SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #892 (60), Tuesday, August 12, 2003
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TITLE: Oblast's Candidate List Is Finalized
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Leningrad Oblast Election Commission on Monday officially registered 10 candidates for the oblast's gubernatorial elections, slated to be held Sept. 21
Five candidates were not registered, after failing to provide the necessary lists of at least 26,000 signatures supporting their candidatures. Eight of the remaining 10 handed in the lists, while two - Alexander Smirnov, the head of the SVA security company, and pensioner Yury Terentyev - instead paid a deposit of 750,000 rubles (about $24,500).
Analysts said Monday that two of the candidates, incumbent Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov and his predecessor, Vadim Gustov, were likely to attract most of the attention in the race for the post.
I have the feeling that the competition will largely be between the current and former governors," Leonid Kisselman, a political analyst at the sociology department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
"Serdyukov's position in the oblast is quite solid, but if he doesn't get 51 percent of the votes in the first round to secure a straight victory, there is a chance that certain forces could unite against him in the second round, which could cause him some problems," Kesselman said. "Life is interesting like that - it throws up surprises at unexpected moments."
Gustov, who currently represents the Vladimirskaya Oblast in the Federation Council, was appointed deputy prime minister in the emergency government of Yevgeny Primakov following the financial crisis of August 1998. As a result, Serdyukov, who had been Gustov's deputy, took over as oblast governor.
According to his spokesperson, Dmitry Motylkov, Serdyukov currently enjoys the support of 60 percent of oblast voters, while support for Gustov is running at 7 percent.
"This is a good starting point but, if support among the population overheats, it makes sense to keep campaigning low key, which is what we'll be doing," Motylkov said in a telephone interview on Monday. "The main thing for us is not to attract attention."
Support for Gustov has doubled in the last few weeks, according to his campaign manager, Andrei Nelidov. Nelidov, the former head of the United Russia faction in the oblast's Legislative Assembly, was expelled from United Russia last Tuesday after announcing he would work for Gustov.
"Russian people have the sort of character that, if someone is attacked, they get angry and voice their support for that person," Nelidov said in a telephone interview on Monday, referring to his having been kicked out of United Russia, which is backing Serdyukov in the oblast elections.
"The real campaign starts officially on Aug. 22, so I won't talk about ratings," Nelidov said. "However, [Gustov's] support is growing, due to the indirect effect on people of incidents like the one that happened to me and the meetings we've been organizing to remaind people of all the good things Gustov did when he was governor."
The Vedomosti business daily, citing anonymous sources within the Leningrad Oblast administration, reported on Monday that one of the sponsors of Gustov's campaign is Alexander Sabadash, head of local liquor producer Liviz. Nelidov refused to comment on the allegation.
Regional Election Commission member Vladimir Pylin on Monday criticized his colleagues, saying that they are in favor of Serdyukov and ignore complaints filed by other candidates against him.
"The oblast Election Commission doesn't examine any warnings or complaints against gubernatorial candidate Valery Serdyukov, and any attempts to raise questions about violations of election law are cut off at their roots," Pylin said at a commission section on Monday, according to Interfax.
"Why do we have to be afraid of Serdyukov? Let's follow the law, and hand over everything to the Prosecutor's Office and the courts," he said.
In Monday's session, the oblast Election Commission threw out a complaint filed against Serdyukov by Vladimir Popov, head of the anti-Communist People's Party. Popov had demanded that Serdyukov be barred from the elections for violating election legislation.
TITLE: Fair-Play Proposal Gets No Support
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The highest profile candidate for the post of governor of St. Petersburg called over the weekend for all candidates to avoid the use of dirty tricks during the upcoming campaign - and promptly found herself accused of exactly what she said she wanted to avoid.
Valentina Matviyenko, the presidential representative to the Northwest Region, circulated a petition to other candidates asking them to sign a pledge not to engage in unfair campaigning.
"We, the undersigned, are obliged not to ... bribe voters; publish anonymous advertising materials not paid for by the candidate's election funds; distribute fake advertisements or organize antisocial actions in other candidates' names; distribute false, insulting or discrediting rumors, distribute fake accusations via the Internet or other non-official information sources ...," read the document, which was sent out to local media outlets by Matviyenko's press service on Monday.
Monday afternoon, the petition still had just one signature - Matviyenko's.
Representatives of other candidates called the petition a dishonest move on Matviyenko's part.
"[Matviyenko] sent us a letter on Friday asking us to help with work on a petition, but the letter had no contact numbers," Yabloko party representative Olga Pokrovskaya, who works the headquarters of Mikhail Amosov, the Yabloko candidate for the elections, said in a telephone interview on Monday. "We would be happy to work on such a petition, but it appeared in the media on Monday with no consultation."
"As one of my colleagues said, it's as though you asked a pack of wolves to become vegetarians," she said, adding that the document failed to cover one important area.
"Nothing is said about guaranteeing all candidates equal media access, one of the main ways to avoid dirty tricks," Pokrovskaya said.
Speculation has been rife in St. Petersburg that the Kremlin is trying to gag local media outlets to make it easier for Matviyenko to win the race for governor. At the end of June, the new management of local television channel St. Petersburg Television, or TRK, shut down a range of analytical programs on local politics. The channel's new boss formerly worked at pro-Kremlin television channel Rossiya.
"When I saw this petition, I didn't think about whether or not I'd sign it - I was thinking why this initiative came from this specific source," gubernatorial candidate and Legislative Assembly lawmaker Konstantin Sukhenko said in a telephone interview on Monday.
"I have certain doubts about the integrity of this initiative," he said. "This is a public-relations move, and I'm not going to be part of someone else's public-relations campaign."
Tatyana Dorutina, head of the St. Petersburg League of Voters, said the petition had put all the candidates in a very uncomfortable position.
"On the one hand, anyone who doesn't sign it will have to explain why they are against it," Dorutina said in a telephone interview on Monday. "This move would obviously reinforce [Matviyenko's] position."
"On the other hand, it looks like none of the candidates is interested in making contact with the voters," she said. "This is because all the candidates seem to think that votes will come to them of their own accord, and this is a very bad sign."
The gubernatorial elections are slated for Sept. 21, with 11 candidates on the ballot sheet. The elections were due to be held in May next year, but were moved to September after President Vladimir Putin appointed former governor Vladimir Yakovlev to work in the federal government as deputy prime minister in charge of communal-services reform.
TITLE: Memorial, FSB in Standoff Over Toksovo Graves
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A year ago this month, St. Petersburg human-rights group Memorial discovered mass graves near the Rzhevsky firing range in Toksovo that it believes contain up to 30,000 bodies. But while Memorial continues to allege that the site, about 30 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, was used by the security services to dump bodies of victims of the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s, the FSB refuses to accept responsibility for the graves.
According to Irina Flige, head of Memorial's historical branch, seven bodies have been excavated, and examined by pathologists. One of the skulls had a bullet lodged in it, while others had holes in the back.
"We shouldn't have to do any more examinations," Flige said in a recent interview. "Precise identifications are impossible. We already know the socio-demographic range of the people buried here - men and women aged from 16 to over 60 - and the bodies date back 50 years or more."
A letter sent to Memorial in March by Sergei Chernov, head of the FSB's archives in St. Petersburg, denied any connection between the agency - the successor to the Soviet secret police - and the burial site. Memorial insists that the FSB has much to hide.
"They wouldn't let us work in the archives for the most ludicrous reasons," Flige said.
"When we asked permission for three of our members, including myself, to see some documents - for example, reports of executions carried out in the 1930s and execution orders from that time - the FSB said it can't allow us to see them as this would infringe the victims' rights."
According to retired FSB Major General Alexander Mikhailov, however, the agency is acting within Russian legislation.
"Although the time limit has expired [for keeping documents classified] in certain cases, some documents - and especially the FSB's internal documents - can only be viewed by close relatives of the victims, and no-one else," Mikhailov said in a recent interview.
Mikhailov said he could understand that some people would rather not see any documents at all.
"I've seen some highly traumatic cases, for example, when a family discovered that someone whom they thought was their best friend was, in fact, responsible for the death or imprisonment of their father," he said. "In one case, we had to call an ambulance."
He also dismissed Memorial's claims about the Toksovo site, saying that the FSB had released lists of all burial sites by 1995 and that Russian medical experts can not draw precise conclusions as to when the people buried there died.
"Pathologists would say that the bodies have been there for 50 years or more, which could mean 100 years," he said.
"We have nothing more to reveal, at least nothing we are aware of," Mikhailov said. "To claim an FSB connection, the evidence has to be more substantial than a hole in a skull. The Toksovo case must be studied thoroughly to draw an official conclusion."
Flige said that the victims recovered so far from the Toksovo graves had been piled on top of each other and killed by a shot to the back of the head - a characteristic of executions by the NKVD, as the FSB's predecessor was then known. She said there is no evidence to suggest that the graves date from the German siege of Leningrad during World War II, as the FSB had suggested.
"Our forensic experts showed that the people were killed by .45-caliber Colt [pistols], a type of gun widely used by the NKVD," she said. "The experts confirmed that the shorts were fired into the back of the heads."
According to Memorial, 720,000 civilians were executed Russia-wide during Stalin's rule, while another 500,000 were sent to the gulag between 1945 and 1953. Nearly 40,000 were killed between August and November 1937, the height of the Stalinist terror.
David Pelgonen, 78, who lived in a village near the Toksovo firing range, recalled in a recent interview seeing trucks and hearing random shots in the night during 1936.
"As we wandered through the woods, we came across a pit with some human remains, including an exposed foot," he said. "When I told my father, he went to see the people at the firing range, who told him to forget about it, if he didn't want to join the bodies in the woods."
In total, political repression could have claimed as many as 2.7 million local residents during the communist era, of a nationwide total of 20 million, Memorial says.
Natalya Kruk, 67, whose father was accused of being a Polish spy and shot in 1937, when she was just one, said in a recent interview that her father may be among those buried at Toksovo.
"I was allowed to see [documents related to] my father's case, but there wasn't any information on where he was buried, where his body is," Kruk said.
"When I heard about the Levashovo cemetery, I thought it would be easier for me to believe that he is there, although I don't know, and probably never will," she said.
The Levashovo cemetery, about 30 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg, contains the graves of about 45,000 victims of political terror, including about 24,000 who were shot in 1937 and 1938. It was turned into a memorial cemetery in the late 1990s.
Kruk said that she knows many people in similar circumstances who prefer not to visit the FSB's archives and do not want to know what happened to their relatives.
"They suffered enough from being relatives of 'enemies of the state,'" she said. "They don't want to bring the tragic memories back, and make them even more bitter, especially as so many people think that the repression was justified."
Mikhailov of the FSB's Moscow office said he is skeptical of the idea of memorial cemeteries, such as the one at Levashovo.
"During Stalin's era, the Criminal Code contained 18 articles that allowed for executing people, and most of those crimes were not political," he said. "Many people were shot because they were bandits. Unfortunately, those bandits share the graves with the victims of political repression. However, if we installed a monument, we'd be commemorating both sets of people."
Mass graves have been discovered periodically at various sites in the former Soviet Union since it collapsed in 1991.
Memorial's Flige warned that Russia has yet to develop immunity to its totalitarian past, thereby creating a danger for the future.
"Despite [Russia's] bloody history and the Bolshevik legacy, there is still no museum of the gulag in Russia," she said. "There has to be a federal program to sponsor nationwide projects like gulag museums, television documentaries, lectures and research."
"We'll never overcome our past if we don't learn to face it."
TITLE: U.S. Adds Basayev to Terror Blacklist
AUTHOR: By Barry Schweid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday designated Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev a threat to the security of the United States and to U.S. citizens.
Powell, in a notice in the Federal Register, said Basayev, 38, "has committed, or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism" against U.S. interests.
The State Department said Basayev has "links" to the al-Qaida terror network. Together with Britain and Russia, the United States asked the United Nations to impose travel sanctions on Basayev and to block shipment of arms and financial contributions to the rebels by all UN members.
"We believe that Basayev, as leader of his group and individually, took part in planning and perpetrating terrorist acts," State Department deputy spokesperson Philip Reeker said.
Basayev claimed responsibility for seizing the Dubrovka theater in Moscow last October, an act of terrorism that resulted in the death of 129 hostages, including a U.S. citizen, Reeker said.
Last December, Chechen suicide bombers destroyed the Chechen administration complex in Grozny, killing 78 people and wounding 150, Reeker said in a statement. It cited other terror attacks and said last November that Basayev warned governments that were members of international organizations in Russia they would be targets.
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control moved to freeze any assets Basayev might have in the United States and any attempt to transfer the funds. U.S. officials have been trying to trace funding to Osama bin Laden and his terror network.
The U.S. action supports Russia's efforts to win acceptance of its widely criticized four-year war in Chechnya and its refusal to negotiate with rebels.
In Moscow, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin's chief spokesperson on Chechnya, said Powell's announcement "is a step in absolutely the right direction. It is another confirmation that within the anti-terrorist coalition there is a deepening understanding that what is happening in Chechnya is inseparable from the battle against terrorist threats in the world."
A Foreign Ministry statement praised the move as "a further step in strengthening global anti-terrorist cooperation."
Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of the Kremlin-backed administration in Chechnya, said Saturday that Washington's designation of Basayev as a terrorist could help cut foreign support for his rebels' operations.
"Few countries or organizations will want to be caught maintaining either direct or roundabout ties with Basayev," Kadyrov said in comments reported by Interfax. He also said the rebels had been deprived of the moral support "that was implicitly expressed when they were called separatists or freedom fighters."
Since Russian ground forces poured into Chechnya in September 1999, the Kremlin has insisted on characterizing the conflict as an "anti-terrorist operation" rather than a war. It has bluntly rejected international calls for talks with the rebels, saying that negotiations cannot be held with terrorists.
Criticism of the Russian campaign faded notably after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, and the West has appeared increasingly inclined to accept the Kremlin's stance.
The U.S. announcement did not specify what sorts of terrorist acts Basayev might threaten the United States with, but he has taken credit for some of the most grisly violence that has hit Russia over the past year, including the seizure of hundreds of hostages at the Moscow theater in October and suicide bombings that killed about 100 people in May.
The Chechen rebel forces are not believed to operate under a central command, and it is not clear whether freezing Basayev's assets would deprive the insurgents of significant resources. The United States ordered sanctions on three other Chechen groups in February, but the tempo of the fighting has not slowed.
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MOSCOW (SPT) - A Chechen separatist news agency said Saturday that Washington's designation of warlord Shamil Basayev as a terrorist amounted to its acceptance of part of the responsibility for atrocities in Chechnya.
In a terse, irate statement published on the Kafkas.org Web site, Agency Caucasus also ridiculed Washington's move to freeze any assets Basayev may have in the United States, saying the rebel fighter had no holdings in the country to begin with.
Russia's enthusiastic praise of the U.S. action indicated its "happiness" that the United States was willing "to share the same responsibility for the Russian bloodshed and genocide in Chechnya," wrote the agency, part of the Caucasus Foundation, a nongovernmental organization based in Turkey.
Russia has long sought international recognition of its military campaign in Chechnya as an anti-terrorist operation.
Akhmad Zakayev, the right-hand man of separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, criticized the U.S. decision as serving nothing but propaganda purposes, Agency Caucasus said.
"The United States administration is using the current political situation to manipulate President [Vladimir] Putin and Russia in the direction of U.S. interests," Zakayev, in London fighting extradition to Russia, was quoted as saying.
Washington's decision comes ahead of Putin's planned visit to the United States in late September. Kommersant suggested it was an attempt by the U.S. administration to ensure Moscow's favorable attitude during the talks.
"The freezing of Basayev's accounts can be considered a gift by George Bush to Vladimir Putin ahead of important talks," the newspaper wrote on Saturday.
TITLE: Quota System Is the Bane of Russian Fishing
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: [Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series.]
"The fishing trade is inherently crooked, which is why the [traders'] wages should be minuscule, and one trader should be hanged per year to keep the rest of them on their toes." - Excerpt from Order No. 1669, issued by Peter the Great
NOVY MIR, Far East - A mere ten years ago, the proud fishermen working at the Novy Mir fishing company would probably have laughed at predictions that the policies of the federal government would end up nearly bankrupting them. Back then, Novy Mir was one of the three top fishing enterprises that was working in the Soviet Union.
But no one considered laughing in June, when the fishermen sailed back into port after spending 40 days at sea. They found that their pay envelopes contained only 1,000 rubles, or $32 - about one tenth of their normal wages - along with promises that the rest of what they were owed would be handed out later.
"This is just absurd," said Oleg, 52, one of the fishermen on the Kamenskoye, a fishing trawler that arrived at Novy Mir - or New World - carrying a load of herring. "I have no idea when I will receive a reasonable wage, and how much that sum will be."
Oleg, his wife and their two children survive on his wife's salary from the local kindergarten.
A Shrinking Collective
The 74-year-old Novy Mir fishing cooperative, or kolkhoz, located a north of Vladivostok, has shrunk down to less than one-third of what it was in the Soviet-era. Only 800 full-time staff remain, working with a fleet of only eight fishing vessels. In the Soviet era, that number was 30.
On top of the economic woes that have chipped away at the company, for the past two years, Novy Mir, like other fishing companies, has had to send representatives on an annual trip to Moscow in order to purchase fishing quotas at auctions that are run by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
The quotas give fishing companies permission to catch a set amount of fish within a set geographical zone.
The rights to about 40 percent of the total annual allowable catch in Russia are sold through such auctions. The remaining rights are distributed free of charge for scientific and other purposes by regional administrations and the federal government.
The system raises the ire of the fishermen, who complain that the requirement to buy quotas ends up eating up much-needed working capital and that the rights that are granted by the documents can be rendered worthless if the fish refuse to confine themselves within the arbitrarily drawn zones, just waiting to be caught.
Wasted Quotas
The Novy Mir collective fishing farm, among others, has complained that it failed to catch the fish for which it purchased rights.
The crew of the Kamenskoye, inone such example, managed to catch only 420 tons of herring, while the quota that it held allowed it to bring in 700 tons, said Yevgeny Sorokin, the ship's captain.
"The region for which we bought a herring quota froze over and we had to stop fishing," he said. "We could have gone to another region to catch pollock, but we have no quota for pollock. So we had to go home."
Sailors cannot wait at sea until the ice breaks up. Every idle day costs them about $5,000, Sorokin said.
"It's not a commodity that is being sold [at the auctions] but, effectively, a forecast of the catch," wrote Yury Kokorev and Vladimir Borisov, both of whom are with the All-Russia Research and Design Institute for Economics, Information and Automated Management Systems of Fisheries, or VNIERKh, in an article that was published in Fishing Economy magazine at the end of 2002.
Pyotr Chmil, the head of Novy Mir's administration, called the auctions an economic crime.
"We cannot afford to buy enough quotas," Chmil said in an interview, sitting near the windows of his office overlooking the sea.
Novy Mir caught 2,000 metric tons of pollock fewer than it expected last year. As a result of that shortfall, he said, "We can't afford to buy quotas for expensive seafood."
Pollack is not a particularly expensive harvest, but crab, among others, is.
Chmil, who holds a doctorate in economics, said that the auctions make it impossible for fishing companies that are short of working capital to plan their work.
"We can't make a business plan properly because we live from auction to auction and we never know how much the prices will increase and whether we will be able [to afford] to buy quotas. We can't buy quotas for the whole year - they're just too expensive.
"This year, we had to borrow again from our partners - banks and the clients who buy our fish - to get quotas on herring and roughhead grenadier," Chmil said. "I can only hope that we will be able to pay them back."
An Alternative Source
In addition to the auction quotas, fishing companies are also eligible to receive some of the free quotas handed out by the region's administration. But the Cabinet in late December gave Primorye's government 30 percent fewer free quotas to distribute in 2003 than last year.
As a result, Novy Mir got only the right to catch 970 tons of pollock from the Primorye administration. In its heyday, the collective farm caught up to 4,500 tons, more than four times that amount.
As companies grapple with these problems, their mounting debts loom.
Gennady Yakovenko, the deputy head of the Primorye Union of Collective Fishing Farms, which represents 12 of Primorye's 38 fishing companies, said that only one of the union's enterprises is without debt.
Novy Mir is two months' worth of wage arrears and 30 million rubles ($984,000) in debt, he said.
"Many fishing companies are selling their vessels to pay off the debts that they are carrying now, while, only three years ago, it was a problem to find ships to buy," Chmil said.
Earlier this year, Novy Mir, sold its biggest refrigeration ship because it could no longer justify keeping a boat that once was used to hold up to two thirds of the company's entire catch for the year. Now that the annual catches have atrophied to one sixth of their former size, such a large boat hardly makes economic sense for a collective fishing farm struggling to make ends meet.
In the early 1990s, Novy Mir hauled in up to 100,000 tons of fish a year. By 2002, its catch had shriveled to 15,600 tons.
As companies like Novy Mir sink further into debt, they are taking whole communities with them.
"The biggest problem is faced by those enterprises that have dependent villages onshore - they are in the worst state," Yakovenko said. "The villages are dying. Where the people will go and what will happen with the fishing industry, God only knows."
Local Responsibilities
Novy Mir's headache extends beyond balancing its books to the fate of the surrounding village, which depends on the taxes paid to the local budget by the collective fishing farm.
Novy Mir has worked hard to adapt to the new economic realities in the past decade. But, Chmil said, there is a difference between a modern, mobile fishing company with a couple of vessels and a source of financing and a fishing village like his, burdened by an aging infrastructure, with its pensioners, veterans, schools, clinics and social problems.
"We are being told that there are 10 years of perestroika behind us, and if we aren't able to adapt to the market economy, then we have no right to survive as a business entity," he said.
Chmil suggested that the most commercially viable restructuring plan would be to strip the company's assets and register a new company with a few salaried staff unrelated to the village.
But he can't do that, he said, because several thousand Novy Mir villagers depend on him for their survival.
"I could easily have gotten three vessels and registered a new company across the road and pretended I don't care about anything but business," he said. "But my mates are here. They are aging and they believe in me."
Chmil says that he often goes to Moscow, where he feels intimidated by government officials from a younger generation.
"They just laugh at me, saying I am either a fool or a lunatic," he said. "They can't understand that I have to care for these people.
"Who are these people in our government? What do they think we are here for?" he said.
TITLE: Moscow Ganglord Arrested at Villa in Spain
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Spanish police have arrested an alleged Russian ganglord who is wanted in Moscow on charges of involvement in an organized-crime group whose members stand accused of killing at least 13 people in the 1990s.
Acting upon the Interior Ministry's request and accompanied by a senior Russian police officer, officers of the Spanish gendarmerie arrested Andrei Pylev, 40, at his luxurious villa in the elite resort of Marbella last Thursday.
Four more people were detained along with Pylev, including three Russians and a Spanish citizen, Kommersant reported Saturday.
Pylev, who reportedly is known in the Russian underworld as Karlik, or Dwarf, oversaw the finances of one branch of Moscow's once powerful Orekhovskaya organized-crime grouping, city police said
The Prosecutor General's Office has requested extradition of Pylev, who is being held in a Spanish detention facility, a spokesperson for the office said. Neither the spokesperson or officials at the office's international legal department, which is responsible for extradition, would comment on the status or prospects of the request.
An official at the Moscow city prosecutor's office was more forthcoming. "In fact, the rumor here is that he will be handed over," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said by telephone Monday.
In a statement announcing the arrest, the gendarmerie of the Spanish province of Malaga said that Russian authorities suspect Pylev of a number of crimes, including involvement in the killing of one of Russia's most notorious assassins, Alexander Solonik. Neither Pylev nor his lawyer could be contacted Monday.
The Moscow City Prosecutor's Office recently finished investigating allegations against Pylev's brother, Oleg, and four other members of the Orekhovskaya gang. The four men, who also are in custody, have been charged with killing at least 13 people, including Solonik, who was strangled at his Greek villa in 1997. They will stand trial in Moscow as soon as they finish reading the cases against them, the official said.
According to Kommersant and Gazeta, members of the Orekhovskaya organized crime grouping, which rose to prominence on racketeering in the early 1990s, are suspected of having killed at least 35 people, including one investigator, one senior police official and scores of rival gangsters. The gang lost most of its power after a series of arrests in the late 1998s, according to Gazeta.
Staff Writer Francesca Mereu contributed to this report.
TITLE: Leather, Metal and Beer: Bikers Gather for Festival
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts from all over Russia gathered at the Kasimovo Aerodrome outside St. Petersburg over the weekend for the annual show organized by Moscow's Night Wolves bike club that came north this year for the city's 300th anniversary.
Although the rain that deluged the city for much of last week turned the approaches to the aerodrome into a muddy mess, preventing many visitors who came by car from getting to the center of the events, the more mobile motorcycles and their riders were not to be put off.
Having ridden up from Moscow during the day, the leather-clad bikers could be seen Friday evening pitching their tents, grabbing a bite to eat or relaxing with a beer, and looking forward to the weekend's festivities.
"Some people think we are crazy and scary, but it's only a superficial impression," said Sergei Vasilyev, an engineer by profession who had ridden up from Moscow on his Russian Java bike.
"It's a serious hobby, like yachting, doing sports or hiking," Vasilyev, 31, said. "For many people, it's also a chance to relax away from work and to have the chance to change their lifestyle for a while now and then."
Vasilyev said his passion for bikes had developed as a result of his love of travelling, and that a bike gave him "the perfect opportunity to see things and the life of other places on the way."
He said that the bikers' "scary" uniform is not just a product of unwritten style laws, but a safety necessity. A large helmet, thick leather jacket and pants and boots cushion bikers against serious injury should they get in an accident.
The rows of Russian-made Java and Ural bikes crammed into Kasimovo were offset by fashionable Harley Davidsons and Yamahas, all gleaming chrome and bright lights, ridden by the more well off - and often older - members of the biker community.
"It's not very often that I get to ride any more, because I'm very busy, but it's always a pleasure," said Viktor, a businessperson from Moscow, while carefully cleaning his Harley.
All of the possible classifications used by bikers to distinguish the machines they ride boil down to two basic categories - heavy bikes, meant for long trips, and sport bikes, whose owners get to show off all kinds of stunts and jumps.
On Friday, the poor light meant that many in the excited audience at Kasimovo found it difficult to see the bike tricks featured in the evening show. However, on Palace Square the following day, many of the bikers turned up for a demonstration in better conditions.
The bikers rode in formation around the city's sights on Saturday, stopping to show off their skills and chat with city residents.
On Palace Square, some bikers rode their vehicles while on their knees and not holding on with their hands, while others rode standing up.
Many bikers came along with their girlfriends, adding a touch of romance to the often testosterone-laden, beer-fuelled invasion.
"I often travel with Sergei, because it's such a fun to feel that wind blowing right into your face and meet so many interesting people united by one culture," said Lena, 25, Vasilyev's girlfriend.
Valery Gromov, 35, a biker from Moscow region, said that people should not be afraid of bikers.
"We're normal people," he said. "We have families, children, jobs - even dachas. We go to theaters and concerts."
Gromov said bikers rarely have problems with traffic police, who mostly stop motocyclers out of curiousity, rather than because they've been causing trouble. However, he said, the freedom of the open road is not unadulterated pleasure.
"One of the most difficult things for bikers is to sit in one position on a bike during long rides," he said.
TITLE: Yeltsin's Apartment Goes on the Market
AUTHOR: By Anna Dolgov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Collectors of items like a dress worn by Princess Diana or a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix might be interested in the latest gem to hit the market: an apartment where Boris Yeltsin used to live.
No, it's certainly not his Kremlin quarters or even his dacha in Barvikha or the digs in the elite Krylatskoye district where the 72-year-old former president has his official address. Instead, it's a sprawling five-room apartment in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, where Yeltsin served as the local Communist Party boss before being transferred to Moscow in 1985.
A for-sale ad is posted on the web site of Yekaterinburg's Atomstroikompleks real-estate agency with the red-letter headline: "Special offer! An apartment of the First President is for sale."
The current owner is a "private individual" whose wishes to remain anonymous, an Atomstroikompleks agent said by telephone Monday.
The agent, who refused to give her name, would not give out an asking price for the apartment, saying it was being discussed individually with prospective buyers - but only those who actually pay a visit to Yekaterinburg to view the property.
The agency's Internet ad extols the apartment's "panoramic view" over a city pond, the regional governor's residence, a movie theater and a dam. The 167-square-meter apartment is on the fourth floor of a six-story building and has sun-lit rooms and four balconies, it says. The building has a quiet backyard, round-the-clock security guards, a swimming pool and a billiards room.
The Atomstroikompleks agent said the apartment is partially furnished. She would not say whether any of the furniture was once owned or used by Yeltsin.
Representatives of Yeltsin could not be reached for comment Monday.
Atomstroikompleks' phones have been ringing off the hook since the ad was posted on its Web site in June, but most of the callers have been television reporters, the agent said.
Calls from potential buyers "come in between calls from television," she said. "But mostly it's calls from television."
Apartments in elite buildings in downtown Yekaterinburg typically fetch about $1,200 per square meter, according to local real estate agents. Prices for apartments at 1 Nabereshnaya Rabochei Molodezhi - where Yeltsin used to live - tend to drop to about $1,000 per square meter because of the building's old-fashioned design and need for renovation, they said. But the connection with Yeltsin is likely to increase the price significantly.
Owning an apartment of a top Soviet-era official has become something of a fad among Russia's new rich - and a source of big money for real-estate agencies.
Offers for the run-down apartment of former Communist Party leader Yury Andropov on Moscow's Kutuzovsky Prospekt have soared into the millions of dollars from a starting price of $400,000, according to the Penny Lane real-estate agency, which is managing the sale.
Even though more comfortable places can be found around town, wealthy Russians seem eager to grab bits of Communist Party and KGB history as "souvenirs," a Penny Lane spokesperson said.
TITLE: Distance No Object for Space-Age Pair
AUTHOR: By Juan A. Lozano
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HOUSTON - Ekaterina Dmitriev married Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko in a ceremony that was partly out of this world.
Dmitriev tied the knot with her orbiting sweetie Sunday as he glided hundreds of kilometers above the Earth.
The first-ever marriage from space was witnessed by about 200 family members and friends. Texas law allows weddings in which one of the parties is not present.
While Dmitriev said her vows during the ceremony at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, her husband recited them during a live video hookup from the international space station, 380 kilometers above the Earth.
"It was very sweet," Joanne Woodward, the wedding planner, said about the ceremony, which including a walk down the aisle by Dmitriev and ended with the couple blowing kisses to each other when the judge who conducted it told the groom he could now kiss the bride.
The honeymoon will have to wait until after Malenchenko, who wore a bow tie with his blue space suit, returns to Earth in late October. They plan a Russian Orthodox wedding sometime next year.
Dmitriev, who wore a sleeveless wedding dress with a V-neck, said the two had grown closer during their time apart, making them want to marry as soon as possible.
"As Yury was further away, he was closer to me because of the communication we have," said the bride, who turned 27 on Friday. "It was a celestial, soulful connection that we have."
At their wedding reception, the bride wore a cream-colored dress, while a life-size cardboard cutout of Malenchenko stood in for the groom.
"I'm taking him with me," Dmitriev told reporters, including some from Russia, as she grabbed the cardboard cutout just before she entered the reception. The reception was held at a nearby restaurant, which was decorated with silver stars and mannequins dressed as astronauts.
The happy couple met at a social gathering five years ago and began dating in 2002.
He is a Russian air force colonel who stayed aboard space station Mir for four months in 1994. She left Russia for the United States with her parents when she was 3 and lives in Houston.
After their relationship began, Malenchenko, 41, returned to Russia to train for his upcoming space mission, but the two continued their courtship via telephone. The cosmonaut proposed in December.
Because Malenchenko was preparing for his mission and there was no time to plan a wedding, they decided to get married while he was still in space.
The couple was issued a marriage license on July 17 by the Fort Bend County Clerk's Office.
Malenchenko blasted off to the station in late April with American astronaut Edward Lu, who served as his best man during Sunday's ceremony, and even performed the wedding march on a keyboard in the space station.
The couple's plans to wed weren't without controversy. Officials with the Russian Aerospace Agency tried to convince Malenchenko to delay the wedding until he returned to Earth, saying it would present legal complexities back home. Soviet-era rules require military officers to get permission to marry foreigners.
In the end, Russian officials gave their blessing - but said other cosmonauts will not be able to enjoy similar ceremonies and such rules will be included in future preflight contracts.
In Russia on Sunday, Malenchenko's father, Ivan, told Rossia television that the space wedding had made the cosmonaut's mother, Nina, cry, and said "what is this needed for - a sensation for the whole world?" His parents are pensioners in a Ukrainian village.
But Malenchenko's brother laughed and said his sibling will now be nearly as famous as cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, the first person to orbit the Earth.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Fatal Mushrooms
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - One hundred and fifty one cases of food poisoning from wild mushrooms, including five fatalities, have been registered in Russia this summer, Interfax reported Friday, quoting statistics from the State Health Inspection Committee.
The cases included 22 children aged under 14, one of whom died, the committee reported. Cases of mushroom poisoning have been registered in the Saratovskaya, Rostovskaya and Kaliningrad oblasts and the Komi Republic, it said.
Mirilashvili Appeal
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Lawyers for Mikhail Mirilashvili on Monday filed an appeal against the local businessperson's jailing, Interfax reported.
The 37-page appeal was handed to the Leningrad Oblast Military Court, head lawyer Alexander Afanasyev said. The court will examine the document before passing it on to the Supreme Court's military division.
Mirilashvili was jailed for 12 years on Aug. 1 on charges of creating a criminal gang, kidnapping and attempted murder. He is said to control business interests including real-estate, pharmaceutical, entertainment and construction companies.
Mirolashvili's appeal was "more ideological than jurisdictional in nature," Interfax quoted his press service as saying.
Transport Charges Up
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Charges for some tickets on the city's public-transport network will increase on Aug. 15, Interfax reported Monday.
Following a decision of the city's Transport Committee, a one-month ticket for one type of above-ground transport will cost 180 rubles (about $6), while a one-month metro card will cost 320 rubles (about $10.60). A one-month card valid on two types of overground transport will cost 220 rubles (about $7.30), while for three types the figure will be 270 rubles (about $9).
A one-month ticket valid on all four of the city's public-transport systems - tram, trolleybus, bus and metro - will cost 400 rubles (about $13.30). A quarterly ticket for all networks will cost 1,200 rubles (about $40).
Prices of tickets for schoolchildren and students will also increase, but the price of one-time tickets on all forms of transport will remain unchanged.
TITLE: Finnish Line Will Cover Local Visa Costs
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Although the Russian laws that originally led it to cancel service to St. Petersburg are still in place, Finnish cruise operator Silja Line will begin docking again in the city again this week, the firm announced on Monday.
According to Igor Gluchkov, the general director of Inflot World Wide agency, which offers tourism services for passengers on incoming cruise ships, the first arrival of the cruise ship Silja Opera will be this Wednesday.
The vessel, which can accommodate up to 1,200 passengers, will be docking in the city every Wednesday, with passengers spending eight hours on excursions through the city.
"It is a breakthrough in cruise tours to St. Petersburg, because Silja Line will continue to come to the city until early January, and then resume cruises again in April, whereas most cruise companies stop coming to the port in mid-September," Gluchkov said.
About 250 cruise ships arrive in St. Petersburg every year, according to Inflot statistics, but that number is lower than it could be because of a Foreign Ministry regulation, issued last year, requiring passengers from Finnish vessels to have visas in order to come ashore.
According to an international convention signed in 1963, international tour cruises that spend less than 72 hours in a foreign port do not require visas. The Soviet Union signed the convention, though it limited the time a ship should spend in port without visas being required to 48 hours.
The Opera had been scheduled to dock in St. Petersburg beginning last year, but the ministry regulation led Silja to cancel the route, while another Finnish operator, Kristina Cruises, curtailed its schedule significantly.
The ministry's decision only affected cruises from Finland, while passengers sailing on other international cruise lines, including those operating out of other European countries and the United States, are still covered by the international convention. The decision prompted an angry response from both the Finnish lines and the City Administration, which both filed complaints with the Foreign Ministry and the Presidential Administration.
According to Alexander Prokhorenko, the head of the City Administration's External Affairs Committee, the cancellation of the project meant the loss of $40 per year, money that the city administration was upset at losing.
Gluchkov said that, although the State Duma passed a new law in January reinstating the 72-hour visa-free period for all cruise ships entering Russian ports, it has yet to be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.
Silja decided to go ahead with its original plan anyway and will pay a 15-euro visa fee for every passenger coming to St. Petersburg. Gluchkov estimates that the existence of the visa requirement will cost the cruise line about 15,000 euros every time it docks.
Silja Line was not available for comment on Monday.
Ironically enough, the cancellation of the program last year didn't mean that Silja had no presence in the city. During the height of the 300th-anniversary celebrations, the Opera was used as floating accommodations for official delegations to St. Petersburg.
Kristina Cruises has been coming to St. Petersburg for 15 years and, before last year's decision, had been docking in Vyborg daily and once a week in St. Petersburg. This year, the line has come to the city once, in June, and plans only two more trips, both in August.
Silja Line's new route runs first from Helsinki to Tallinn and then to St. Petersburg, but analysts say that, for two chief reasons, Tallinn will likely eventually be excluded from the route.
First, cruises are only considered to be international when the vessel docked in more than two foreign ports. Since the Russian port requires visas anyway, this removes the rational behind the stop in Tallinn.
The second reason is that is Estonia is slated to enter the EU in May 2004. EU law will not permit duty-free services between Finland and soon-to-be fellow member Estonia.
For now, the crossings will only be offered to Finnish tourists, but a press release from Silja Line says that the company may start selling tickets to Russians traveling to Helsinki and back, but questions about Finnish visa requirements will need to be agreed upon first by both sides.
Gluchkov said that Finnish authorities are likely concerned at a possible flow of criminal activity or illegal immigration from Russia if visa requirements are relaxed. The Foreign Ministry regulations presently in effect are unlikely to be of much assistance in convincing its Finnish counterpart to be lenient.
Silja Line, one of the largest cruise companies in Europe, earned 107 million euros in revenues and carried 1.07 million passengers for the period January-March 2003. The most popular routes for the company are those from Helsinki to Tallinn and Helsinki to Stockholm.
TITLE: Single-Currency Issue Up Front
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin said Monday that a final decision must be made soon on long-standing plans to use the ruble as the single currency in Russia and Belarus, an issue that has raised tension between the Slavic neighbors despite years of calls for closer ties.
Putin told cabinet members that he and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko would soon set a date for a meeting to discuss the single currency issue. "We have reached the point when it is necessary to make a final decision," Putin said in comments broadcast on state-run Rossia television.
Russia and Belarus signed a union treaty in 1996 envisaging close political, economic and military ties, but they stopped short of creating a single state and have made few concrete moves toward integration.
Last January, Putin and Lukashenko vowed to push ahead with existing plans to create a constitution-like document for the union and to establish the ruble as a single currency by Jan. 1, 2005.
But tension between the two presidents and fears in Minsk that Belarus would be less independent if Russia controls the single currency have become stumbling blocks. Lukashenko, an authoritarian leader who is trying to maintain firm control over his country and its economy, has hesitated on the single currency issue.
In June, Lukashenko said both countries may still decide not to introduce a single currency, and demanded equal power on a joint council.
Lukashenko, who for years scored points with voters nostalgic for the Soviet Union by championing a union with Russia, has backed off on such calls and stressed the importance on Belarussian sovereignty since Putin angered him last year by suggesting a scenario in which Belarus would essentially be carved up and subordinated to Moscow.
TITLE: Fetisov: Russia Should Pick Up an NHL Club
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - The chairperson of the country's top sporting authority on Thursday urged Russian millionaires to expand their sporting interests by buying a team from North America's National Hockey League.
Ice hockey legend Vyacheslav Fetisov, chairperson of Russia's State Sports Committee and two time Stanley Cup winner, said that Russian businesspeople should follow millionaire Roman Abramovich's example and buy a professional sports team - not in the English soccer Premiership as Abramovich has done, but from the National Hockey League.
"It wouldn't hurt to have our own, wholly Russian team in the National Hockey League. It would stir up more interest," Fetisov told a news conference, according to Interfax.
Last month, Russian oil and aluminum tycoon Abramovich landed a bombshell in the English soccer world when he purchased a controlling stake in Chelsea Football Club. Fetisov played in the NHL from 1989 to 1998 and twice lifted the Stanley Cup as a defenseman for the Detroit Red Wings.
Fetisov said that, although Abramovich pays for the upkeep of the Avangard hockey club in Omsk, he still had opportunities to invest in the Russian sport.
"But everyone has the right to buy a business wherever they want and invest money in it, lose money or make a profit," he said.
"Compared to what our league players earn in Russian football, basketball and hockey and take out of the country, Abramovich's deal doesn't seem too large," he said.
Many prominent Russians, including Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, have criticized the Chelsea deal for being unpatriotic.
Audit Chamber head Sergei Stepashin also slammed the purchase, suggesting that it had been funded by Abramovich's oil company Sibneft's tax underpayments. "Generally I'd call this a provocation," Stepashin said.
On Tuesday, Abramovich seemingly made moves to placate the dissenters and announced that he was ready to bankroll construction of a new stadium in Moscow.
Abramovich spokesperson John Mann said the tycoon planned build a modern stadium that would need to house three teams to be economically viable.
Ideally, they would be CSKA, Torpedo and Spartak he said.
(AP, SPT)
TITLE: Looking at the Yukos Affair After the Scandals
AUTHOR: By Christof Ruehl
TEXT: Attentive readers of Russian newspapers might be forgiven for being confused. Does the World Bank these days advise unraveling the privatization process? Certainly not. But behind entertaining headlines hides an important discussion. Slowly, the debate of the Yukos affair has moved onto a more serious plane. Beyond summer readings of a colorful cast of heroes and villains and a lot of guesswork about their motives, deeper structural issues have emerged, issues that are likely to resurface after this affair has been forgotten. The first of these concerns the economic consequences, the price for entangling economic life with politics. The second concerns the security of property rights established through privatization.
To gauge the economic effects of the current affair, a logical distinction must be made between how it affects businesspeople already operating in Russia and how it affects those who are thinking about coming here. With respect to the former, there has - so far - been notably little impact. The numbers show no capital flight: Reserves declined by $1.1 billion last month (Platon Lebedev was arrested on July 2), but $970 million of this was spent on debt repayments. High demand for hard currency before the August holidays and uncertainty at the beginning of July about exchange-rate policies and the euro/dollar rates are likely to have contributed toward more, rather than less, hard-currency holdings. The stock market went down, but not anywhere near crisis mode. Importantly, Yukos went down, while other stocks did not - signaling that the markets were well able to discriminate. They perceived a particular stock under threat, but not the system as a whole (as some observers have claimed). Russian eurobond yields went up, but this started before the Yukos affair broke and it affected all emerging markets. These observations do add up: Investors already operating in Russia have priced in a certain amount of political risk.
Of course, this should not be taken as a denial of the negative real effects of the affair. In particular, Russia's image abroad will be tarnished. And, in general, the longer any kind of political interference into the economic process is perceived to exist, the more difficult it will be to attract capital into Russia, be it foreign or domestic.
This leads to the next question, namely: What underlies the current situation? From the economic point of view, the key difficulty here seems to be how to find closure to the privatization results of the 1990s.
Here, two principles are in conflict. Both are important, and no one has yet found a way out of this dilemma. The first principle is the obvious economic one, namely that anyone tampering in an arbitrary way with an existing distribution of property rights plays with fire. It is logical and easy to understand that no-one will invest in a place where investors feel that the government or other agencies can violate their property rights in an arbitrary manner. It is this fear that spooked investors in the wake of the Yukos scandal.
On the other hand, there is a widespread perception that the results of privatization were partially obtained in an illegal or "unfair" fashion. Because of this and the enormous gaps in wealth and income that have emerged, the existing distribution of property rights is rejected by a majority of the population. Consequently, some argue, an amnesty should be out of the question. It would only reward those who violated whatever rules were in place at the time, thus undermining the rule of law, rather than securing it.
There are very few historical precedents that might be instructive as to how such a dilemma can be solved. None of them lends itself easily to the Russian situation but, perhaps, they are able to provide some cues. One is East Germany, where the legal right of the old owners to the physical restitution of property (expropriated either by the Nazis or the Communists) deterred new investors to such an extent that this right eventually had to be replaced with monetary restitution. Even those who had a justified claim could no longer claim back physical property (such as land or houses) but had to take monetary compensation instead. The simple lesson is that a modern state has more means at its disposal to work around economic constraints than redistributing physical property, monetary settlements being one of them. (Interestingly, and unrelated to this example, Boris Nemtsov recently advocated a similar mechanism of tax transfers.) Another episode that comes to mind, this one admittedly from an entirely different context, is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When trying to put closure on a historical period, it may be necessary, we learned, to do so in an inclusive manner.
But, in the end, Russia's dilemma persists. On the one hand, the economic argument is correct. The system needs closure. Property redistribution is not an option as, otherwise, not only the productivity of existing assets but new investment itself is bound to suffer. On the other hand, one needs to be careful when discussing an amnesty. The legal system is weak, and an amnesty per se does, not lend more credence to it. What is to be addressed by it? Who makes the distinction between "serious" crimes and the violations of procedural rules everyone engaged in? Is there a way of paying for past mistakes without redistributing property? And, most importantly, can closure really be obtained if the overwhelming majority of the population is convinced it has been cheated?
These are serious questions that have not been sufficiently addressed. And yet it is precisely the resentment of large parts of the population that plays into the hands of the few who are currently abusing Russia's turbulent economic history to foster their own purposes.
There is no obvious solution to this dilemma, or at least there is none yet. But it seems evident that such a solution can only be found if a debate on these issues ensues - a debate, not the kind of sensationalism currently dominating most of the discussion - that will bring about a broad consensus rather than yet another truce between a small group of particular oligarchs and politicians.
Christof Ruehl is chief economist of the World Bank's Russia Country Department. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Combatants or Criminals in Chechnya War?
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT:
At the end of last month in Grozny, Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev handed over to Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov overall control of anti-rebel operations in Chechnya. Gryzlov and Patrushev told reporters that it is not appropriate anymore to describe the conflict as an "antiterrorist operation." Instead, it is an operation to "maintain public order in Chechnya" - a police job.
Gryzlov and Patrushev's rhetoric, painting a rosy picture of an almost fully pacified Chechnya, was devastated only a few days later by a truck-bomb explosion in Mozdok in nearby North Ossetia. The bomb flattened a four-story military hospital that treated solders wounded in combat in Chechnya, killing 50 and injuring many more - mostly military personnel and military medical staff.
Mozdok is the main supply and air-support base for anti-rebel operations in Chechnya. In Soviet times, Mozdok was an air base for Tu-95 Bear strategic and shorter-range Tu-22-3M Backfire bombers. During the early stages of the first war in Chechnya, in 1994 1996, Mozdok was still used by the strategic nuclear forces. (In April 1995, I witnessed from above, coming in from Chechnya on a helicopter, the takeoff of three heavy Tu-95 bombers on some mission.)
The Tu-95s (the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. B-52s), their nuclear bombs and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were later moved from Mozdok to the Volga region. The air base, with its extended concrete airstrips and large infrastructure that serviced the strategic 5th Soviet Air Force Army, became a vital springboard for the Chechen campaigns.
The troops occupy two concrete airstrips inside Chechnya: in Khankala, in the northeast outskirts of Grozny (built as a Soviet military jet pilot training center and now the main headquarters of the occupation forces), and the Soviet-built Grozny civilian airport, north of the city. But no planes are permanently based inside the war zone.
Helicopters transfer soldiers from Mozdok to Khankala and other destinations, while fixed-wing aircraft do not land on Chechen soil at all because of the threat posed by the rebels. Almost a year ago, the rebels shot down a large military Mi-26 transport helicopter as it approached Khankala from Mozdok, with the loss of some 130 lives. Since then, only smaller Mi-8s that carry up to 10 passengers fly inside the republic.
The Mi-8s in Chechnya are old, typically in service for 20 or so years, and prone to technical failure, and there is a shortage of spare parts to do proper maintenance. The occupying troops are, in effect, pinned down to the ground, with air trips reserved mostly for the top brass. Thus, there has been a disproportionate loss of colonels and generals when these choppers go down because of technical mishaps or enemy fire.
All air-support sorties flown today over Chechnya take off from Mozdok. Troops leave the war zone and reinforcements or replacements are flown in by transport plane to Mozdok or arrive via the railroad to be transferred into Chechnya proper in convoys of trucks and APCs. (Sometimes, part of the travel inside Chechnya is also by rail and then convoy.)
Wounded service personnel and the remains of the dead also pass through Mozdok - a small town around the air base that the rebels believe is vital for Russian operations. In June, a female suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying military personnel from the tactical 4th Air Army, which has bombed Chechnya since 1994 and continues to do so. Eighteen people, including the bomber, died.
The deliberate attack recently on the military hospital is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention and a war crime. But, in Chechnya, the Russian authorities also do not observe international rules of war. Wounded rebels are randomly killed; field camps set up by the rebels to treat their wounded have been deliberately attacked (state television has shown the results of such attacks, portrayed as "great victories").
The Russian authorities have not allowed international humanitarian NGOs to set up hospitals to give aid to the wounded. Chechen doctors have been prosecuted as criminals for treating the rebels.
Moscow considers the rebels to be not combatants but criminals. So the rebels face the same legal jeopardy if they attack a military base or a military hospital.
President Vladimir Putin has called the Mozdok hospital bombing "yet another confirmation of the inhumanity and cruelty of the bandits." In fact, the Kremlin has been inviting such attacks by fighting an inhumane war itself.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.
TITLE: A Positive Example for the City's Next Governor
AUTHOR: By Michael Rosenthal
TEXT: With less than two months remaining until St. Petersburg's gubernatorial elections, Northwest Region Presidential Representative Valentina Matviyenko has become the sole focal point in the election coverage, which follws who has announced support for her, who has decided not to run in favor of her, and what government resources she will be able to exploit in her campaign. Political opposition seems to have been eliminated and rumors have it that media criticism has also been "managed." Yet there is at least one constituency Matviyenko should not forget if she indeed plans to continue the political games and cronyism of her predecessor: foreign investors.
Foreign investors tend to put their money in places where conditions are stable, transparent and free of government interference. Unfortunately, for a city with a huge potential for investment, such conditions are exactly what previous Governor Vladimir Yakovlev failed to create. By contrast, a glance at the progressive government of St. Petersburg's neighbor, the Leningrad Oblast, reveals what the city has missed out on and with what Matviyenko has to compete.
The oblast, without significant natural resources and with only a third of St. Petersburg's population, has out-performed the city in each of the last three years in attracting foreign direct investment, for a total of $559 million. During the same period, St. Petersburg attracted only $345 million, and much of it from Cyprus - meaning that it is only Russian money being repatriated. Investment in the oblast has gone into a new Ford car-production facility, opened in 2002, and was spent on new factories by Caterpillar, Kraft, Philip Morris, IKEA and others.
In the last few years, the Leningrad Oblast has gone from a debt-ridden backwater to a so-called "donor" region, whose surplus revenues are distributed to other regions in Russia. The residents have noticed the difference too, as tens of thousands of new jobs have been created, while increased tax revenues have allowed the government to boost spending on social services by 400 percent. Even better, 2002 was the first time in recent years that Russian capital investment outpaced its foreign counterpart, meaning that Russians, with their larger investment potential, have begun to follow the lead of foreigners into the oblast.
So, what is the secret of the Leningrad Oblast's success? The crucial difference is in the attitude of the oblast's administration. Its governor, Valery Serdyukov, as well as his predecessors, has been committed to working individually with investors. The oblast has offered huge tax breaks so that investors can recoup their investments as quickly as possible.
The oblast has also reduced bureaucracy and corruption, two of the main barriers that prevent Russia, as a whole, from attracting an appropriate level of FDI. Serdyukov actually cut his administration's staff by 15 percent, and raised salaries for those who remained.
The governor's office has also consistently been willing to help investors, even if it meant lobbying federal issues outside of its jurisdiction. For instance, Ford was "helped enormously" by the oblast to sign a deal with the federal customs authority for tariff-free imports on car parts for the first five years of production.
On the other hand, corruption and inefficiency within the St. Petersburg administration are, almost without exception, cited as the main obstacles to foreign investment by those who chose to invest in the city as well as by those who have passed it over infavor of the Leningrad Oblast. For obvious reasons, former investors are more willing to go on record than current ones. Garry Wilson, who founded a Coca-Cola factory here in 1995, had numerous problems with corruption, and even had his offices stormed and occupied by Kalashnikov-wielding tax inspectors, who were demanding $1.2 million, but were quickly willing to settle for half of that sum. Alexei Kim, the former director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia's St. Petersburg office, recalls when the city administration founded its own electricity-distribution company to challenge the local energy monopoly, which was controlled by opposition political forces. The new distributon company demanded that foreign companies like Wrigley and the local Radisson hotel start paying the new company, as well as turn over infrastructure they had been forced to build for the city.
While it won't be easy, the winner of September's elections will certainly have a chance to turn things around and attract more investment, tax revenues and jobs to Russia's northern capital. The director of one large American factory in the area argues that, "if you took the team from the Leningrad Oblast and put it in St. Petersburg, you would get the same huge development there - it's all about the people."
The next governor could start by completing the compilation of the land register in the city and coming up with zoning laws to lessen the risk for investors interested in building here.
Investors also claim that the city's infrastructure and transport sector need to be improved. For example, the port could be made many times more efficient if corruption and bureaucracy were reduced there. At the very least, the new governor could bring in a team that wouldn't be involved in internecine squabbling, a problem that has often left investors caught in the middle. A former top administration official, who wished to remain anonymous, admitted that, although a few eager bureaucrats tried their best to compete with the 0blast for investment, "political leadership was the biggest problem in the city in terms of attracting foreign investment." The official added, "The city reacts slowly to investors and their needs, it's just lazy. Only 10 percent of Smolny really works - it's like a socialist employment program."
Thus, Matviyenko, should she win, needs to remember that, while she may be able to bully opponents out of the race, she won't be able to bully foreign investors in the same way, since they have much more freedom to choose. If she doesn't improve St. Petersburg's lackluster investment climate to capitalize on the city's enormous potential, investors will continue to spend their money in other regions of Russia and in other countries instead. The Leningrad Oblast's own fall elections pit popular incumbent Serdyukov against his predecessor, Vadim Gustov, who started much of the work in attracting foreign companies. The winner will be Matviyenko's real competition, and this is just what Russia needs: The Leningrad Oblast is proving that competition can push local governments to improve themselves and even make up for deficiencies in the national investment climate, literally bringing investment to Russia that otherwise wouldn't be here. This is no small task in a country with a frightening history of centralization, which continues under its current president, Vladimir Putin.
Michael Rosenthal is a 2002-2003 U.S. Fulbright Scholar. He submitted this comment to the St. Petersburg Times. The views expressed here are entirely his own, and do not in any way reflect the views of the Fulbright Program.
TITLE: NATO Takes Over Afghan Command
AUTHOR: By Todd Pitman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan - NATO took command of the 5,000-strong international peacekeeping force in the Afghan capital on Monday, a historic move that marks the alliance's first operation outside Europe since it was created 54 years ago.
The alliance took over from Germany and the Netherlands, which have jointly led the International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, since Feb. 10.
"ISAF's name and mission will not change," said NATO Deputy Secretary General Alessandro Minuto Rizzo. "But what will change as of today is the level of commitment and capability NATO provides."
The outgoing commander, German Lieutenant General Norbert van Heyst, handed over control during a formal ceremony in an auditorium inside the capital's Amani High School.
The new commander, NATO Lieutenant General Gotz Gliemeroth, who is also from Germany, accepted a green flag from van Heyst to mark the change. Gliemeroth's deputy will be Canadian Major General Andrew Leslie.
The school auditorium was ringed by scores of armed peacekeepers and ISAF armored cars mounted with machine guns. Bomb-sniffing dogs were on hand to search for any explosives.
Present were President Hamid Karzai, German Defense Minister Peter Struck, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander General James L. Jones and a host of diplomats and UN officials.
Struck said in a speech that the handover showed the world's commitment to rebuilding war-shattered Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan must not lapse back into anarchy and chaos and must not again become the home of global terror, as was the case under the rule of the Taliban," Struck said.
"What the people of Afghanistan wish for is a stable peace. They are pinning great hopes on the international community. The support of NATO for ISAF ... is a visible expression of the fact that the people of Afghanistan will not be let down."
NATO is taking over command in large part to end the arduous task of searching for a new "lead nation" every six months to run ISAF.
NATO spokesperson Mark Laity told reporters in Kabul on Sunday that a single, open-ended command by NATO would add more continuity to the mission as well as an institutional memory. Most commanders, after learning the intricacies of Afghanistan, have been rotated out after six-month tours-of-duty.
ISAF will continue operating exactly as before, with the "same mission, same mandate, same banner," he said.
The 30-country force was created in December 2001 to bolster security in Kabul in the wake of the U.S.-led war that toppled the Taliban, which had granted haven to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
About 90 percent of ISAF's troops are from NATO countries, though 15 of the 30 contributing countries are - and will still be - from non-NATO countries, said German peacekeeping spokesperson Leuitenant Colonel Thomas Lobbering.
The deployment in Asia will be NATO's first outside Europe since the organization was formed during the Cold War to provide a bulwark against possible attacks by the former Soviet Union.
"NATO is a defensive alliance, and it still is. But, previously, how you defended yourself was defined by parking your tanks along your borders and preventing the former Soviet Union and its allies crossing," Laity said.
"What we saw on Sept. 11 was that the most powerful member of the alliance was attacked by a threat which emanated from Afghanistan. So the traditional concept of defense needed to be revised," Laity said.
NATO will face the same challenge other lead nations have in the past: ensuring stability in Kabul and preventing possible terrorist strikes.
ISAF suffered its worst-ever hostile casualties in June, when a suicide attacker driving an explosives-laden taxi killed four German peacekeepers and wounded 29 others.
TITLE: Charles Taylor Steps Down in Liberia
AUTHOR: By Ellen Knickmeyer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MONROVIA, Liberia - President Charles Taylor, blamed for 14 years of bloodshed in Liberia and indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone, resigned Monday and surrendered power to his vice president.
It remained unclear, however, when - or if - Taylor would go into exile in Nigeria as promised, and rebels besieging the capital, Monrovia, threatened more violence if the former warlord does not leave the country immediately.
Pushed to resign by the United States and West African leaders, Taylor declared that history would judge him kindly, speaking at his long-awaited resignation ceremony in Liberia's war-blasted capital.
Taylor, who had reneged on past promises to resign, began his farewell address by exhorting the international community to help Liberia.
"We beg of you, we plead with you not to make this another press event," he said.
"History will be kind to me. I have fulfilled my duties," he said, adding, "I have accepted this role as the sacrificial lamb ... I am the whipping boy."
Wearing a white safari suit and carrying his trademark staff, Taylor looked on as successor Moses Blah was sworn in under heavy security. Steel blinds guarded windows against assassination attempts, like a 1996 try on Taylor's life in the same building that killed two aides.
Placing his left hand on the Bible and raising his right, Blah pledged to "faithfully, conscientiously and impartially discharge the duties and functions of the Republic of Liberia."
Rebels have rejected Taylor's choice of successor - a longtime ally and comrade in arms - and demanded that a neutral candidate be chosen to preside over a transition government until elections can be held.
Inside a velvet-draped room in the Executive Mansion, Ghana's President John Kufuor told about 300 Liberian and other dignitaries that Blah would hand power to a transitional government in October.
"Today's ceremony marks the end of an era in Liberia," Kufuor said, speaking as head of a West African bloc that has sent peacekeepers to Liberia. "It is our expectation that today the war in Liberia has ended.
He also said South Africa would be contributing troops to the West African force, which started deploying last week.
Two months of intermittent rebel sieges have left over 1,000 civilians dead in Monrovia, as government and insurgent forces duel with the city of 1.3 million as their battlefield. The war has left Taylor controlling little but downtown, referred to derisively by rebels as Taylor's "Federal Republic of Central Monrovia."
Taylor launched Liberia's 14 years of near-constant conflict with a 1989-1996 insurgency. International aid agencies estimate that virtually all of Liberia's roughly 3 million people have been chased from their home by war at one time or another.
Taylor was elected president in 1997 on threats of plunging the country into renewed bloodshed. Rebels-including some of Taylor's rivals from the previous war - took up arms against him two years later.
His ragtag forces, paid by looting, are accused by rights groups and Liberia's people of routine raping, robbing, torture, forced labor and summary killings.
Rebels, to a lesser extent so far, are likewise accused of abuse.
Perhaps crucially, Taylor made no mention in his Sunday address of his vow to leave Liberia.
Closing his speech, he declared: "I will always remember you wherever I am, and I say, God willing, I will be back."
TITLE: Iraqi Killed for Giving Intelligence to U.S.
AUTHOR: By Sameer N. Yacoub
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DHULUAIYAH, Iraq - The tale is recounted only in whispers, but its horror still rings loud through the orchards of apples, dates and figs surrounding this small town.
Last month, townspeople say, tribal leaders gave a farmer named Salim Khaldoun a sobering choice: Kill your son, or watch your entire family be killed.
His son Sabah, 29, had committed a terrible crime. Eager for money, he had tipped off the Americans to a house where he said Saddam Hussein had stayed.
U.S. soldiers raided the house, finding no trace of Hussein but killing a 12-year-old boy. Sabah, neighbors say, accompanied the soldiers on the raid. His face was covered with a sack, but they recognized him easily.
"Sabah also gave information about former intelligence and military officers," neighbor Ahmed Ibrahim confided. "He did it for money."
Dhuluaiyah is a one-street town 90 kilometers northwest of Baghdad in the "Sunni Triangle" where U.S. forces have met the fiercest resistance. Surrounded by orchards, the town appears deserted during the day because the men are in the fields.
Townspeople are still deeply resentful of the Americans because of a U.S. Army sweep two months ago in which dozens of people were detained at a nearby military base and, they claim, left in the hot sun for days before they were released.
Many also support Hussein, as intelligence officers and other regime cadres were recruited from the heavily Sunni Muslim area.
A month after Sabah Salim's death, few people are willing to discuss how he died.
"I don't know how he was killed, but he deserved it because he was a traitor," Ibrahim said.
The head of the town's tribal council, Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh, refused to discuss the details and described the incident as "mere family business."
Police Major Mehdi Saleh said nobody had asked for an investigation or even a death certificate. He said no probe was being conducted because it "could be sensitive in the community."
Pinched by a colleague, he became even more vague.
"I only heard about the incident," he said. "Nobody from Sabah's family has come to us to demand an investigation, so we can't take any measures."
But outside the station, a police captain jumped inside a reporter's car to give a fuller story.
The tribal council, he said, went to Salim Khaldoun with a message: "Kill your son, or the whole family will be wiped out."
The next day, Sabah was found dead in his family's farm, the officer said. The father hasn't been seen since.
Standing at the gate of Sabah's house, a teenaged relative confirmed that Salim Khaldoun had killed his son.
He said U.S. soldiers came looking for Khaldoun last week but didn't find him.
The family itself offered a cold reception in the house. Khaldoun's brother said he didn't want to discuss the incident, because "the Sabah incident" had brought enough trouble to the family.
He said he preferred to discuss the difficulties of post-war life in rural Iraq, especially the electricity cutoffs that leave farmers unable to pump water from the nearby Tigris River into their orchards.
"Our dying trees," he said, "are more important than the dead Sabah."
TITLE: Clijsters Takes Over at the Top
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARSON, California - Kim Clijsters defeated Lindsay Davenport 6-1, 3-6, 6-1 to win the JPMorgan Chase Open on Sunday for her tour-leading sixth title of the year and move from No. 2 to No. 1.
Clijsters took over the top spot from the injured Serena Williams, who trailed by less than 45 points in the WTA Tour rankings released Monday.
"Rankings have never been my priority. As a young player, the pressure comes more from people around you to be No. 1," Clijsters said. "To be in this situation now is incredible."
The ranking is the most notable achievement in a year that so far has been outstanding for the 20-year-old Belgian. She reached the semifinals in all 14 events she's played in 2003; she and compatriot Justine Henin-Hardenne were tied with five titles.
Clijsters is the first Belgian and the 12th woman to be No. 1 since the rankings began in 1975.
Clijsters is also the only player to be No. 1 without first winning a Grand Slam title, although she will be a strong favorite to win the U.S. Open, which begins Aug. 25.
She has come close this year, losing in three sets to Williams in the Australian Open semifinals; losing to Henin-Hardenne in the French Open final; and losing another three-setter to Venus Williams in the Wimbledon semifinals.
Serena Williams, champion at five of the past six majors, had knee surgery Aug. 1 and is expected to be out up to two months. She has been No. 1 for 57 consecutive weeks since July 8, 2002.
"No one wants to see such a great champion not playing, especially with the U.S. Open coming up," Clijsters said. "Not to see her there is going to influence the whole tournament, not just the players, but also the crowd."
Clijsters rolled to a 5-0 lead in the first set against Davenport, a former No. 1. Davenport blew a 3-0 lead in the second, letting Clijsters get to 3-3.
Davenport fought off four break points and held at 4-3 when Clijsters returned her second serve into the net. She broke Clijsters in the next game and won the set when the Belgian's backhand sailed long.
The players then were allowed a 10-minute heat break and Clijsters was by far the fresher player in the third set, winning it in just 17 minutes.
"I felt I could move her around, and at the end she hurt her foot," Clijsters said. "That made me be a little more aggressive."
Davenport's left foot started bothering her as she fell behind 3-1. She started hobbling, and Clijsters broke her at love then closed out the victory when Davenport's backhand landed wide.
In Montreal, Canada, Andy Roddick beat 2002 Wimbledon runner-up David Nalbandian 6-1, 6-3 on Sunday to win the Masters Canada for his fourth title of the year.
It's the first Tennis Masters Series championship for Roddick, who lost in last year's final in Canada.
Roddick lost his serve just once and needed less than an hour of playing time to defeat the Argentine at the hard-court tuneup for the U.S. Open.
"It's my biggest title so far," Roddick said. "Hopefully, it will be a good stepping stone to the Open."
TITLE: Unassisted Triple Play Is Just Consolation as Atlanta Loses
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ST. LOUIS, Mississippi - Atlanta shortstop Rafael Furcal turned the 12th unassisted triple play in major league history, though the St. Louis Cardinals beat the visiting Braves 3-2 Sunday night on Albert Pujols' tiebreaking homer off John Smoltz in the eighth inning.
Furcal single-handedly snuffed out a St. Louis rally in the fifth for the first unassisted triple play in the majors since Oakland second baseman Randy Velarde did it against the New York Yankees on May 29, 2000.
With runners on first and second, Furcal made a leaping grab of pitcher Woody Williams' liner. The runners were going on a 1-1 pitch, and Furcal stepped on second base to double up Mike Matheny before tagging out Orlando Palmeiro as he made a futile attempt to scamper back to first.
"I didn't know right away," Furcal said. "I wasn't thinking of trying to get three outs by myself, I was just trying to get outs."
Williams is one of the best hitting pitchers in the majors, with a .250 batting average and seven RBIs. He tried to bunt earlier in the at-bat, then was allowed to swing away.
"That's amazing," Williams said. "It's a nice play on Furcal's part."
Seattle 8, N.Y. Yankees 6. Roger Clemens and Jamie Moyer faced off in the first matchup of starting pitchers over 40 years old in more than a decade. The last time it happened was when Frank Tanana started for the New York Mets against Charlie Hough of the Florida Marlins on July 29, 1993.
Bret Boone, Randy Winn and Ichiro Suzuki got the big hits after Seattle chased Clemens in a five-run seventh that made it 6-4. After the Yankees tied it against Arthur Rhodes in the bottom half, John Olerud took four straight balls from Antonio Osuna (2-4) with two outs in the eighth to make it 7-6.
Seattle's Rafael Soriano (2-0) stopped a rally in the seventh and pitched a scoreless eighth, and Shigetoshi Hasegawa closed for his 10th save in 10 chances.
In other games, it was: Baltimore 5, Boston 3; Texas 5, Toronto 4; Cleveland 3, Anaheim 1; Minnesota 4, Detroit 3; Kansas City 7, Tampa Bay 3; Chicago White Sox 5, Oakland 1; Chicago Cubs 3, Los Angeles 1; Milwaukee 5, Florida 4; Houston 8, Montreal 2; Pittsburgh 5, Colorado 3; San Francisco 5, Philadelphia 2; Arizona 7, N.Y. Mets 4; and San Diego 2, Cincinnati 0.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: World Record
TULA, Russia (Reuters) - Yuliya Pechyonkina broke the women's 400 meters hurdles world record at the Russian championships on Friday.
Pechyonkina clocked 0:52.34 in the final to break the 0:52.61 mark set by American Kim Batten at the 1995 World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Hasek Off Hook
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) - Dominik Hasek will not be charged for hurting a player during an inline-hockey game.
There was no evidence Hasek caused bodily harm to Martin Sila during a game in May, prosecutor Lenka Strnadova said. Strnadova did not say how she reached her decision, but she ordered that the case be treated as a misdemeanor.
Hasek faces a maximum fine of about $105.
Bengals' Bad Day
EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey (AP) - New head coach Marvin Lewis and Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer were no help to the Cincinnati Bengals in their preseason opener. They bumbled in a 28-13 loss to the New York Jets played through a steady rain.
Palmer had two interceptions returned for touchdowns, and the Bungles had their share of miscues - a botched field goal and extra point attempt, two personal foul penalties and four total turnovers.
When asked whether there was one thing he needed to improve upon, Palmer said: "Everything."
Palmer, who won the Heisman as a senior at Southern California last season, entered the game at the start of the second half and led the Bengals to their two scoring drives. But he also had two passes intercepted and returned for scores.