro on a Friday lunchtime, Antalya looked very busy, its two large rooms being packed, and a horde of waiters and waitresses hustling and bustling between the tables. Considering the high concentration of eateries of various kinds and price level in the near vicinity, it occurred to me that Antalya has managed to build a considerable reputation at a breakneck pace.
Watching one of the chefs prepare a fresh shaverma on the spot, and another working on sizzling vegetables, I breathed a deep sigh of relief, realizing that here, at least, we would be spared the dreaded microwave. It was also a relief to hear real traditional Turkish music in the background, rather than the disco pop of a radio station that is piped into far too many St. Petersburg eateries.
Our waitress explained that we could either order from the bi-lingual menu, or order our dishes direct from the buffet-style counter, taking whatever caught our eye. We took the latter option.
I ordered two half-portions of different Turkish aubergine salads, one being a mild saute mixed with tomatoes and dill, and the other featuring tiny bits of steamed aubergine pulp with herbs. The second of the two salads was particularly delicious and unusual in taste, although you shouldn't judge a book by its cover - when I selected it from the buffet, I assumed it was made up, for the most part, of cucumber, and I was surprised when our waitress explained what it was. The salads, of which there was a broad selection, cost from 45 to 60 rubles ($1.50 to $2) per portion, although you have the option of ordering in half portions.
My dining companion, who is a big fan of beans, ordered a bean salad and chicken salad in cream, though he described the chicken as being fairly tasteless. We couldnít resist ordering a Turkish cheese pizza for 90 rubles ($1.50), which is highly recommendable. Cooked in just 10-12 minutes, the pizza is thin and crispy, and packed with substantial amounts of tender cheese.
We followed this with a portion of chicken shaverma for 110 rubles ($3.6) - delicious juicy chunks of chicken, free of gristle, cartilage or bone, it was a far cry from the cheap shavermas that you can buy at the city's kiosks and where you continually find yourself wondering what exactly you've bitten into. Thankfully, the shaverma wasn't too fatty or greasy either.
My main course - chicken stewed with vegetables - was hardly a disappointment, but it was also nothing special, being a little too free and easy with the oil and salt. My dining companion, struck gold with his mutton shashlyk for 140 rubles ($4.60) - medium-spiced, tender, crispy and not at all overcooked.
None of the dishes we ordered appeared to be more than medium spiced, which probably reflects the venue's attitude. Most of the dishes werenít very oily as well. The service was prompt and polite, although we had to order our desserts twice because our busy waitress lost a copy of the note. The range of desserts to choose from was broad and tempting. The jam roll at 40 rubles ($1.30) was plain and somewhat dry, but the gatsan dibi (a sweet, baked pudding with nuts) for 40 rubles ($1.30) was rich and deliciously moist. Ayva taylasi (quince in syrup and cream) at 40 rubles ($1.30) was a huge success as well.
The food then, and the service, up to this point, had been generally excellent. But as we prepared to leave, things started going down hill at a breakneck pace. Getting an accurate, comprehensible copy of the bill turned out to be an insurmountable task at Anatalya. The first version was a hastily scribbled copy of a note where the only thing that could be made out was the total - 740 rubles - rather than a complete list of what we'd ordered and for how much. Despite several requests and a brief exchange of expletives, neither the waitstaff nor the administrator called in to arbitrate could provide a readable bill. Eventually, the waitstaff said that she was too busy with other customers to make out a proper bill, and the administrator said that this was the kind of bill all customers receive, end of story. We were left hoping that the paper's accountant will be able to digest this scrap of exotic book-keeping.
Antalya Bistro. 14, Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 315-95-36. Open daily, 9.00 a.m. to 11 p.m. Menu in Russian and English. Major credit cards accepted. Lunch for two, with alcohol, 740 rubles ($24.25).
TITLE: Modern Dance Graces Classic Stage
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Is there a recipe for a successful ballet? There might be, if you blend rationality and instinct in the right proportions, according to renowned American-born choreographer John Neumeier, whose internationally acclaimed Hamburg Ballet made a guest performance at the Mariinsky Theater last week. For 60-year-old Neumeier, a tour to St. Petersburg with his company had been a dream for years. "I am the most devoted admirer of Vaslav Nijinsky," he said. "This ballet simply had to be shown here."
Neumeier, who has been the Hamburg Ballet's artistic director since 1973 and has produced nearly 125 productions during his career, spoke with The St. Petersburg Times this week about being a choreographer, intuitively communicating with dancers, and the differences between ballet and cooking.
q: The repertoires of Russian ballet troupes have virtually everything except works by contemporary Russian choreographers today. In your opinion, what kind of artistic environment does there have to be for modern choreographers to be able to emerge in this country?
a: I don't think it is a question of a particular kind of artistic environment. If an artist has something to say, then I would certainly listen. In my opinion, creativity and the creative spirit don't depend that much on environment.
q: In your company, there are people from different countries, cultures and ballet schools. How do you reconcile all of these influences? Did you deliberately make your troupe a melting pot of cultures?
a: In the company, we have people of eighteen or nineteen nationalities, and they come from different places. But more than half of them have been to my school. That means that, for at least two years - in their last, very important years - they are watching my company performing and even working with the company.
I have always been interested in individuals, I didn't want everyone in the troupe to look exactly the same, to resemble one another. Each nationality, or rather, each individual, brings a lot to the company.
q: How do you put your company together? Are you rational, merely looking for people with certain qualities and capabilities, or is it more of an emotional choice, with you taking the dancers that have touched your heart?
a: It is rational in the sense that I see a student in a school, and then they have an audition, where they must do a classical class to show what their basis is. I believe that classical training gives them the freedom to do what they want to do on stage and what I want them to do. The next step is an audition for the company and performances of some of our repertoire. Here I must see if they can move in another way, different from that of the 19th century; can they think in a modern way. When they try, I ask myself 'Am I interested, or do they look as if they were waiting for a bus?' The steps that are way too familiar to me must look as if I have never seen them before.
q: What do Russian dancers bring into your troupe?
a: When I choose dancers, I don't look at their passports. Sometimes I think that someone is Russian, and he turns out to be Ukrainian or Armenian. I am interested in what I see, and not in the nationality or passport issues. Every dancer has a bright individuality, and I really can't divide them into groups, whether it be by nationality or anything else.
q: You staged three ballets at the Mariinsky Theater two years ago. Looking back, what do you feel about that experience? Would you like to repeat it?
a: It was one of the most important events in my life. I am very conscious and respectful of tradition. Our understanding of modern dance in the West was influenced by the developments in Russia.
And my absolute devotion to Vaslav Nijinsky also played a role. All that made my coming here incredibly important. If you think about it, no other foreign choreographer has staged anything at the Mariinsky specifically since [19th century French choreographer] Marius Petipa.
For me, the most rewarding thing in my profession is the contact with the dancers. I make them move in a different way, and try, in a way, to bring them into the 21st Century. I talk to the young dancers about their profession, and explain that their work needs to evolve from the same old 19th-Century-style movements. They should be able to talk about their own lives, feelings and emotions through the dance.
That was very hard to do in the Mariinsky. It is such a big company, and there were always problems organizing rehearsals, getting all of the dancers together, etc.
My own working environment is very organized and dedicated, and so the somewhat chaotic Mariinsky was quite a departure from what I am used to. A lot of my energy had to be spent on just bringing people together. But that wasn't the most important thing. I have designed a ballet [The Sounds of Empty Pages, set to the music of Alfred Schnittke] for this company, and my parental feelings by far overwhelm the managerial disappointments. So, as I am back here, I think I could work here again. I know it would be difficult, but I didn't close the door.
q: How much verbal communication is there between you and your dancers, for instance, during the rehearsals?
a: Not much at all. And certainly not in the process of creating, of showing them the movements. It has to be intuitive. You can't describe it first and then do it.
The dancers have to sense the emotions. They have to do it first, and then describe what they feel or think. Otherwise it would be as predictable as baking a cake: you read a cookbook, put sugar, flour all the ingredients together, blend them, and get the taste you expect.
We talk amazingly little. In fact, we only have a proper conversation when the work is finished, when I have done the choreography. If I try to draw a scheme, it would look like "rationality-instinct-rationality". In that order only. Rationality is preparation. Instinct is important for understanding the choreography, when you need to plunge yourself into it. Then you can talk about it and analyze what you've done.
q: Do you make changes to the ballets you created some time ago, or do you prefer to keep them in their original version?
a: I always make changes with time. If I perceived my ballets like an artist perceives his paintings - once he finishes his work, he doesn't touch the painting anymore - I wouldn't be interested in staying in the same place with the same company for thirty years.
It's crucial to be awake, to be critical of your work as long as you are alive. I watch nearly every performance of my company, and when I feel a ballet needs a change, I make the change.
A ballet repertoire is not a collection of antiques. It is a breathing art of the present day.
When we perform one of my old ballets, it should still be resonant and in tune with today's life.
When I choreograph a ballet, my inspiration is always an emotion. That emotion can be a reaction to a work of literature, or music, or something personal. I have staged about a hundred and twenty five pieces, and they change all the time. Sometimes, I try to find the drama within the music, and sometimes I use an existing plot, like, for instance, in "The Seagull."
q: Do you believe that being a choreographer is a profession that one can teach or learn?
a: No. Creativity is something one can't learn. You can learn the rational element, like a certain variety of movements, for example, or by reading about the subject of your ballet, or just knowing that it would be nice to have a climax somewhere.
For instance, if I am staging "The Seagull", I read a lot about Chekhov and his time, but it doesn't really help me to make a better ballet. It only creates a structure, which makes my work easier.
But when I create, it is just me, the studio, the piano or tape-recorder, and the dancers. And nobody can help me there. I don't think about what Chekhov would have said or how he would advise me. The ballet should reflect the choreographer's own feelings for the characters - if he has them.
TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Vostok-delo tonkoye: the East is a shifty business; used jokingly or half-jokingly to describe the complexities of Eastern cultures for a Westerner.
Run, don't walk, to your local video kiosk and grab a copy of the film "Beloye Solntse Pustyni" ("White Sun of the Desert"). Settle in for an utterly satisfying two hours of East meets West, Bad Guys vs. Good Guys, all laced with Soviet kitsch. And get out your notebook to jot down some phrases that Russians use all the time without knowing where they came from.
The film takes place during the first years of Soviet power, in the desert by the Caspian Sea. Sukhov, a Red Army officer longing for home, is tasked with escorting the many wives of the warlord Abdullah to safety. Vostok - delo tonkoye (the East is a shifty business) comes out of this film, and is used any time you want to express a Westerner's awe of the purported Byzantine complexities of Eastern cultures, i.e. any culture that you don't understand. The phrase can also be used as a joke when there is nothing complex about the Eastern behavior at all: On ubil vsekh i naznachil sebya prezidentom. Vostok - delo tonkoye (He killed everyone and named himself president. The East is a shifty business.)
The wives of Abdullah don't understand that they are now free citizens, despite Sukhov's attempts to bring them into the fold of revolutionary reality. He puts up a sign for the women's quarters with the slogan: Doloi predrassudki! Zhenshchina - ona tozhe chelovek. (Down with prejudices! A woman is a person, too.) Abdullah's wives, however, think that they have simply been transferred to another husband, and when Sukhov names one "starshaya po obshchezhitiyu" (head of the dormitory, literally "elder of the dormitory") she cries delightedly, "Gospodin naznachil menya lyubimoi zhenoi!" (The master named me most beloved wife!) All these expressions are used jokingly by Russians, so you shouldn't be surprised if you hear that your project manager is starshaya po obshchezhitiyu or lyubimaya zhena.
Za derzhavu obidno (it makes you ashamed of your homeland) is one of my favorite phrases, which, alas, I have occasion to use more often than I'd like. You can use it when you witness behavior not befitting a great power (of the many words for homeland in Russian, derzhava has the sense of "power," as in velikaya derzhava - Great Power). Ty videl, kak podralis vchera v Dume? Ei-bogu! Za derzhavu obidno. (Did you see how they got in a fistfight yesterday in the Duma? Honest to God! It makes you ashamed of your homeland.)
You might be baffled, when you are discussing a business deal, to hear Tamozhnya dayot dobro. (The customs service gives their OK.) This is used jokingly whenever a power-on-high gives the OK for something, be it the local registration chamber or the president of a company.
And then there are other little phrases from the movie that have entered Russian conversational speech. Voprosi yest? Voprosov net! (Any questions? No questions!) These two sentences are a good thing to say at the end of your staff meeting when you want to avoid a discussion.
Finally, when you have made a blunder, or when you've made a drunken nuisance of yourself, or when you've had an acrimonious meeting, say as you're leaving, Izvini, esli shto-to ne tak. (Sorry if something wasn't right.) Everyone will laugh and forgive you.
And when you say it, thank Sukhov for getting yet another poor soul out of a tricky situation.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator.
TITLE: Making Up for a Fort Failure
AUTHOR: By Arina Birstein
TEXT: It's time again for St. Petersburg's annual island rave - so put together your wackiest clubbing outfit and prepare for FortDance.
The massive open-air rave, held for the fourth year in a row on Saturday, July 26 on the island of Kronshtadt in the Gulf of Finland, differs from the other summertime raves that take place on the island in that it is organized by exclusive Moscow club Zeppelin. And, although last year's FortDance was rife with organizational snafus, this year's promises smoother sailing for the several thousand guests expected to attend.
While the site of the three previous FortDance raves, the Alexander I fort at the historic Kronshtadt naval base, is large enough to hold 10,000 partygoers, this Saturday will see a first-ever opening of a mainland dance area in addition to the one on the island at the Alexander. On solid ground, Zeppelin introduces the Konstantin Fort, three times the size of the Alexander - and a good thing, too. Organizers are estimating crowds will reach 30,000.
Measures have been taken to avoid the kind of debacle that occurred last year - when organizers failed to provide enough boats to ferry partygoers to the fort and angry people filled the pier to bursting - including hiring logistics consultant Toto Darch, whose job it is to attend to the kind of details in which the devil lurked last year.
"The boats were overcrowded and some people jumped in the water to get to the arena," Darch said. "But, even if there had been enough boats, the dancefloor could not have held all the people who wanted to get to it. It's a miracle nothing bad happened."
In addition to a laser show and an appearance by MTV Europe's VJ Kriel, who has designed video accompaniment to the music at some of the world's premiere raves, this year's FortDance features a roster of both Zeppelin residents and internationally known DJs, including former Prodigy member and beats & breaks maestro DJ Leeroy Thornhill; British trance duo The Thrillseekers; BBC radio personality and the so-called "Queen of Ibiza" DJ Lottie; legendary Frankfurt DJ Mark Spoon, half of the duo Jam and Spoon, which has sold in excess of 5 million dance-music albums worldwide; and Montreal's DJ Tiga, whose latest hit "Sunglasses at Night" brought electro back to the dancefloors this season.
Several types of tickets are available, depending on how much you want to spend and how much of the rave you'd like to see. Access to the mainland dancefloor alone costs just $10 and includes transportation from the Chyornaya Rechka metro station, where the party starts at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
VIP tickets cost $50 and include admission to both the mainland arena and the island dance floors, boat passage to the island, parking and a welcome drink upon arrival. For another $50, you can purchase a Deluxe ticket that gives access to a chill-out room and bar.
Tickets can be bought at Titanic, Iceberg, Kinomir and Saigon shops, or ordered in advance on Tel.: (095) 207 207-4305/2392.
The show starts at 3 p.m. on Saturday at the main arena (the Konstantin Fort). Guests who arrive early will automatically be entered to win one of 50 VIP tickets.
Passage to the rave is from Chyornaya Rechka metro station. Shuttle buses and boats will be available from there to take partygoers to the island.
FORTDANCE SCHEDULE
MAIN ARENA (KONSTANTIN FORT)
3 p.m. Norma (live electronic performance, Russia)
3:30 p.m. DJ Pushkin (Russia, deep progressive)
5 p.m. DJ Air (Russia, progressive & jungle)
6:30 p.m. DJ Jeremy Healy (Britain, progressive)
8:30 p.m. DJ Natarcia (Holland, funky house)
10 p.m. Radiotrance (Russia, trance)
10:30 p.m. DJ Compass Vrubel (Russia, techno hard house)
Midnight DJ Leeroy Thornhill (Britain, beats and breaks)
2 a.m. DJ Mark Spoon (Germany, techno progressive)
4 a.m. The Thrillseekers (Britain, trance)
6 a.m. Above and Beyond (Britain, trance)
8 a.m. DJs Fox & User (Russia, house)
ZEPPELIN ARENA (ALEXANDER FORT)
9 p.m. More Spokoistvia (live electronic performance, Russia)
10 p.m. DJ Fish (Russia, hard house)
11:30 p.m. DJ Jeff (Russia, disco house)
1 a.m. DJ Lottie (Britain, techno house)
2 a.m. VJ Kriel (Holland, three hour video set)
3 a.m. DJ Sander Kleinberg (Holland, ambient & trance)
5 a.m. DJ Rudyk (Russia, disco house & progressive)
7 a.m. DJ Daniele Davoli (Italy, house)
DELUXE ARENA
11 p.m. DJ Ogjo (Russia, garage & house)
1 a.m. DJ Panin (Russia, house)
3 a.m. DJ Tiga (Canada, electro)
05.00 DJ Shushukin (Russia, progressive & pumping)
TITLE: Counting the Tragic Cost of the Camps
AUTHOR: By STEVEN MERRITT MINER
TEXT: NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
In the introduction to this book, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, ponders why the Soviet and Nazi regimes are treated so differently in the popular imagination. Young people who would never purchase Nazi regalia think nothing of sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle. Yet, as Applebaum shows, the Soviet killing machine was certainly equal to its Nazi counterpart. Wisely, she avoids wandering into the muck of comparing the two totalitarian terror apparatus to decide which was worse, but she argues that ''at a very deep level, the two systems are related.''
Ever since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his magisterial three-volume history of the Soviet concentration-camp network, ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' in the early 1970's, the grim details of life in what he called the Soviet sewage system have been well known. From arrest by the Soviet secret police through interrogation, to deportation and hard labor, the life-and-death cycle of the gulag is a familiar story. Other witnesses, like Varlam Shalamov and Evgeniya Ginzburg, have also brilliantly described prisoners' constant struggle against hunger, cold and disease. So a great deal of what Applebaum writes about in ''Gulag: A History'' has been told before.
But that does not lessen her achievement. When Solzhenitsyn's volumes first appeared they had an enormous impact. Yet he soon fell from favor, dismissed by some as an anti-Communist crank, by others as a nationalist anti-Semite. As documents from the Soviet archives have now shown, much of this defamation campaign was financed and encouraged by the K.G.B. But the attacks had their effect: a group of so-called revisionist historians, who dominated the study of the Stalin years in the United States and Britain during the 1980's, waged a war against the portrayal of the Soviet Union by Solzhenitsyn and other anti-Soviet memoirists.
Instead of the slave empire, these historians stressed the country's rapid economic development and urbanization under Stalin, which supposedly fostered widespread support for the regime. None questioned the existence of the gulag. Rather, they minimized its place in Soviet life and denied that the population as a whole was ever terrorized.
Applebaum's book weighs in heavily in support of Solzhenitsyn on almost every point, and her account is backed not only by a careful use of the vast memoir literature but also by a thorough mining of the long-closed Soviet archives. Most important, she supports Solzhenitsyn's central argument: that the gulag was not some incidental Stalinist accretion to Lenin's visionary concept of Socialism. The cancer of police terror was embedded in the original DNA of Lenin's creation, ''an integral part of the Soviet system,'' in Applebaum's words. Under Lenin, the first concentration camps were created; the first mass executions were carried out. He bequeathed to his successor a well-functioning police state.
Applebaum estimates that from 1929 through 1953 - the years of high Stalinism - more than 18 million people coursed through the camps, with a further six million being exiled to remote regions of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these people were guilty of nothing. An Orwellian logic underlay the whole enterprise. As one police investigator explained to his victim: ''We never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren't guilty, we can't release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people.''
Particularly useful is Applebaum's account of the camps during World War II. It was precisely at this time that the system reached its peak of lethality. Fully a quarter of the inmates perished during 1942, but the appetite of the security forces was so insatiable that the gulag's population dropped less than 20 percent. Following the war, whole new categories of inmates flooded into the camps: German P.O.W.'s, anti-Communists from the western borderlands or from the new Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Little known in the West, some 600,000 Japanese troops fell into Soviet hands, forced to labor for years after the cessation of hostilities; only a fraction ever returned home. Stalin also punished with deportation entire nationalities - Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars notably - ostensibly for collaboration with the Nazis but, in fact, Applebaum argues persuasively, to eliminate nationalist resistance to Moscow.
One great difference distinguished the Soviet and German systems: there was no Soviet equivalent of the death camps. People sentenced to death in the Soviet Union were generally shot before entering the camp network. Applebaum estimates these victims at just under one million during the Stalin years. Instead, Soviet prisoners were expected to earn their keep by contributing to the creation of Soviet Socialism. They worked for the most part in harsh areas to which free labor could never be enticed. By the outbreak of war in 1941, the gulag was the single largest employer in the world.
Yet the Soviets never managed to make it pay for itself. Leon Trotsky had once defiantly stated that it was ''the worst sort of bourgeois prejudice'' to call slave labor inefficient; such labor could contribute mightily to the growth of the Soviet economy. Lenin believed him, as did Stalin - with even greater zeal.
Defenders of the Soviet system have all too often played Stalin's game, excusing - or, rather, ''explaining'' - the gulag as a direct descendant of the czarist Siberian exile system. But Applebaum's numbers tell their own story: on the eve of the 1917 revolution, under the czar, only 28,600 convicts were serving sentences of hard labor, compared with the millions committed to the gulag under Lenin and Stalin. At some point numbers matter; quantity becomes quality. It is simply wrong to maintain that the gulag was nothing more than a modernized version of its czarist predecessor.
In the end, bourgeois economic realities defeated Bolshevik will and ruthlessness. Projects created with slave labor proved to be shoddily built and inefficient. One notable Stalinist showpiece, the White Sea canal, was designed to allow warships and commercial vessels to pass between the Baltic and the White Seas. Perhaps 25,000 people died digging this canal, yet despite the enormous human cost the canal was too narrow for warships; only shallow draft boats could navigate its course. Touted at the time as one of the great achievements of Stalinist planning, it stands instead as proof of its titanic moral and economic failure.
Applebaum gives due consideration to the post-Stalin years of the gulag and to the way the memory of this vast crime against humanity has played out since the Soviet Union's collapse. Following Stalin's death in 1953, the Gulag system persisted and, though it wound down dramatically during Khrushchev's thaw, did not finally disappear until well into the Gorbachev years. A brave but small band of Russians, notably the organization Memorial, commemorates the victims of the gulag. But most of their countrymen seem uninterested. The revelations about the crimes of the Stalin era have all come too late, and life today in the former Soviet Union is so hard.
Significantly, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions. Many of the mass graves have been unearthed, but these attract little notice in Russia and scarcely more than a paragraph in Western newspapers. Irreconcilable versions of the past contend for the current Russian soul. An astonishing number of Russians - perhaps as many as 15 or 20 percent - reject Memorial's documentation of the terror and view Stalin as a positive historical figure. Applebaum cites Russians saying that the gulag was somehow a historical necessity; that without it Russia could never have tapped the vast resources of the Far East.
Most worrisome, Russia's current leader is a product of the unrepentant and largely unreformed F.S.B., successor to the K.G.B. The talk in Moscow is of restoring the statue of Dzerzhinsky - the first head of the secret police, and a man who can justly be called the Patriarch of the Gulag - to its place in Lubyanka Square, right in front of the headquarters where so many innocent Soviets were swept into Solzhenitsyn's sewer system. This would be a historical obscenity. It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum's tautly written and very damning history. Even more fervently, one hopes that it will soon be translated into Russian.
Steven Merritt Miner, a professor of history at Ohio University, is the author of ''Stalin's Holy War.''
GULAG A History.
By Anne Applebaum.
Illustrated. 677 pp. New York: Doubleday. $35.
TITLE: '2 Fast, 2 Furious,' Running on Empty
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: My hand trembles slightly as I type these words, but the truth is that while watching "2 Fast 2 Furious," the follow-up to the pleasurably cheap-thrills sleeper of two years ago, "The Fast and the Furious," I realized just how much I miss Vin Diesel.
The colossus whose Hemi-engine voice roared through the "The Fast and the Furious" like a 1969 Charger and whose absence hangs over its sequel like stale exhaust, the aptly named Diesel was the first film's Neanderthal Hamlet, a tire-iron giant gently soiled by axle grease and filial anguish. The new movie arrives without its original star, director and writers, a triple whammy that is, loosely speaking, akin to a second "Godfather" movie minus Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, never mind Robert De Niro. In place of Diesel, who had been flanked by pouty tomboy Michelle Rodriguez, doe-eyed Jordana Brewster and steely Rick Yune, the sequel offers up just two familiar faces, character actor Thom Barry as an FBI agent and, pale, pretty Paul Walker as former Los Angeles cop Brian O'Conner.
An actor for whom the word "whaddup" will never be first, second or even third nature, Walker had been designated the first movie's star and indeed received top billing, but ended up choking on his co-star's churning dust, playing Ice Man to Diesel's Top Gun. The Ice Man cometh once again, roaring into "2 Fast 2 Furious" in a silvery Nissan Skyline GTR that spits fire like a baby dragon and has a spoiler large enough to hang the wash. Now kicking it in Miami, the ex-cop earns his keep hot-wheeling against locals such as Suki (Devon Aoki), an anime cartoon come barely to life whose cotton candy-hue S2000 Honda and poignantly awkward line readings vividly bring to mind the intestinal pink of this city's most famous Corvette and its driver, Angelyne.
O'Conner may be the kind of guy who unabashedly wears shirts embroidered with his name, and he may sport black Converse sneakers when he puts the pedal to the metal, but he knows how to soul-shake the hand of Miami's No. 1 street-car impresario, Tej (musician Chris "Ludacris" Bridges). In other words, he may be white, but he's also down - or as down as a blond, blue-eyed dude from California without visible tattoos, a guitar or a contract with an East Coast publisher can be. Despite getting the LAPD boot, the onetime undercover brother also retains enough credibility with the FBI to get pulled into yet another high-stakes covert operation, this time involving money launderer Carter Verone (Cole Hauser).
As written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, and as directed with characteristic crudeness by John Singleton ("Shaft," 2000), the story tracks how O'Conner infiltrates Verone's lair along the usual script lines, with the help of the usual action-movie suspects. Riding shotgun with O'Conner is the righteously angry yet lionhearted former convict Roman "Rom" Pearce (singer Tyrese); riding his tail are the hostile and inevitably inept FBI agents (led by James Remar). Then there's the requisite hot government babe, Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes), who's sleeping with the enemy for duty and designer threads but is mostly on hand to resolve which way the blandly asexual O'Conner likes to downshift.
An ode to Los Angeles street-car racing and the beautiful kids who race, "The Fast and the Furious" became an easy guilty pleasure with little more than fast cars, young flesh and lean-to-the-bone storytelling. Punctuated by the sort of throbbing beats that suggest all the carnal interplay that can never occur when a movie earns a PG-13 rating, the original was feverishly serious and hopelessly goofy, as well as B-movie modest from start to finish. At center was the relationship between the Diesel and Walker characters and the ways in which men bond, although more critical to the film's success was the multiracial, multicultural utopia represented by Diesel's crew, as gorgeously hued as all those candy-colored cars.
Diesel's appeal, which becomes less evident with each new endeavor, was in the brutal poetry of that gravel-pit voice wedded to a presence whose mysteries - is he black, white, Latino, Samoan or some fusion of all of the above? - pointed to a new model of post-Schwarzenegger masculinity. But that's so two years ago, and "2 Fast 2 Furious" is nothing if not representative of a new, distinctly less hopeful world. Instead of the multi-everything family that races, parties and thieves together, Singleton unleashes spasms of sadism and innumerable leering shots of girls gone wild, albeit - alas - not behind the wheel. (The races, meanwhile, have all the zip of a can of motor oil.) More tellingly, in place of Diesel, Singleton offers up the wan visage of Walker, who, having again received top billing, again barely registers, despite his best attempts to walk the walk and talk the talk.
It probably wasn't lost on everyone involved with the new movie that only one star emerged from "The Fast and the Furious," and his name wasn't Paul Walker. That may have been tough on the young actor, a nice enough addition to movies like "Pleasantville" (1998), but it seems to have produced a mildly fascinating effect on the makers of "2 Fast 2 Furious," specifically in the effort to turn Walker into the least-white white guy around. It isn't just the sight of Walker trying to chill alongside the no-sweat cool of Tyrese or the sound of his newly deepened voice, once a sturdy alto next to Diesel's basso profundo, that betrays the film's racial anxiety. No, it's all the times the poor guy is forced to say "bro" as if it were a magical initiation into the hip hop brotherhood. The moviemakers wanted diesel, but this star runs strictly on unleaded.
"2 Fast 2 Furious" is showing at various cinemas. See Screens for details.
TITLE: Koreas Exchange Gunfire Over Tense Border
AUTHOR: By Christopher Torchia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - South and North Korean soldiers briefly traded machine-gun fire in their border zone on Thursday, raising tensions even as Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed optimism about diplomatic efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff.
The South Korean military said it did not suffer casualties in the shooting between two guard posts a half mile apart in the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, the buffer created at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War to keep opposing armies apart.
There was no comment from North Korea on the exchange.
South Korean military officials said that the North Koreans shot first. The South was investigating whether the shooting was inadvertent or a scheme to rattle nerves, possibly to gain leverage in the dispute over the North's suspected development of nuclear weapons.
"We need to clarify whether it's intentional or accidental before we can say anything about its impact on the nuclear issue," said Lee Jihyun, a spokesperson for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun.
A team from the U.S.-led United Nations Command, which oversees the southern half of the DMZ, inspected the site of the shooting near the South Korean town of Yonchon, 55 kilometers north of Seoul. The Pentagon said that it was aware of the incident, but had no comment.
Decades ago, shooting incidents were commonplace along the DMZ, but they have tapered off in recent years. The last exchange of fire in the DMZ, in November 2001, caused no casualties. A naval battle between ships from the two Koreas in June 2002 killed six South Koreans and an unknown number from the North.
Negotiations have generally moved forward despite such violence.
A Chinese envoy visited North Korea this past week to discuss efforts to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully, and Powell said in Washington on Wednesday that he talked to Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing about the trip.
"So the diplomatic track is alive and well and I expect to see some developments along that track in the very near future," Powell told reporters.
The United States "is still hopeful of a diplomatic solution," he said.
Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, said that North Korea was open to a China-proposed format for talks on the nuclear issue, and negotiations could occur as early as next month if the United States agrees.
China plans to send an envoy to the United States by this weekend to propose three-way talks with North Korea in Beijing, said Yonhap, citing an unnamed South Korean government official. The arrangement would include a followup, U.S.-proposed meeting in which South Korea and Japan would also take part, the agency said.
China, a key player in the dispute because of its close ties to its communist neighbor, hosted talks with U.S. and North Korean officials in April. Efforts to stage more talks have stumbled over North Korea's demand for one-on-one talks with the United States, which wants other countries to be involved.
North Korea recently said it might consider U.S. demands for multilateral talks if it could also meet one-on-one with the United States.
The shootout began at 6:10 a.m. when North Korean soldiers fired four rounds, and South Korean soldiers fired 17 rounds from a K-3 machine gun one minute later, said Major Lee of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, who refused to give his first name. Three of the North Korean bullets hit the wall of a South Korean guard post.
The South Koreans then issued a loudspeaker broadcast, telling the North Koreans that they were in "clear violation" of the armistice that ended the Korean War.
"Immediately stop the provocation," said the broadcast.
The shootout occurred on the 55th anniversary of the enactment of South Korea's 1948 Constitution. Advancing U.S. and Soviet forces divided the Korean Peninsula after the capitulation of Japanese colonial forces at the end of World War II.
TITLE: Television Airs Tape of Criticism By Hussein
AUTHOR: By PAUL HAVEN
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD - A purported recording of Saddam Hussein was played on Arabic television on Thursday - the anniversary of the revolution that brought the former leader's party to power - with the ex-dictator criticizing the new Governing Council and calling U.S. President George W. Bush a liar.
The voice in the broadcast tape called for resistance to the U.S. occupation.
"How can the people benefit from employees named by the foreign occupiers," the taped voice said on the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya television networks. "What can those named by the foreign occupier offer to the people other than the will of the occupier."
The tape, which reporters familiar with Hussein's voice said sounded authentic, appeared to be new, since the Governing Council was established on Sunday. But there was no way to authenticate the recording independently or to be sure of when it was made.
U.S. forces in Baghdad were on the lookout for new trouble related to the anniversary of the 1968 Baathist revolution but, by mid-afternoon, there were no reports of violence involving U.S. troops, and American patrols in the capital had noticeably dropped off.
Streets normally filled with American Humvees and tanks were strangely quiet, perhaps part of an effort to avoid confrontation. The U.S. military said it was treating the day like any other.
About the only thing on Baghdad's streets on Thursday were rumors: One that Hussein would make some sort of personal appearance after weeks in hiding, and the other that he had finally been captured by U.S. forces. There was no evidence that either rumor was true.
The 1968 coup led to Hussein taking power 11 years later. Iraq's new Governing Council, in its first act Sunday, swept aside the July 17 celebration and five other dates the Baath Party designated as official holidays.
The Pentagon's second-in-command was in Baghdad on Thursday to assess progress in rebuilding the country.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was meeting with the top American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. commander of the approximately 160,000 American and coalition personnel in Iraq.
"I look forward to seeing firsthand evidence of what it means for the Iraqi people to be liberated from decades of brutal repression," Wolfowitz said after stepping off an Air Force C-17 cargo plane following a 12-hour overnight flight from Washington.
The speaker on the tape played Thursday lashed out at Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, saying they tricked their people to justify the war.
"What will they say to their people and to mankind? What will the chorus of lies say to those that backed them?" said the voice. "What will they say to the world after they devised the scenario of lies against Iraq's people, leadership and culture?"
"The lies were known to the U.S. president and the British prime minister when they decided to launch a war and aggression," said the tape.
Bush and Blair have come under increasing criticism at home over some of the intelligence used in the run-up to the war.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Crossing Danger
MONROVIA, Liberia (Reuters) - Liberian rebels advanced to a road junction used as a springboard for previous attacks on the capital, heightening fears of a third assault on the city in two months, military sources said on Thursday.
Rebels and government forces clashed at the junction north of Monrovia on Wednesday, eroding a shaky truce and underscoring the risk of more of the fighting which killed hundreds in the coastal city last month.
Military sources said that the junction at Klay, 35 kilometers north of Monrovia, had fallen to the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), but Defense Minister Daniel Chea said military activity was continuing in the area.
Chea said that it was unclear whether LURD planned to launch a new assault on Monrovia, whether they wanted to grab land before cease-fire monitors arrive or whether they needed the junction to bring supplies from neighboring Sierra Leone.
Job Done
SAO TOME, Sao Tome and Principe (AP) - The leader of a military coup in this tiny West African country promised Thursday to call elections and said he did not want to stay in power, while regional powerhouse Nigeria intervened to mediate the crisis.
Major Fernando Pereira, an artillery officer, told Portuguese state radio Radiodifusao Portuguesa that his troops - who detained the prime minister and other officials during Wednesday's coup - acted to save the impoverished country from social and economic decline.
"We achieved our objective by taking over," Pereira told the Lisbon, Portugal-based radio station by phone. "Now we have to set up a provisional government and... create the conditions for free elections. We don't want power."
Sao Tome, one of Africa's smallest and poorest countries, has high hopes for wealth after the discovery of oil reserves in its waters in the Gulf of Guinea.
Birthday Wishes
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Tributes from around the globe poured in for Nelson Mandela on Thursday, one day before South Africa's anti-apartheid icon celebrates his 85th birthday.
"It's a national day of celebration," said President Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela in 1999. "All of us as a country are indeed very blessed that we have somebody like him."
Mandela received birthday wishes from former Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others at his Johannesburg office, where he was presented with a book compiling tributes along with some of his best-known speeches.
"I never imagined I would still be treated the way you are treating me," said Mandela, who won the Nobel prize for guiding South Africa from whites-only rule to multi-racial democracy in 1994. "I have lost office, I have lost influence, I am now a has-been and that's the way I want to be treated."
TITLE: Surprise Winner in Russian Duo
AUTHOR: By Ciaran Giles
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BARCELONA, Spain - Russian Alexander Dobroskok fulfilled a dream on Tuesday.
"I still can't believe I have won," said Dobroskok, who took gold in the men's 3-meter springboard and watched as friend and teammate Dmitry Sautin took only bronze.
"Sautin is the greatest of all of us. I cannot believe that I am the winner."
Dobroskok scored 788.37 points while China's Peng Bo took the silver with 780.84. Sautin, who led through five of the final six dives, erred in his final effort and settled for bronze with 776.64.
Dobroskok and Sautin won a gold together in the 3-meter synchronized springboard on the first day of the championships on Sunday.
He became the first with two gold medals after only three days of the World Swimming Championships.
Considered the world's top diver, Sautin led the morning preliminaries and was ahead after the semifinals.
In the six-dive final, Sautin led Dobroskok and Peng from the start, scoring 93.00, 77.52, 98.70, 80.10, 90.00. But Dobroskok scored 103.95 on his final 2 1/2 somersault, 1 1/2 twist to reach 788.37.
Sautin did a 1 1/2 somersault, 3 1/2 twist but scored only 81.18 to lose both the gold and silver.
"As you have seen, I failed to make a good entry on my last dive and without a good entry you can't get a good result," Sautin said.
He didn't seem upset.
"Sports is sports and life is life. It so happened that I made a mistake ... It can happen," he said smiling.
Prior to these championships, Sautin had won 19 medals - 10 of them golds - in the Olympic Games, World Championships and World Cups.
His most prized medal is the 1996 Olympic gold in the 10-meter platform in Atlanta.
This was the best moment of Dobroskok's career.
"I have always dreamed of competing with Dmitry and sometimes I thought that I might be the winner but I didn't expect it to happen," he said.
"For me, it is the most prestigious win. We were silver medalists in the 3-meter down in Sydney but for me, world champion is the best."
Sautin dismissed suggestions that the win might affect their friendship.
"We are very good friends since the very beginning and we will remain the same," Sautin said.
Peng, for his part, had hoped for more.
"I am happy with the results but it was a pity because my goal here was to be the world champion," he said.
Fellow Chinese diver Wang Tianling finished fourth with 745.35, while American Troy Dumais was fifth with 706.08.
All 12 finalists qualify automatically for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.
TITLE: Anderson Grabs Unwelcome Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Ronald Blum
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO - Garret Anderson came to Chicago this week as the quiet cog that propels the Anaheim Angels. He left with a national reputation as a home run hitter.
One night after his surprise win in the Home Run Derby, Anderson started the American League comeback with a two-run homer and was voted the first Ted Williams Most Valuable Player of the All-Star game after getting three hits in a 7-6 victory.
"It's been a good year, and this year's not over yet," he said.
Anderson's been somewhat of a secret on the national stage, not even making an All-Star team until last year. But his teammates on the Angels know what they have. They voted him their MVP last year for the third time in four seasons.
"I think all of southern California has known Garret for a long time," said Mike Scioscia, the American League and Anaheim manager.
But when the cameras are turned on and the microphones appear, Anderson would rather disappear. That's becoming an increasingly tougher task.
"I think whether Garret likes it or not, he's on that stage now," Scioscia said. "He's not comfortable with it. He's not flamboyant at all, he's not a showboat." Of course, most fans know a lot more about the Angels now, nine months after the franchise's first World Series title. But when it was time for the big postseason honors last year, Adam Kennedy and Troy Glaus walked off with series MVP awards, not Anderson.
"I think they're starting to understand Garret's talent and starting to see it," said Scioscia, who counts Anderson among the top five players in the sport. Anderson, 31, had what might have been the biggest hit in Angels' history, a three-run double off San Francisco's Livan Hernandez that put Anaheim ahead 4-1 in Game 7 of the World Series.
On Monday, Anderson beat the St. Louis Cardinals' Albert Pujols 9-8 in the finals of the Home Run Derby.
"Yesterday was more of an exhibition, to put on a show for the fans," Anderson said. "Today, it was going back to playing baseball and doing the things that I'm capable of doing."
He's capable of quite a lot.
Starting in left field because of an injury to Boston's Manny Ramirez, Anderson struck out against Jason Schmidt in his first at-bat and singled off Kerry Wood in the fourth. With the A.L. trailing 5-1 in the sixth, Anderson hit a two-run homer off Woody Williams.
Then, with the A.L. down 6-4 in the eighth, his one-out double off Eric Gagne started the go-ahead rally. Melvin Mora ran for Anderson, who went back to the dugout. When Hank Blalock delivered the pinch-hit homer that put the A.L. ahead for good, the usually subdued Anderson pumped his arms.
For him, that's a big reaction.
"That is what is exciting about the game, never knowing what is going to happen," Anderson said. "To do it in that fashion, it definitely was very exciting."
TITLE: SPORT WATCH
TEXT: Crossing Town
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Yankees began gearing up for another run at the post-season by acquiring right-handed pitcher Armando Benitez from the New York Mets Wednesday.
The Mets dealt Benitez for right-handed pitchers Jason Anderson, Anderson Garcia and Ryan Bicondoa. The Yankees expect to use the 30-year-old as a set-up man for Mariano Rivera out of the bullpen.
"With the addition of Armando, we addressed the need for a proven power arm at the back end of the bullpen," said Yankees general manager Brian Cashman in a statement.
"We are excited to add Armando because we believe he will help solidify the bridge between our starters and Mariano Rivera."
Benitez was named to the National League All-Star team this season for the first time. He had a record of 3-3 with a 3.10 ERA and 21 saves in 45 relief appearances for the Mets this year.
Staying Put
LONDON (Reuters) - Spanish defender Ivan Campo has re-joined Bolton Wanderers by signing a three-year contract subject to a medical, the premier league club said on Thursday.
The 29-year-old, who was out of contract at Real Madrid, joined Bolton on a season-long loan deal in August last year and played a key part in their battle against relegation.
Manager Sam Allardyce told the Bolton Web site: "Both parties have reached an agreement and we are very happy to have secured Ivan's services for the next three years. He was a key figure for us last season and will be vital for us next season."
Helicopter Races
LONDON (Reuters) - The British army has halved refuelling times for its Apache helicopter fleet after studying the pit-stop routine of Formula One teams.
After a proposal last year by an army brigadier, a consultant engineer from motor racing's governing body visited the School of Army Aviation to look at ground crews in action.
Personnel from the British Army Air Corps were also invited to attend grand prix races to watch the pit-stop procedures.
"These exchanges led to a number of relatively minor changes which, when implemented together, have made the complete procedure more efficient, contributing towards cutting the rearming and refuelling time for an Apache by 50 percent," a statement from the FIA governing body said on Thursday.
Lakers Sign Duo
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Future Hall of Fame inductees Karl Malone and Gary Payton signed contracts with the Los Angeles Lakers shortly after midnight on Wednesday.
A moratorium on free agent signings expired Tuesday night.
Malone, the second-leading scorer in NBA history, who is considered perhaps the greatest power forward ever, signed a two-year contract worth just over $3 million, Lakers spokesperson John Black said.
Malone, who earned $19 million last season in his 18th and final season with the Utah Jazz, will earn the veteran's exception of $1.5 million next season. He turns 40 later this month.
Payton, five years younger, also signed a multiyear contract. He established himself as one of the NBA's finest point guards in Seattle, where he played for nearly 12 seasons before being traded to Milwaukee this past season.
The players were to be introduced Thursday morning at a news conference at Staples Center.
Payton, who earned $12 million last season, will make $4.9 million in his first year with the Lakers.
Shipping Shannon
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (Reuters) - The Minnesota Twins acquired outfielder Shannon Stewart from the Toronto Blue Jays on Wednesday, sending outfielder Bobby Kielty to Canada in return.
The Twins have lost 22 of their last 28 games, and the last eight straight, to lie 7 1/2 games behind the first place Kansas City Royals in the AL Central.
Stewart was Toronto's lead-off hitter and left fielder and was expected to be moved due to his high salary as the Blue Jays look to trim their payroll.
He's hitting .294 with seven homers and 35 RBI despite missing almost all of June with a strained hamstring.
Minnesota has been trying to acquire Stewart for several seasons. His best year was in 2000, when he hit .319 with 21 homers, 69 RBI, 20 stolen bases and 107 runs scored. He stole a career-high 51 bases with the Jays in 1998.
The switch-hitting Kielty is hitting just .252 this season, with nine homers and 32 RBI, as he has struggled to find playing time in the Twins outfield.
Duff Fee Agreed
LONDON (Reuters) - Chelsea has agreed to a fee for Blackburn Rovers midfielder Damien Duff, the Premier League club said on its Web site on Wednesday.
Rovers manager Graeme Souness was desperate to keep the highly rated Ireland international and Blackburn had turned down three previous bids from the west London club.
Chelsea did not disclose any details of the deal.
The 24-year-old Duff has a clause in his Blackburn contract allowing him to talk to clubs offering more than Pound17 million ($27 million).
Piched Battle
GENEVA (Reuters) - The final of a Swiss friendly tournament between Dinamo Zagreb and Partizan Belgrade was abandoned when rival fans fought on the pitch, police said on Thursday.
Referee Carlo Bertolini was forced to abandon Wednesday's game after 68 minutes with Dinamo leading 2-0 in the final of the four-team tournament in Kriens, near Lucerne.
The Lucerne police department said that Zagreb fans spilled on to the pitch when Ivica Olic taunted Belgrade supporters after scoring the second goal.
"This was a nasty experience," said Partizan's Ivica Iliev. "I didn't see the whole incident but my teammates said it was a fierce fight and I hope no one got killed in it."
More than 200 police officers were deployed to keep the supporters apart and peace was eventually restored.
"The Zagreb fans went on to the playing field and the fans of Belgrade were provoked," the Lucerne police said. "The referee then stopped the game."
One supporter was taken to hospital in Lucerne after collapsing on the pitch. Ten arrests were made before the game after police stopped skirmishes around the Kleinfeld Stadium.