SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #896 (64), Tuesday, August 26, 2003
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TITLE: What Did the 300th Really Do for City Residents?
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A great hope expressed before St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations was that the occasion would provide a much-needed boost to the massive repairs needed by some of the city's decaying sights and crumbling buildings. But while many of the city's historical buildings got at least a new coat of paint on their facades, the ambitious plans made for the repair and construction of some crucial infrastructure are still unrealized.
Into this category fall the metro line between the Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva metro stations, the completion of the eastern part of the city's Ring Road and the ongoing saga of the long-promised flood-protection barrier.
The metro line between Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva has been out of action since part of the tunnel collapsed in 1995 due to pressure from an underground river. Some 500,000 residents of the city's northeastern districts still have no direct metro link to the city center.
Officials have repeatedly blamed a lack of financial resources and technical difficulties for the lack of progress.
In November 2002, as the pre-300 rush was gaining momentum, the head of the federal Construction Committee, Nikolai Koshman, finally expressed confidence that the broken line would be repaired by the end of the annivesary year.
According to the City Administration's Transport Committee, however, the line will now only be working again "in the second half of 2004."
"It was planned to complete the work on the metro by the end of this year, but this is a unique project, and has such serious technical difficulties that the term of completion has been changed," committee press secretary Alexei Gerashchenko said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Another big anniversary promise was to finish the construction of about 70 kilometers of the eastern part of the Ring Road. Like the metro, however, this has also now been pushed back.
"So far, only 30 kilometers of the eastern half have been completed," Yevgeny Korolyov, spokesperson for the State Ring Road Construction Board, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
"The work has been going slower than planned due to the lack of financing," Korolyov said. "Now, completion of the eastern part is scheduled for 2005."
Work on the construction of the road, which is meant to ease the flow of transport around St. Petersburg, started in 2001. The project is being financed with federal funding. The construction of the eastern part of the road was budgeted to cost 45 billion rubles ($1.5 billion). However, in 2001, the federal budget allocated just 5 billion rubles ($166 million) for the road, while in 2002 the figure was 6 billion rubles ($200 million).
"It's a very large-scale project and, of course, with only that much money available, it could not be completed," Korolyov said.
Next year, according to Korolyov, the federal budget is planning to allocate more money for the project. Planners are also pinning their hopes on receiving loans of over $100 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Although not specifically mentioned as an anniversary-linked project, the flood-protection barrier saw yet another revival of interest in 2003. A tender for the completion of the project, which was started in 1979, was announced, and the EBRD also promised funding of $245 million.
However, despite these failures, the city has seen many positive changes. Since 2000, as part of the celebrations, 78 of St. Petersburg's historical buildings, many overlooked for decades, finally had some attention paid to them.
Among the definite achievements of the anniversary celebrations were the completion of the construction of the Konstantinovsky Palace in the suburb of Strelna, revamped into an official presidential residence; the opening of the reconstructed Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in Pushkin; the revival of long-neglected Sennaya Ploshchad; and the cleaning up of St. Isaac's Cathedral and a number of other sights.
TITLE: Media Baron Gusinsky Held in Greece
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton and Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Greek prosecutor on Monday ordered Vladimir Gusinsky transferred from a detention facility at the Athens airport to a local jail, pending hearings on whether to extradite him to Moscow.
Prosecutor Giorgos Vlassis said it was beyond his jurisdiction to decide whether the 51-year-old former media baron - who fled Russia fearing prosecution on fraud charges in 2000 - should be handed over to Russian law enforcement and referred his case to Greece's top court, the council of appeals.
"It is now up to the council to decide on his extradition or not," a Greek Justice Ministry spokesperson said Monday, Reuters reported.
She was unable to say how long it would take to reach a decision, but court sources told Reuters that it was a matter of weeks rather than days.
Gusinsky's lawyer, Alexander Berezin, told Rossiya television he will appeal the prosecutor's decision to the council of appeals court within 24 hours.
Should Russian prosecutors file a formal extradition request, Greek authorities would be required by law to decide within 30 days whether to extradite Gusinsky, Berezin said.
Gusinsky, who lives in self-imposed exile in Israel and holds both Russian and Israeli passports, was detained Thursday at the Athens airport upon his arrival on a flight from Tel Aviv.
It remained unclear Monday what charges Gusinsky is wanted on and whether the Prosecutor General's Office has asked for his extradition. Russian officials said over the weekend that they would decide Monday whether to file the request.
The Prosecutor General's Office on Monday evening continued to refuse to comment on his detention. Officials at the Russian Embassy in Athens would only say that they are aware of the arrest.
The silence suggests that Gusinksy's arrest caught prosecutors off-guard, and they are trying to find a way to capitalize on the unexpected opportunity, a source close to Gusinsky said.
"It seems this all began as an accident, but now we have no idea how it is going to unfold," the source said.
According to the source, Gusinsky was stopped after he presented his passport at the Athens airport and border officials found an international warrant for his arrest in their computer database. The officials then phoned Interpol's headquarters, which informed them that there was no warrant.
Greek authorities, however, then contacted the Russian branch of Interpol and were told that Russian prosecutors are still investigating Gusinsky, the source said.
The source said he doubted that the arrest represents an attempt by Russian law enforcement to widen a crackdown on oligarchs, currently focusing on senior management at oil giant Yukos. He said he doubted that Gusinsky - who controls a weekly political newsmagazine, Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, and the small Ekho-TV television company - had any plans to set up any projects with Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Gusinsky lost control of his powerful Media-MOST empire, whose outlets included NTV television and Ekho Moskvy radio, after prosecutors mounted a legal offensive against him and his senior managers in 2000. He was charged that year with embezzlement of state property at a St. Petersburg television company and misuse of a loan of 5 billion rubles (then worth about $250 million) from state-controlled gas giant Gazprom.
Gusinsky maintained his innocence and accused prosecutors of trying to silence his media outlets, which were critical of the Kremlin and the military campaign in Chechnya. He was briefly jailed in June 2000 and fled to Spain shortly afterward.
The Prosecutor General's Office tried to have Gusinsky extradited from Spain on embezzlement charges, but a Madrid court rejected the request on April 18, 2001. Two days later, the prosecutor's office charged Gusinsky with laundering 2.8 billion rubles ($97 million) and asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant. Interpol refused, saying the case had "a predominantly political character."
Russia and Greece, however, have a bilateral agreement on extradition, and Athens has extradited a number of Russians at Moscow's request in recent years.
Political analysts were scratching their heads Monday about the timing of the arrest. They said that while it probably has nothing to do with December's parliamentary elections, the fact that Gusinsky apparently remains on Russia's wanted list despite having made peace with his creditors - and all but withdrawing from Russian media - indicates that what is going on is purely political.
"This could be a case of phantom pains" for law enforcement, given that they have been unable to put Gusinsky on trial, said Nikolai Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
He said prosecutors no doubt see Gusinsky as a good target since he no longer has any political or financial punch and is still detested by some Russians as an oligarch who illegally amassed a fortune in the 1990s.
Alexei Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies said some hardline voters would welcome the extradition and conviction of "at least one oligarch," but he expressed doubt that Gusinsky's arrest could be linked to the elections. He said that Gusinsky, who has travelled outside of Israel to countries such as the United States, may have put down his guard.
"[Prosecutors] didn't defuse the minefield of extradition requests, and Gusinsky finally stepped on one," Makarkin said.
He said prosecutors are probably keeping silent on the arrest not an attempt not to raise the stakes and end up embarrassed as they did after their high - profile campaign to extradite Gusinsky from Spain failed.
TITLE: Cossacks Saddle Up For First Congress
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: NOVOCHERKASSK, Southern Russia - An invading French regiment is routed by a Cossack cavalry unit amid deafening cannon fire near the Tuzlovka River, a few kilometers outside Novocherkassk, the Don Cossack capital. After the lopsided battle, combatants from both sides sit down to drink vodka together while cannon smoke still lingers over the steppe.
But this is no mutual epiphany about the brotherhood of man. It is simply the Count Ataman Platov Don Military-Historical Club taking a break from oppressive 30-degree heat after recreating a War of 1812 battle for several hundred spectators.
The mock battle on Saturday - set to loudspeaker music that included "Glory, Glory Hallelujah," "La Marseillaise" and the theme music for 20th Century Fox - was one of the highlights of the final day of Novocherkassk's four-day festival commemorating the 250th birthday of Cossack hero Matvei Platov.
Platov, who commanded Cossack troops in the defeat of Napoleon's invading French army in 1812, lived his final years in this town 30 kilometers northeast of Rostov-na-Donu. After his death in 1818, the town erected a monument in his honor.
Cossacks from throughout Russia and abroad traveled to Novocherkassk last week to attend the festival, which kicked off Wednesday morning with the laying of a wreath at the Platov monument and ended Saturday night with fireworks and a gala concert.
Cossacks, a group of warrior peasants who for centuries defended Russia's borders, were renowned for fanatical devotion to the tsar and the Orthodox Church, and for being fierce soldiers with unparalleled skill on horseback.
Napoleon once said he could conquer the entire world with Cossacks in his ranks, a quote oft-repeated by festival speakers and attendees.
The Cossacks suffered heavy persecution under Soviet rule, as most sided with the White Army in the civil war. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, a Cossack revival has slowly taken place, and Novocherkassk's Don Cossack Dramatic Theater on Friday was the site of the First International Cossack Congress.
Congress attendees included atamans - or elected Cossack leaders - from Vladivostok to Kalmykia, and a slightly bored-looking General Gennady Troshev, who in February was appointed by President Vladimir Putin to the post of presidential adviser on Cossacks after having served as commander of the North Caucasus Military District.
Guests also came from other countries, including the United States, Canada and Germany.
For Faina Boldyrev, who came to the congress from Montreal with her husband, Andrei, it was her first time in Russia. Boldyrev, 54, said her family, which left Russia shortly after the 1917 Revolution and arrived in Canada in 1952, never lost its fear of persecution.
She said her father told them they were Kuban Cossacks in order to give them a false lead. Only later did she find out they were Don Cossacks.
"I have a brother who is 78 years old now, and when I asked him if he wanted to come to this conference, he said 'No way. They're going to come after me and send me to Siberia,'" Boldyrev said. "He's still scared after all these years."
The Cossacks carry an air of Slavic romanticism, with lively folk music and dancing and their traditional dress - lambskin hats, tunics and baggy pants tucked into knee-high black boots. But there is a darker side to Cossack culture, one associated with Jewish pogroms and violent conflicts with neighboring Muslims.
Even recently, Cossack gatherings have been rife with ethnic slander. Addressing a Cossack congress in Novocherkassk in February 1999, Albert Makashov, a retired general and then a member of the State Duma, did not mix words.
"We will be anti-Semites and must be victorious!" he declared.
But whether it was the understanding that hate-filled diatribes might not sit well with the foreign guests or an honest shift in focus away from ethnic conflicts, the restraint in conversations and formal speeches at the festival was palpable.
Sitting around a table drinking vodka with friends at equestrian games on Saturday, a middle-aged Don Cossack named Vladimir, who declined to give his last name, cut short his friends' conversation about Cossack-Muslim relations, muttering something about foreign journalists being connected to the CIA.
But before Saturday's parade, in a garden cafe near Yermak Square in central Novocherkassk, one ataman managed to squeeze in some Jew-baiting.
"The conspiracy by kikes and Masons is the greatest enemy of Russia," said Viktor Demyanenko, ataman of the Donetsk district. "They have to run the entire world, and they already control almost all of it."
Speakers at Friday's congress stuck primarily to political issues, such as land reform, and kind words, to shouts of "lyubo!" - the Cossack cry of approval - from the audience.
The ataman of the Kuban Cossack Army, Vladimir Gromov, demanded that the Russian government return to the Cossacks their original lands, claiming that otherwise the Cossacks "would go the route of the American Indians - foreigners in our own land."
Not all congress participants - including Novocherkassk Mayor Anatoly Volkov - agreed with Gromov's position, but there was more consensus on the importance of reviving educational institutions for Cossack youth.
There are currently more than 600,000 registered Cossacks in Russia, 20,000 of whom serve in the military. But Cossack organizations are just beginning to form their own military academies to train their youth in the tradition of their warrior past.
This process has already begun in Novocherkassk, with the re-establishment of the Don Emperor Alexander III Cadet Academy.
The academy was founded in 1883, but in 1920 the entire school was evacuated to Egypt after having fought for the White Army in the civil war. After two years in exile in Egypt, the school was relocated to Yugoslavia, where it continued until 1945.
In 1991, the academy re-formed in Novocherkassk and now has an enrollment of more than 200 boys grades six through 12.
The cadets were a ubiquitous sight at festival events and on the streets of Novocherkassk, fulfilling flag-guard duties at Friday's conference, marching in Saturday's parade in the center of town, and displaying their deftness with a shashka - the Cossack saber - before Saturday's battle re-enactment and equestrian contest.
Twenty cadets lined up in front of spectators to rapidly rotate their shashki, which were more than half as tall as many of the cadets. Only a few nervous audience members moved to the side for a safer observation post.
"I like the speed of it and being able to handle a cold weapon," said cadet Stanislav Lebedinsky, 16, regarded by his peers as the academy's best sword handler. "It's a good thing. It may come in handy on the street."
"It also has to do with tradition," he continued. "The most important weapons for our ancestors were a horse and a sword. We want to be like them."
The horse-as-a weapon theme set up the festival's most impressive event, the equestrian show that followed Saturday's battle re-enactment, giving Cossack riders a chance to perform startling stunts in the saddle to more "lyubo!" cheers from the audience.
Spectator Vasily Khopreninov, who described himself as a "pure-blooded Don Cossack," said he was not overly impressed with the show.
Khopreninov, whose best riding days appeared to be behind him, said the riders' exploits were nothing special compared to the abilities of their Cossack forefathers.
"They call what you're seeing out there 'expertise,'" he said, pointing to riders performing a stunt in which they swing themselves under the belly of their horses in full stride and land back in the saddle from the other side. "Before the Revolution, every ordinary Cossack had to be able to do that before they could even go into the army.
"A Cossack was born on horse, and that's where he died," said Khopreninov, adding that his great-grandmother dismounted to give birth to his grandfather and promptly continued riding after she was finished.
TITLE: Was the Anniversary Good for Business?
TEXT: Much was said before the event about the effect that St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations could have on business in the city. Angelina Davydova spoke with members of the business community to find out what the effects have actually been.
Vladimir Katenev
President, St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce
Q: What effect have the 300th-anniversary celebrations had on the city's economy, and what are the prospects for the future?
A: St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary was celebrated not only in Russia, but around the world. We have seen particular interest in the city not only in tourism, but in investment. Over the next three years, industrial growth is expected in the heavy machinery and shipbuilding industries thanks to major export orders. However, the Eigth Northwest Banking Conference showed that, in the near future, foreign banks are unlikely to become the main source of investment in our economy, because investment risk is too high in Russia. The city's birthday has made no major change in that respect. The big picture shows revitalization of the city economy, thanks to increased flow of federal funds and the use of existing resources. It's easier to implement projects in general - including commercial projects - with the overall growth.
Q: How has the anniversary affected the Chamber of Commerce?
A: The St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce hosted a large number of Russian and foreign business delegations this year, including from Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. All the visiting businesspeople spoke of their interest in increasing trade turnover with St. Petersburg. For example, we took part in the Business and Diplomacy Russian-American business symposium in April 2003. The symposium was one of the events intended to attract leading U.S. businessspeople to St. Petersburg's anniversary. Twenty seven businesspeople, owners and directors of major U.S. companies came to St. Petersburg. Such meetings help to identify new partners, establish new business contacts, and carry out large projects. A meeting of the Baltic Partneriat is planned for September 2004, the final stage of the anniversary celebrations. Some 500 small and medium-sized businesses based in St. Petersburg and the Northwest Russia, and an estimated 1,500 representatives of foreign companies from various countries of Europe, will take part in the partneriat. Business meetings will be held over the course of two days. The goal of these meetings is to sign agreements and contracts to help stimulate international activity on the part of small and medium-sized businesses, and pave their way to international markets. The anniversary should prove an impetus, a starting point for long-term projects that will revive and support the St. Petersburg economy long after May 2004.
Natalya Kudryavtseva
Executive director, St. Petersburg International Business Association
Q: What impact have the 300th-anniversary celebrations had on the city's economy?
A: It is clear that the world's attention to the city grew immediately before and after the anniversary celebrations. The number of conferences and seminars held in St. Petersburg began to increase significantly. At present, however, it seems that the jubilee was more of a PR event, so it's too early to speak about economic results now. We cannot expect foreign investment to grow noticeably just yet, because the decision-making process usually takes longer than a month or two. Investors should thoroughly examine all investment terms, compare the city with other regions, and then make a choice.
Q: Do you think this choice will be in favor of St. Petersburg?
A: The party is over, but the investment climate has not changed significantly. Every investment decision has two aspects: investment climate; and attracting attention to the region, its reputation and publicity. St. Petersburg has been advertised widely thanks to the 300th anniversary, but the second aspect is still an ongoing issue. I can not say that investment terms are too unfavorable, since there are a number of companies with foreign capital operating quite successfully in the city, but the City Administration has a lot of issues to resolve. With interest in the city increased, it's now time for city officials to pool their efforts and improve the economic and investment climate in the city.
Alexander Sidorov
Head of the Development Department of the Economics Committee, St. Petersburg City Administration
Q: What effect have the 300th-anniversary celebrations had on the city's economy, and what are the prospects for the future?
A: First of all, the jubilee was a PR event that showcased the city to the world. Although the jubilee did not imply the investment process itself, we now have evidence that many multinational companies are planning to come to St. Petersburg or to enter a local market. One example is ECA World Trading Company, the director of which met with the governor of St. Petersburg several weeks ago.
Another example is increasing interest on the part of international companies already operating in Moscow to expand their activities to St. Petersburg, specifically a number of Japanese companies. Also, several of the world's leading consulting companies plan to settle in St. Petersburg. Whenever a consulting firm comes to the city, its clients will arrive about a year later. Another positive impact is the improvement in the travel sector, both in terms of incoming tourists and in terms of infrastructure development. The City Administration has recognized some serious flaws in its travel policy, and is trying to eliminate them.
A number of conferences and exhibitions, such as the International Maritime Defense Show held in St. Petersburg in June and the upcoming Euro-Asian Conference, are also bringing benefits to the city. This can be seen in the number of contracts for St. Petersburg-based companies and the recognition of the city as a major transport and industrial center. St. Petersburg's stock-exchange market is also more active, with a number of local enterprises' shares to be offered soon.
Q: Do you think the recent drop in the volume of foreign investment in St. Petersburg will be reversed?
A: Definitely. In fact, the decrease in the volume of foreign investment this year at the same time meant a rise in the share of foreign investment going to industries, as well as long-term investment. This all happened because corporate investors became too engaged in politics during the event and, while dabbling in politics, they slowed down their economic activity. If we look at the total amount of foreign and Russian investment coming into the city, we notice a growth trend. A positive factor is that these are not only investments into import-substitution industries, but the development of the entire sector. While foreign investors are still more interested in foodstuffs, local investors find construction, medium-sized-business and even small-business infrastructure to be more attractive.
TITLE: Crashed Chopper Was Flying too Low
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - An Mi-8 helicopter that crashed last week in the Far East, killing all 20 people on board including the governor of the remote Sakhalin region, was flying dangerously low in thick clouds, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said Monday.
Shoigu said a preliminary investigation found that the helicopter crew deviated from its route, and was flying much lower than it reported to flight controllers.
Shoigu, on a trip to Sakhalin Island, said in televised remarks that the helicopter flew 40 kilometers off its designated flight route, and entered heavy clouds.
Flight recorders found at the site of the crash in Kamchatka Peninsula revealed that the helicopter was just 13 meters from the ground when the pilot jerked its nose in an apparent attempt to avoid a close obstacle, Shoigu said at a news conference, Interfax reported.
The abrupt maneuver caused the helicopter's rotor blades to swing back, slicing its tail and causing the crash, said Shoigu, who was dispatched to investigate the crash by President Vladimir Putin.
Wednesday's crash killed Sakhalin Governor Igor Farkhutdinov and many of his administration's senior officials. The bodies of the victims were flown to Sakhalin on Monday, and three day's of mourning started.
The wreckage of the helicopter was found in a marshy field Saturday, three days after its last contact with air traffic controllers.
Shoigu said it was not immediately clear why pilots had deviated from the flight route and gave the wrong information to flight controllers.
Shoigu said the crash closely resembled another helicopter crash that killed Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Lebed in April 2002. Lebed was flying in the same type of helicopter in heavy snow at a low altitude, and the pilots performed the same type of maneuver when it hit power lines, Shoigu said.
TITLE: Culture Provides Main Draws
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov and Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While nearly everything this year has born the tag "In Honor of St. Petersburg's 300th Anniversary," there have been some genuinely important events in the sphere of culture.
Many of the events that attracted the most interest from city residents can be found in this area: the State Hermitage Museum opening through the night, the Mariinsky Theater's mammoth Stars of the White Nights festival and the Year of Japan.
Not everything went completely according to plan, though. Various pop-music events had been anticipated for the previous 12 months, with the press hyping projects such as an open-air concert by Paul McCartney on Palace Square, and Radiohead and Aerosmith headlining a huge festival promoted by Yury Shevchuk of local rock band DDT. None of this, however, actually happened.
The city's two highest-profile institutions led the way. The Mariinsky Theater kicked off proceedings on May 6 with the 11th running of its annual Stars of the White Nights festival, which expanded this year to three months from its usual one.
Over the course of the next three months, operas, ballets and orchestral concerts were given at venues including the Mariinsky itself, Smolny Cathedral and the towns of Vyborg and Ivangorod by a list of artists that reads like a who's who of international classical music, opera and ballet.
The one notable absentee was the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which was scheduled to appear on May 29. The Met - where Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev is principal guest conductor - failed to appear after an embarrassing spat between Gergiev and Shostakovich Philharmonic Artistic Director Yury Temirkanov resulted in a bureaucratic mess that left both sides with egg on their face and the Mariinsky hastily putting together a program to fill a hole in its program.
Festival highlights included a powerful performance of works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Strauss and Mendelssohn by the World Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Gergiev; the first complete performance in Russia of Wagner's operatic tetralogy "Der Ring des Nibelungen"; and the symbolic short season by New York City Ballet that wrapped up the festival.
On City Day itself, May 27, the Hermitage opened its newly restored gates on Palace Square to let in visitors around the clock for the first time in its history. According to the museum, the event was a resounding success, attracting over 22,000 during the night alone.
Despite the often chaotic crowd scenes on Palace Square and problems with the bridges and the metro both being closed, some Hermitage visitors said they had achieved "spiritual euphoria" and "nirvana" during the night, with many even attributing this to the lack of sleep.
Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky said afterward that, once some logistical problems have been worked out, the museum plans to repeat the experiment at some point in the future.
The main pop-music event was closed to the public, as it was given to an audience of 45 state leaders and their entourages on the terrace of the newly-renovated presidential Konstantinovsky Palace in the suburb of Strelna on May 31.
The open-air show, scripted by film director Andrei Konchalovsky, featured a bizarre lineup of Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, pop/classical crossover singer Emma Chaplin, 1970s pop idol Demis Roussos, German rock band the Scorpions - which inevitably performed its Perestroika-era anthem "Wind of Change" - and Russian folk singer Pelageya.
All the performances - including Pavarotti's - were lip-synced, according to Alexei Winer of the local band Wine, who was enlisted to simulate guitar-playing for Roussos, an experience he wrote about in an article called "How I Worked as a Piece of Furniture" for the Web site of the local rock shop Castlerock.
"It was for the protocol, not for fun," Winer said by telephone this week. "There were presidents sitting on chairs under the cold wind from the gulf. Half of children who took part in the show caught cold."
In line with former Governer Vladimir Yakovlev's declaration that the 300th-anniversary celebrations should last all year, the Year of Japan arrived in April with a huge drumroll, thousands of trees and an explosion of interest in traditional Japanese theater.
The product of an agreement between President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the Year of Japan, while taking place in cities across Russia, was meant specifically as a present to St. Petersburg.
The Year of Japan opened up with a presentation to St. Petersburg by the Japanese government of 1,000 saplings of sakura trees - a traditional symbol of the Asian country - and a performance by the Tokyo Dagekidan traditional-drumming troupe. It went on to include a sell-out performance at the Shostakovich Philharmonic by Tokyo's NHK Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit, and performances of traditional noh theater at Smolny Cathedal and kabuki theater at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory that had rapt audiences fighting for every available square centimeter of free space.
The kabuki performances, in particular, inspired at least one local production. The Mariinsky's new production of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "The Golden Cockerel," which premiered earlier this month, has been staged in the kabuki style by Japanese director Ennosuke Ichiwara.
Many pop events were included on the City Administration's list of official events, even if the same administration gave them no funding.
Of those, the main event was Okna Otkroi! ("Open the Windows"), an all-day open-air affair on June 23, which was eventually headlined by Shevchuk's DDT.
However, several festivals, such as the Neva Delta Folk Blues Festival and the new Baltic Jazz Festival, were either cancelled or postponed due to lack of funds or public interest.
Shevchuk's planned rock fest started to be scaled down when it became apparent that no official funding would be forthcoming, first dropping international headliners, then Russian bands from other cities and, eventually, folding altogether.
Shevchuk organized a news conference in Moscow to criticize local authorities and Presidential Representative to the Northwest Region Valentina Matviyenko, who chose to support the four-day pop festival "300 Years of St. Petersburg," organized by the Moscow-based, state-owned agency Kreml at the Kirov Stadium.
"There's a war with pop on one side and seats of culture that struggle to survive on the other," he was quoted as saying. "This situation reminded me of the times when rock was banned."
Despite all the official support, the pop event held on the Kirov Stadium failed to live up to what was advertised on its posters. With many headliners - including the Scorpions - failing to show up, probably the best-known international act was Kingdom Come, a third-rate heavy-metal band from Germany.
Ironically, ex-Beatle McCartney did eventually perform in Russia - on Moscow's Red Square. The planned concert on Palace Square on May 24 was given by Alexander Rozenbaum, a local singer/songwriter popular with criminals and cab drivers for his blend of gangster and patriotic war songs.
At the height of the celebrations, McCartney did come to the city - but to launch the Menshikov Foundation, a children's charity founded by Anthea Eno, the wife of British composer Brian Eno, rather than to play a show.
TITLE: Did Somebody Say This Should Go On all Year?
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although the main celebrations for St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary are already a distant memory for many, jubilee organizers say that the festivities are carrying on as planned until the end of the year.
Neither recent political events nor the closure of the official 300th-anniversary press center influenced the events that have been planned through December, they insist.
"The celebrations are taking place through all of 2003, which has been designated as the year of St. Petersburg by UNESCO," Vyacheslav Filippov, a representative of the official 300 Organizing Committee, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
According to the official jubilee Web site, spb300.com, which lists 125 events from September through Dec. 25, the celebrations will round off with five days of anniversary-closing ceremonies and conclude on Dec. 31.
The list includes cultural events, exhibitions and a variety of sports events, although the site does not specify the nature of the events planned for the final week.
Political analysts said that the anniversary has been forgotten in the aftermath of former Governor Vladimir Yakovlev leaving office.
Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst at the Sociology Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that, if the anniversary celebrations are still going on, then it is just for the authorities' benefit.
"They got as much money for the elections as they did for organizing the celebrations, and the only thing they care about is to get close enough to the feeding trough to get their food," Kesselman said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Last spring, local media reported that about $1 billion was being transferred to the city from the federal budget to finance the anniversary.
The gubernatorial elections are scheduled for Sept. 21, with 11 candidates in the race to take over at Smolny. Yakovlev was appointed by President Vladimir Putin to work as deputy prime minister responsible for communal-services reform in the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on June 16.
"Many things have been painted, many roads have been re-asphalted, but the paint has faded in some places by now and the asphalt started [cracking]," Kesselman said.
"I feel like everyone has forgotten about the anniversary, which just proves that it was organized only for the authorities, to get some advantages for them in particular," he said. "They have squeezed out everything they could have."
Local politicians also said that the jubilee is far from their minds at the moment. Vladimir Yeryomenko, an independent lawmaker in the Legislative Assembly, said he has no personal inclination to celebrate.
"I have the feeling that the anniversary year is still on, given that anniversary events are still taking place in the city," Yeryomenko said in a telephone interview on Monday. "But there are no emotions, as there were during the actual anniversary week."
"The other thing is that the celebrations are getting no attention because of the transition period and the current power vacuum," Yeryomenko said. "The representatives of power are now concentrating on the elections, rather than on anything else."
Olga Pokrovskaya, a member of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly, said she did not notice the celebrations at all.
"All these exhibitions and concerts taking place in the city look like ordinary events from any other year," she said. "It just happened that the 300 anniversary has smoothly transformed into the gubernatorial elections, with all the usual suspects."
Yury Vdovin, co-chairperson of the local branch of international human-rights group Citizens' Watch, said the only consequences of the anniversary for him is that he can no longer wash his grandson in the shower.
"The hot-water pressure dropped after the anniversary, that's what I noticed," Vdovin said in a telephone interview on Monday. "The water temperature jumps like crazy, so it's hard to find when it's hot and when it's cold."
"Nothing has changed," he said. "I still live in a communal flat ... I love my city, because I was born here, but it's shame that it has such a bitter fate."
TITLE: Kungayevs Move to New Norway Home
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Fearing for the safety of their remaining children, the family of murdered Chechen woman Elza Kungayeva has moved from the squalor of an Ingush refugee camp to an apartment in a small town off Norway's coast.
For three years, Visa and Rosa Kungayev have been in and out of courtrooms fighting for the conviction of former Colonel Yury Budanov, who last month was sentenced to 10 years in a high-security prison for strangling their 18-year-old daughter in March 2000.
Now that the battle is over, they are worried about the future of their four other children, who they say have lived in constant fear of Russian troops and are far behind in school.
"You can imagine how they felt after seeing what happened to their sister," Visa Kungayev said by telephone from the family's new home in the island town of Floro.
His two older children, Khavazhi, 17, and Khaza, 16, "are embarrassed because they cannot keep up with a fifth-grade level," he said. The two younger children are Khasi, 15, and Larisa, 13.
Kungayev said that he is not satisfied with the Budanov verdict, which came in a retrial ordered after Budanov initially was found mentally ill. "The most important charge, the rape of my daughter, was dropped," he said.
A preliminary autopsy concluded that Elza Kungayeva had been raped, but later forensics experts decided that she had been beaten in the groin area with a blunt object, and the rape charge was dropped.
Budanov has admitted to killing Kungayeva, but said he did it in a fit of rage because he thought she was an enemy sniper. A Rostov-na-Donu military court convicted him on charges of kidnapping, murder and abuse of authority.
"I asked them to give him a life sentence or give back my daughter," Kungayev said.
Human-rights activists, who helped the Kungayev family relocate to Norway, said that the guilty verdict was a step in the right direction. However, the family has received a number of threats, and it is not safe for them to live in Chechnya, said Patricia Kaatee, an adviser for the Amnesty International human-rights group in Norway.
"It is the first case when a high-ranking military official is being forced to take responsibility for a gross violation of human rights. But it is also a tragedy that the family has been faced with so many threats that they have had to flee the country," she said.
"It wasn't safe," Kungayev said.
Leaving those memories behind, Kungayev, 49, said he is looking forward to seeing his children go to school in Norway and plans to study the Norwegian language himself. He joked that after three years in court he and his wife have unofficial degrees in law - and added in all seriousness that they were considering attending law school in Norway. But this is not the last the family will see of Chechnya, he said.
"We have not asked for political asylum," he said. "We will stay here until things settle in Chechnya and then go back home."
The Norwegian branch of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the UNHCR invited the family to Norway and helped them obtain refugee status there.
They arrived in Oslo on Wednesday after flying from Nazran, Ingushetia, via Moscow and Stockholm. Waiting to meet them were human-rights activists, government officials and members of Norway's Chechen diaspora, Kungayev said.
This is the first time the family has been abroad.
On Thursday, the family arrived at their apartment in Floro, 540 kilometers west of Oslo on the Atlantic coast. "This exceeded my highest expectations," Kungayev said. "A room for the two older children, a room for the younger children and a room for me and my wife, plus two bathrooms, a hall and a big kitchen.
"The tent we lived in in Ingushetia was full of holes. It was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer," he said. "The whole family lived there, sometimes more when we took care of relatives' children from Chechnya."
TITLE: Krasnodar Rocked by Series of Bombs
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A series of bomb explosions shook the southern city of Krasnodar on Monday, killing at least three people and wounding at least a dozen of others, officials said.
The explosions occurred near two cafes and a bus stop in the capital of the Krasnodar region, said Vitaly Tushev, a duty officer at the local branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry.
Tushev said the type of the explosive devices and possible motives behind the blasts were not immediately known.
An official investigation has started, and local police were put on high alert.
Another regional Emergency Situations Ministry official, Alexander Lemeshev, said one victim was killed instantly and two others later died of wounds in the hospital. He said that another 12 people were wounded.
He said the attackers used explosive devices that each contained about 200 grams of TNT, and put them on top of bus and tram stops.
Lemeshev said the attacks appeared to be linked to a property dispute between two local criminal clans.
Other officials also pointed at a criminal score-settling as a possible reason. They also said, however, that investigators were not excluding a terrorist attack.
Krasnodar police chief Sergei Kucheruk said the fact that the explosions occurred virtually simultaneously in crowded public places backed the theory of a terror attack. He said that the bombs were stuffed with metal bolts, nuts and screws for maximum damage.
Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov held a telephone conference with local police officials, and sent his deputy to the region, Interfax reported.
The office of Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachev offered a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators of the attacks, Interfax reported.
Several bomb explosions and other attacks have recently rocked Moscow and a handful of cities and villages in southern Russia - mostly in the North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. The government has blamed most of the attacks on the Chechen rebels.
TITLE: 'Lara Croft' Star Visits Camps in Chechnya
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is currently in movie theaters all over the country as Lara Croft, the pneumatic computer-action figure whose missions require impossible feats and mind-boggling stunts.
On Sunday evening, the "Tomb Raider" left Russia after a four-day mission that required feats and stunts of a completely different kind.
Jolie came for a whirlwind tour of refugee camps in Ingushetia and North Ossetia to raise awareness of the plight of Chechen refugees in her role as UNHCR goodwill ambassador.
She called on the government not to force the refugees at the Bella camp in Ingushetia to return to Chechnya against their will.
"I think that it is a question we all need to raise now. If Bella camp is closed and people are not given an option of housing, then I would consider it forced. That is not voluntary repatriation," she said at a news conference on Sunday.
"Those families that want to return are supported by the UN, but we have concerns for people who don't," she said. "I do believe that it is a very dangerous place still in Chechnya. They should be given a choice where to be housed."
At least 53,000 refugees remain in Ingushetia. Authorities say they will close down all the camps before the Chechen presidential election Oct. 5.
Speaking at the news conference, Jolie could have been any United Nations diplomat giving a report on the refugee crisis in Ingushetia. She spoke without notes.
The main difference was that photographers don't usually fight and swear at each other as they struggle to take pictures in Russia's UN office.
"I've worked for [the UNHCR] a few years and visited refugee camps all around the world. My concerns are humanitarian not political," said Jolie, after the photographers had calmed down enough for her to speak.
On her visit to Bella, some refugees complained that they did not manage to speak to her because of the tight security. Others told her of the numerous relatives who had been killed in the war.
"I would go into a dusty canvas with holes, and the family would find food they had saved - even rations from UNHCR - and insist on sharing. They take great pride in being good hosts," Jolie said.
"I have to take my hat off to her. She's a wonderful woman," said Joseph Gyorke, UNHCR's regional representative in Russia. "She has contributed millions of dollars to the UNHCR."
Jolie became a UNHCR goodwill ambassador two years ago after she had filmed the first Lara Croft movie in Cambodia - she later adopted a young Cambodian boy.
"I love acting, but it is also a means to an end to do more good," she said, adding that she takes two months off after every film to help the UNHCR.
"Some of my relatives are Native American, so they were refugees from America," she said with a laugh. "They were internally displaced."
It was her idea to come to Russia and, as with her other trips, she paid her own way. While visiting the Morozov hospital in Moscow, she made a donation of $20,000.
On Thursday, Jolie met with Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov, and she said she won assurances that refugees will not be forced back to Chechnya.
Moscow has long been making this promise, but the UN is still worried about what is happening on the ground at refugee camps.
Jolie, who won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2000 for her role in "Girl, Interrupted," will be back in Russia later this year to star in a new film about Catherine the Great. A copy of a book about the tsarina could be seen poking out of her bag in her car.
She will also return for a follow-up visit to the camps, she said.
Waiting after the news conference Sunday as he had waited every day of her visit was Mikhail Klimash, holding an enormous bunch of 97 white roses. Klimash, who has a Web site (www.angelinajolie.ru) devoted to his drawings of Jolie, had presented her with 97 roses every day, twice on one day, of her visit.
"I thought it was strange that she had no flowers," he said. "It shouldn't be like that."
He managed to hand over the fifth installment to Jolie by Red Square, where she smiled, said, "They're the most beautiful flowers I've seen in all my life," and put them away in the trunk of the UN Volvo sedan.
TITLE: Mid-Term Macro Plan Touted
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's gross domestic product is expected to grow 15 percent to 18 percent by the end of 2005, according to the government's midterm socioeconomic program released Monday.
To achieve this, the economy would have to expand 5 percent to 6 percent peryear for the next three years.
The 117-page document, approved by the cabinet earlier this month, lists dozens of reforms that need to be conducted in practically all spheres of the economy in order to achieve sustainable economic growth.
The document - although written in vague, general terms - also calls for natural-monopoly reforms, energy-saving technologies and focusing social subsidies on those in need.
Despite listing certain achievements of the last five years, such as tax reform and overall economic growth, the document stresses that the current drivers of growth - the benefits for domestic manufacturing of the ruble's weakness after 1998 and favorable world's energy prices - cannot serve as a basis for sustainable growth in the coming years. The ruble is getting stronger and imports are growing.
President Vladimir Putin earlier this year said the economy must double by 2010, sending many government officials in charge of the economy scrambling for a means to secure the promised economic miracle. The government's medium-term program for socioeconomic development seems to be part of the effort.
Economic diversification would be implemented both "horizontally," or across the board, and "vertically," in ways tailored to individual sectors.
The horizontal reforms call for securing equal access to raw materials, energy, and labor. They also promise law and order, the relaxation of currency regulations and guarantees by the state that conditions for enterprises will not worsen.
Vertical measures involve promoting private enterprises in the manufacturing, processing and service sectors. Processing is to be a priority not only in the fuel and energy sectors but in timber and agriculture, too.
But despite its rather ambitious scope, the document left little impression on observers.
Alexei Moiseyev, chief economist at Renaissance Capital investment bank, said the document is more or less a repeat of things previously voiced by the government and is likely primarily to reflect the cabinet's need to appear dedicated to economic growth.
"The forecasted GDP growth is not out of the loop and is likely to coincide with reality," he said, noting, however, that to deliver Putin's promise of doubling GDP, these high growth rates will be necessary.
TITLE: Courts Prepare To Run Most-Indebted Regions
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In 2007, federal arbitration courts will be able to appoint special financial administrations to intervene in heavily indebted regions, according to amendmends to the Tax and Budget codes approved at last week's Cabinet meeting.
According to the drafts, temporary financial administrations will step in for regions where debts amount to over 30 percent of its income, excluding transfers from the federal budget.
Who, precisely, will be appointed to haul regional finances out of the red is not yet clear.
Nor is it clear what the role of the region's finance officials will be during the intervention year. The amendments are believed to be part of a package of laws now being prepared by the presidential administration's commission, headed by Dmitry Kozak, which deals with the redistribution of power among regional and federal administrations.
Which regions are financially troubled have not been identified.
Deputy Finance Minister Tatyana Golikova, who presented the amendments to the cabinet last Thursday, did not name any region that may become subject to the new law.
Another deputy finance minister, Anton Siluanov, told Rossiya television's Vesti program last Thursday that, now, "None of the regions are up to these criteria, and it is too preliminary for the regions to worry about it."
Vesti did, however, name Ulyanovsk as one region that is lagging far beyond the criteria, with a debt burden equal to 52 percent of its regional income. In Ulyanovsk, though, the regional finance committee's acting head Irina Batrakova refused to confirm or deny the figure, saying that information is "confidential."
And Ulyanovsk is not alone. Vesti also said that the Kostroma, Kursk, Tver, Murmansk, Altai, Krasnoyarsk and Chukotka regions have debts that exceed 20 percent of their incomes. In Omsk and Kurgan, Vesti said the regional debt burdens are closer to 30 percent.
The program did not give sources for the information.
Governors have mixed feelings about proposed intervention of federal financial controllers.
"I believe that it is fair," Krasnoyarsk Governer Alexander Tkachyov, told Vesti. "The federal center has the unique capability to control regional finances. There are regions where debts are higher than the budget itself."
But Yaroslav Governor Anatoly Lisichkin argued that such intrusion violates the rights of people living in the regions.
"People elected the governor, they trust him. So the federal authorities must trust them too," he said, speaking on the same program.
Felix Ejgel, an associate with public-finance rating company Standard & Poor's, said that it is impossible to point fingers at so-called bad regions, because there exists more than one way of calculating debts.
"A lot will depend on how the payable debt will be calculated and how tough the criteria is that is used to assess the debt," Ejgel said. "Now, there is no simple, standard method to calculate it."
Ejgel said it is very important to clearly and transparently outline the mechanism of the application of the law because otherwise the complexity of the issue may be used to put political pressure on "bad governors."
"Abroad, such temporary administrations are being introduced to benefit people. Here, the tool can be used as a form of pressure on the regions and their administrations. We can only hope now that these shortcomings will be resolved by the time the amendments are finalized," Ejgel said.
"It is very important that the tool is used to help people, but not as a lever the Finance Ministry can use to change an administration," Ejgel said.
TITLE: Firms Split Over WTO Role in Governance
AUTHOR: By Alex Fak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian membership of the World Trade Organization would create a chasm between companies with good corporate governance and those with none, as a few firms would attract increased foreign investment while many more would perish, a survey by the Investor Protection Association has shown.
The survey, conducted from March through May and presented at a business round table last week, demonstrated that domestic firms have a long way to go in terms of transparency, independence of auditors and directors and protection of shareholders.
Around 70 percent of companies said they do not release information about major investors' and executive board members' ownership of their stock.
More than 50 percent do not let stockholders know the terms of contracts with top executives, board members and the auditor.
Only 36 percent release audit reports, though Sergei Pokrovsky, who supervised the poll, said the number of such companies is growing.
More encouraging news came from 79 percent of respondents who said the role of the firm's corporate governance in attracting capital would increase after WTO entry.
Other results were mixed. For instance, 75 percent of respondents thought that appointing independent board members would raise the level of trust among investors and creditors. Yet many expected problems with independent directors. More than half of all respondents said such directors might be ignorant of the sector.
More surprisingly, a third said that an independent director might not be all that independent; the person could secretly hold stock in the company, or even be allied with competitors.
Sixty two firms from nine industries participated in the poll, of 400 invited.
Several participants expressed concern that managers at most companies, perhaps including some of those who answered the survey, do not truly understand what corporate governance is.
Igor Belikov, head of another corporate-governance group, the Russian Institute of Directors, and a critic of the survey, said that its main fault was in not distinguishing between different types of corporate entities, between industries, or even between publicly-and non-publicly traded companies.
"There is no logic in this survey," he said. "If we want to get a clear picture of the state of corporate governance, then we need to ask companies for whom it is an important issue. It is not a real concern for all companies."
TITLE: Boeing Foresees 30 CIS Orders
AUTHOR: By Todd Prince
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW - Boeing Co., the world's biggest aircraft maker, expects to lease or sell as many as 30 new and used planes to Russia and other Commonwealth of Independent States countries by the end of next year as carriers in the region update their fleets.
"Boeing has already signed agreements with some Russian and CIS airlines and is close to signing agreements with others,'' said Viktor Anoshkin, a spokesperson for the Chicago-based planemaker, in a telephone interview from his Moscow office.
Aeroflot and other domestic carriers are flying more passengers as the economy grows for a fifth year, the longest period of expansion since the Soviet Union collapsed. Aging aircraft, falling leasing prices and the inability of the country's planemakers to meet domestic demand are pushing Russian airlines to look to foreign producers.
Boeing and its biggest competitor, European Aeronautic, Defense & Space Co.'s Airbus SAS division, were among 118 exhibitors from outside the Commonwealth of Independent States at last week's Moscow air show. Boeing Capital Corp., the company's leasing arm, said that it is opening a representative office in Moscow to be led by Mher Papyan, 33, a former director at Armenian International Airways.
Russia and other CIS countries have leased about 80 planes from Boeing over the last 10 years, Anoshkin said. Leasing contracts may accelerate as Russia meets more international rules to join the World Trade Organization, Anoshkin said.
"When Russia joins the WTO, it will be very positive for Boeing Capital,'' he said.
The carriers are also buying more planes from abroad because "one, Russian airlines now have some money,'' said Tim McCutcheon, an analyst at Moscow-based Aton Capital Group. "Second, leasing is cheap now as no one is buying planes'' in other parts of the world.
Domestic airlines were operating 3,978 aircraft, including 47 planes built outside the country, as of January, according to a report by the Moscow-based Renaissance Capital investment bank. Domestic planemakers build between five and 21 planes per year. Boeing estimates that Russian carriers will need about 160 planes over the next five years, while about 800 airliners will be retired by 2010, said Craig Jones, the planemaker's vice president of sales in Russia and the CIS. Russian-built planes do not satisfy European noise regulations going into effect in 2006, he said.
Boeing expects to continue yearly investments of $100 million in Russia "as we see lots of potential in different areas,'' Jones said.
Boeing has invested $1.3 billion in the country in the past decade in aviation and space projects and is a consultant on the $600 million Russian Regional Jet program of OKB Sukhoi, the state-owned builder of Sukhoi fighter jets.
TITLE: Aeroflot's New Image Set To Take to the Airwaves
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As Aeroflot works to implement the new image crafted for it by British branding firm Identica, the flagship airline said on Monday that it will launch an 18-month television and billboard advertising campaign in October.
To oversee the effort, Aeroflot last week tapped Moscow ad agency Media Arts FCB to run the campaign meant to win over new clients to the carrier's new values.
These values involve showing off the softer side of the airline, which was long infamous for its chilly demeanor. Aeroflot's new priorities call for greater sincerity, hospitality, professionalism and more focus on serving passengers and meeting world class standards, Tatyana Zotova, the head of Aeroflot marketing department said by phone Monday.
Media Arts, whose client list includes juice and dairy giant Wimm-Bill-Dann, German cosmetics-maker BDF Beiersdorf and Rossia television, is a newcomer to the airline business.
Media Arts itself is a unit of Foote, Cone & Belding, which is in turn owned by New York-based Interpublic, the world's No. 2 advertising firm, according to a statement released by the airline.
"[Aeroflot and Media Arts] have been given a month to put together a TV commercial that we will start broadcasting in mid-October," Zotova said, adding that the commercials will run in the lead-up to the key summer and winter travel seasons through 2005.
The campaign's budget has yet to be determined, but it will not exceed $2 million this year, Zotova said.
In 1997, Aeroflot launched its first memorable but vague television commercials depicting an elephant gradually rising from over the horizon through a heat haze into a brilliant blue sky, to the tune of a slogan that, loosely translated, said that the airline was "fast to take off" or "light on its feet."
It was not clear what effect the campaign actually had. Zotova said that no records of the campaign, organized by the Premier SV advertising agency, remain with the company.
Although both Aeroflot and Media Arts have kept mum on what the airline's new slogan or image will be, Zotova said it definitely will not involve elephants or any other animals.
Elephants aside, the old hammer and sickle will still grace the new silver, blue and orange livery of the Aeroflot fleet.
Last Friday, the airline received its first Boeing 767 of the total 27 foreign jets with which it plans to upgrade its fleet. By 2005, Aeroflot plans to have eight more such planes along with 18 Airbuses 319/320. The Western planes' relative efficiency compared to domestic planes is expected to save the airline up to $100 million a year.
This efficiency, however, is being questioned by the National Reserve Bank, an Aeroflot minority shareholder, which holds around a 30-percent stake in the carrier.
Through the Ilyushin Finance Co. leasing company, NRB has an interest in the Voronezh aviation plant, which makes long-haul Ilyushin 96s.
Eager to sell ten more of those planes to Aeroflot, NRB president Alexander Lebedev said last week that he will ask Aeroflot's board of directors to hire independent consultants to verify whether Western planes do indeed have lower operating costs, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Report: Abramovich Considering F1 Addition to Sports Stable
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Having recently bought English soccer club Chelsea, Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich is considering investing in Formula One, planning to buy one of the sport's financially troubled teams, British newspapers reported.
Formula One racing is the oil and aluminum tycoon's second-favorite sport after soccer, popular tabloid The Sun reported last Thursday, noting that Abramovich has recently been in contact with the sport's senior officials.
The Sun report said that Abramovich might have struck a deal with European Minardi, the weakest team on the current Formula One grid, having been around for a decade without yet winning a single race. Team owner Paul Stoddard, an Australian, met with Abramovich last month and invited him to "save the team" by buying into it.
Minardi's finances were so poor ahead of the start of this year's racing season in March that Bernie Ecclestone, who owns all the rights to the sport, was reported to have personally invested $3 million into the team to keep it afloat.
Minardi is now estimated to be worth $118.7 million, The Sun reported.
Abramovich has already invested nearly $500 million in soccer, having bought Chelsea, covered its debts and bolstered the team with a raft of all-star players.
Britain's The Guardian newspaper reported Saturday that Abramovich may be considering buying not Minardi but another racing team, Jordan, which enjoyed success in the late 1990s before running into financial trouble in recent seasons.
Jordan team owner Eddie Jordan evaded questions Friday on the eve of the Hungarian Grand Prix, insisting that he had "not personally" talked to Abramovich, the Guardian report said.
Jordan refused to say whether there have been any contacts between his team and potential investors and said, "I am not going to answer that, on the grounds that I might have to lie to you."
Last month Abramovich was a guest of Ecclestone at the European Grand Prix in Nuerburgring, Germany, where he visited the Minardi pit, The Guardian reported.
John Mann, a spokesperson for Sibneft, the oil major in which Abramovich holds an ownership stake, denied any knowledge of negotiating of a purchase.
"I know that Roman likes Formula One but I am not aware of any plans to buy a Formula One team," Mann said on Sunday.
TITLE: Norilsk Reaps Benefits of Recovering Expectations
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Bolstered by expectations of global economic recovery and a labor strike at the mines of its major international competitor, Norilsk Nickel has seen its fortunes soar.
Its market capitalization is a notch below $9 billion, meaning that the company is about five times bigger than it was at its previous, pre-crisis peak in 1997. This is the largest gain over the period of any of Russia's blue chip stocks, excluding Yukos and AvtoVAZ, two companies that only joined the top tier of publicly-listed firms in the last couple of years.
But analysts say the company will hold on to its gains only if expectations of global economic recovery materialize.
"Mining stocks attract a lot of attention in the current environment," said Coast Sullenger, a fund manager with Lombard Odier Bank in Geneva. "Norilsk Nickel is a case in point."
Morgan Stanley's worldwide cyclical index, which only measures stocks that are highly sensitive to swings in output, has risen by 45 percent since mid-March versus the broader S&P 500, which gained 25 percent, according to Investor's Business Daily.
"Mining stocks are trading higher on expectations of economic recovery," said Ingrid Sternby, metals analyst with Barclays Capital in London. "They've been going up on the back of improving leading indicators."
After two years of economic slowdown, consumer-durable-goods production in the United States rose by 2.3 percent in July after a 1-percent gain in June, and construction starts for new single-family homes hit a 17-year high in July.
Ideally, investors would prefer to snap up physical assets themselves, but equity is easier to acquire than, say, a platinum mine, so speculators betting on economic growth add mining shares to their portfolios, Sternby said.
Nickel prices have been on the rise since the fourth quarter of 2001, reaching a 3 1/2-year high of $9,825 per ton last week, an increase of more than 70 percent from December 2001.
Norilsk's spectacular rise has also been fueled by a three-month labor strike at Canada's Inco, which claims some 20 percent of global nickel sales.
Worldwide, Norilsk commands 22 percent of the nickel market, 45 percent of palladium, 10 percent of platinum and 10 percent of cobalt.
However, it may be that hopes of recovery do not soon materialize, in which case Norilsk will start going downhill.
"What we hear from many [mining] companies is that there is no sign of demand picking up," Sternby from Barclays Capital said. "This is why we expect the upward trend to be choppy."
The company's stock closed at an all-time high of $40.75 last week.
Zenith Bank set its 12-month target for Norilsk at $45 per share, up from earlier expectations of $36 per share.
"It may be that prices drop from current levels, but we revised upward our fair price for the company, seeing a deficit of nickel and platinum on international markets," said Sergei Suverov, the head of research at Zenith Bank.
TITLE: The Real Problem? Visas
AUTHOR: By Yuri V. Ushakov
TEXT: The Russian-American relationship has a serious problem. No, it's not Iraq, Iran or North Korea, each of which is the subject of complex but productive dialogue. The problem is more mundane but still potentially disruptive. It is the problem of American visas.
It's encouraging that Russia and the United States work well together to try to overcome repercussions of the Iraq war and to continue their cooperation on a wide range of issues. The special trust between Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush - and good working relationships among many senior officials - complement our important common interests and values.
But sustainable strategic partnership between Russia and the United States will not be possible without considerable improvement in contacts between our societies. Broader public dialogue and exchanges are essential to building a solid foundation for bilateral relations in our democratic political systems.
Regrettably, the public dialogue between Russia and the United States is suffering real damage from U.S. visa policies, which sharply and unduly restrict business trips, academic exchanges, tourism and other travel by Russian citizens to the United States. Even official delegations have experienced unnecessary denials and delays. As a result, the visa problem has become one of the thorniest issues on our bilateral agenda. It is also an emotional issue among the Russian people and in the State Duma, where anxiety over this problem could have unpredictable consequences.
Everyone in Russia understands why America must be careful after Sept. 11. Many Russian citizens have died in terrorist attacks in recent years. What Russians cannot understand is why, for example, Russian high-school students should be considered a threat to American security. This summer a group of bright teenagers from across Russia - invited by a member of Congress - were told the night before their scheduled departure that they would not receive visas. This particular trip was saved through political intervention, but the vast majority of Russians seeking to travel to the United States do not have political patrons. Hundreds of student applicants for the summer work and travel program are still waiting for visas, with very little summer left. One in every three Russian college students who requests a visa is turned down.
Russian officials were not able to attend the recent Earth Observation Summit in Washington because they were refused visas. There have been similar incidents involving members of the Russian Academy of Sciences and other officials and experts invited to participate in different events.
Even more disturbing are instances of visa denials in the so-called humanitarian cases when people are not able to join other members of their families already in the United States or visit ailing relatives or deal with other emergency situations.
For many Russians, applying for a visa is their first direct experience with the United States; sadly, it is rarely a pleasant one. And even if visas are granted, they are routinely issued at the last minute, adding unnecessary stress. New procedures effective Aug. 1 require mandatory personal interviews for most applicants and are likely to make a bad situation even worse.
Consider the realities of life in Russia. It spans 11 time zones, and yet it hosts four American consular posts. A resident of Sochi on the Black Sea coast would have to make a 3,000-kilometer round trip to Moscow, spend the night there and pay a $100 fee (itself nearly a full month's average wage) simply to be interviewed - and then might have to wait weeks or months to learn whether a visa will be granted.
It was not so long ago that the United States was actively promoting the idea of people-to-people contacts, while the Soviet Union resisted. Now it is the other way around.
Mandatory interviews would be understandable if they were an effective barrier against terrorism, but most interviews involve less than three minutes of conversation with an overloaded consular officer. In-depth personal interviews are surely essential in some cases, but wholesale pro-forma interviews create hardship and ill will while providing little or no security benefit. Everything that has been done recently by U.S. authorities to complicate visa procedures is, unfortunately, an invitation for reciprocal measures. I hope that we will not be forced to take such measures.
There is a better way. Russia and America's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are working together ever more effectively, as demonstrated by their recent collaboration to foil a plot to smuggle Russian-made surface-to-air missiles into the United States. Russian agencies can readily provide much more information on suspicious visa applicants than can be gleaned from a brief interview.
Exchange of intelligence on terrorist organizations and organized crime between our security services, creation of common databases on illegal immigrants and on criminal activities and closer cooperation between our law enforcement agents of the type described above will surely be a much more reliable deterrent against potential terrorists than indiscriminate interviews of law-abiding citizens.
This kind of cooperation would be a major step forward in broadening the practical joint efforts of our two governments. Finding a solution to the visa problem will strengthen the U.S.-Russian partnership.
Yuri V. Ushakov is Russia's ambassador to the United States. He contributed this comment to The Washington Post.
TITLE: What's Up With Russia's Soccer Team?
TEXT: Russian Football Union President Vyacheslav Koloskov was right to call last Thursday's resignation of national-team coach Valery Gazzayev "a sad day for Russian football." Koloskov's complaints about the players, however, highlight a deeper problem for Russian sports in general, and soccer in particular, at the national level.
"We give [the players] everything: excellent training facilities, the best care, best hotels, food, etc. They travel first class, they earn big money from their clubs and huge bonuses playing for the national team. What else do they need?" Koloskov asked.
One word: Motivation. Even this is disingenuous, however, as most soccer fans in other countries will tell you that no-one should need financial incentives, for example, to play for their country. The best example, love him or hate him, is David Beckham.
The England soccer captain is not only one of the finest midfielders currently playing, he is also arguably the most famous face in any sport internationally at the moment. In short, if Koloskov is right, Beckham would have no reason to to pick up the telephone if England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson called.
Yet, last Wednesday, captain Beckham turned an ordinary performance by England into an encouraging win over Croatia.
Why? Because it was England. It's that simple.
And this is the crux of Russia's problem: There is no understanding of what Russsia is, post-1991, or of what people can be proud.
Friday's National Flag Day provided a timely example of this. An unscientific poll of Russians in and around our office showed that most of them had no idea what Friday's holiday was all about. (Answer: The readoption of the red-white-and-blue tricolor as the national symbol following the failed putsch of August 1991 in Moscow.)
For a country that prides itself on the concept of narod, or people, and uses the word nash - our - as a synonym for Russian, there is currently a vacuum at the center of national identity. This vacuum must be filled if Russia is again to enjoy the sporting success that was a feature of the Soviet Union.
Back then, things were different - people played for the U.S.S.R. because they were told to - but there was a concept of what it meant to represent the country.
National Sports Committee head Vyacheslav Fetisov recently made a revealing comment about the late Herb Brooks, who steered the U.S. hockey team to the "Miracle on Ice" win over the U.S.S.R. at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Fetisov said that Brooks helped him realize that "a modern coach is first of all a wonderful psychologist."
Maybe Russia could learn something from the man who orchestrated the downfall of the Soviet hockey machine nearly 25 years ago.
TITLE: Journalists Have A Jolie Time for Visit of Actor
TEXT: Going into the weekend, virtually everyone in the media that noted Angelina Jolie's visit to Russia complained that she was not immediately and at all times available to journalists. "According to [Jolie], the attention of journalists will distract her from her peacekeeping duties, and she also would like to be 'completely focused on her mission,'" Gazeta.ru reported, with barely contained skepticism.
"It's unclear," Gazeta.ru added, "whether there'll be any sort of use out of the movie diva's visit to a refugee camp." Kremlin officials, planning a reception for Jolie, impatiently tapped their feet and waited for her to quit wasting time down south. "We're very pleased, of course, that a movie star has come to visit," a government official said, adding that of course it happens all the time.
Gazeta.ru twice more in the same article complained that Jolie did not sit down across from their reporter, grab her lapels and wrench bare her cleavage. At least I assume that was the core complaint.
Newsru.com found its own solution, accompanying a tiny article about Jolie with four photos, including one of her chewing playfully on the stem of a flower, another of her sensuously eating grapes.)
Hardly any media mentioned that the refugees Jolie planned to visit were slated for repatriation against their will back into a war zone. Instead, Gazeta.ru's report concluded by noting, "It was exactly one month ago that sex symbol Jolie, having gathered a press conference, declared to all of society that she had not made love in more than a year because she was tired of men."
Here's Komsomolskaya Pravda's equally breathless coverage:
"At 8 o'clock [Friday] she was expected for dinner with Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov ... The menu was fish, and especially for Jolie there were many Diet Coca-Colas on the table - rumor had it that she preferred that drink to others. But the actress did not even touch her cola, preferring to spend the whole evening nursing mineral water ... As was confirmed for us by the ministry, Angelina really does have a pretty good understanding of refugee problems. True, she was advised not to fall for any possible tricks upon her visit to the Caucasus, [such as] when the same woman might cry about her sad fate in different tents."
Yes, those sobbing Chechens all look alike, don't they.
All across Moscow this weekend, reporters told their friends how cute Angelina Jolie was with her little badge and her "diary," and put on knowing airs about how it's not at all clear what good comes of having a Hollywood star visit refugees. And then, no doubt, they went home and masturbated sulkily, thinking about what a "bitch" Angelina Jolie is, giving up sex like that and talking to Chechens instead of journalists.
It's really enough to make you wish for a journalists-only tent camp in Ingushetia - complete with guards who charge in with heavy black varnished nightsticks to drag journalists, weeping and thrashing, toward Chechnya-bound trains.
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, writes the Daily Outrage for The Nation magazine. [www.thenation.com]
TITLE: Bomb Blasts in India Kill More Than 40
AUTHOR: By Ramola Talwar Badam
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOMBAY, India - Bombs exploded in a crowded jewelry market and a historical landmark in Bombay on Monday, killing at least 40 people, wounding 150 others and shaking buildings in India's financial capital.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the two blasts, which came the same day as the release of a long-anticipated archaeological report on a religious site in northern India claimed by both Hindus and Muslims. The dispute has been linked to previous bombings.
Telephone lines were jammed and mobile phone services briefly crashed as panicked residents called family and friends.
Police issued security alerts for Bombay and India's capital, New Delhi, calling police officers back from leave in case of further trouble.
The bombings killed at least 40 people and wounded 150 others, said Javed Ahmed, a police commissioner for Bombay.
"Blasts in a crowded place in Bombay are aimed at creating terror," he said.
Asked if the explosions could have been to avenge killings last year in the western state of Gujarat - violence sparked by reaction to the disputed religious site - Ahmed said: "It could be that."
One explosion was at the Gateway of India, a famous seaside landmark and tourist attraction built by India's former British colonizers to commemorate the 1911 visit of King George V, Ahmed said.
The other bomb rocked the Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded market of jewelry stores, said a police official, who asked not to be identified. Both spots are in southern Bombay. Police said earlier reports of four explosions had been wrong.
Stock prices fell quickly following the blast reports. The benchmark index of Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, closed at 4,005, down 119 points or 3 percent.
Nuclear rival Pakistan, with whom India has engaged in decades of bloodshed, condemned the attacks. The neighbors have fought three wars - two over the divided region of Kashmir - and nearly started a fourth last December. New Delhi accuses Pakistan of supporting militants, which Islamabad denies.
"We deplore these attacks and we sympathize with the victims and their families. Civilians have been targeted, according to the news reports we have been hearing, and we condemn all acts of terrorism," Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Masood Khan said. "I think that such wanton targeting of civilians should be condemned in the strongest possible terms."
The carnage shocked even those accustomed to bloodshed.
"I have never seen anything so horrible," said S. Manoj, a doctor at Bombay's J. J. Hospital, describing a scene of "body parts" and burnt corpses. The body parts were placed on stretchers, covered with blood-smeared white sheets and wheeled to the mortuary.
Manoj said some of the injured had been trampled in stampedes after the explosions, and came in with multiple broken bones.
The explosions terrified Bombay residents.
"The building we were in shook and we heard a loud noise," said Ingrid Alva, a public-relations consultant, who works near the gateway.
"I rushed out and saw the crowds at the Gateway of India. We saw some body parts lying around, before we were told to move away by the police," she said.
The blast broke windows at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is across the street from the gateway, and damaged cars in the parking lot, said Ravi Dubey, the hotel's communications manager.
The explosions came just hours after the release of the archaeological report on the disputed religious site in the northern town of Ayodhya. The site has sparked violence before.
In March, a bomb attack on a Bombay train, which police blamed on Islamic militants, killed 11 people and wounded 64 others. That explosion came a day after the 10th anniversary of a series of bombings in Bombay - also blamed on Islamic militants - which killed more than 250 people and injured 1,000.
Police say the bombings were in retaliation for the 1992 destruction by Hindus mobs of the Ayodhya mosque, and to avenge Muslim deaths in riots that followed.
A Hindu mob tore down the 16th-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, claiming Muslims had built it after razing a Hindu temple marking the birthplace of Rama. The mosque's destruction ignited religious riots that killed 2,000 people across India, a predominantly Hindu country of more than 1 billion people, with the world's largest Muslim minority of 140 million.
Hindus want to build a new temple on the disputed grounds near Ayodhya, 194 kilometers southeast of New Delhi. Muslims demand the land be returned to them so they can build a new mosque.
The report, issued by the government archaeological agency Monday, indicated there had been some sort of ancient structure at the site, lawyers for both sides said, though they disagreed on whether it said there had actually been a temple. The report was released to lawyers and has not been made available to the public or the media.
TITLE: As Bonds Mourns Father, Giants Losing Their Way
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN FRANCISO - Jeffrey Hammonds hit two doubles, made two superb catches in left field and drew a standing ovation at Pac Bell Park.
He's still no substitute for Barry Bonds.
The San Francisco Giants began an indefinite stretch without their superstar on Sunday, looking a bit lethargic in a 7-4 loss to the Florida Marlins.
Bonds, leading the majors with 39 home runs, was placed on the bereavement list a day after the death of his father, Bobby. The NL West-leading Giants held a brief team meeting before the game to talk about how to cope.
"We'll do the best we can," manager Felipe Alou said. "Mentally, these guys know they can win a game without Barry. Hopefully we can win a couple more before he comes back."
Hammonds filled in for Bonds and did a nice job, and the sellout crowd saluted him.
"They appreciate baseball out here," he said. "I've just got to go out there and do my best for as long as I have to. I don't have a choice."
Miguel Cabrera and Derrek Lee each homered and drove in three runs as the Marlins ended a five-game losing streak.
Florida sent San Francisco to its only defeat on a six-game homestand. Earlier this month, Bonds left the team to spend time with his father and the Giants lost four in a row.
Boston 6, Seattle 1. Derek Lowe pitched 7 1/3 strong innings Sunday night, and David Ortiz hit a three-run homer to lead Boston to a 6-1 victory over Seattle - the fifth consecutive loss for the AL West-leading Mariners.
The Red Sox right-hander has allowed a total of three runs in his last three starts, but Boston lost his last game when he left a two-hit shutout after six innings because his thumb blistered up.
"I'm not the only person in the locker room who's got something wrong," Lowe said after Boston beat Seattle for the third consecutive game. "You've got to get over it because the team needs you to be healthy."
The Red Sox have won four in a row overall since falling a season-high 7 1/2 games behind the New York Yankees in the AL East.
Lowe (13-6) allowed one run on five hits and five walks, striking out four before leaving after giving up back-to-back walks with one out in the eighth.
"He has turned the corner from earlier in the season," Boston manager Grady Little said. "Hopefully he can keep it going the rest of the way."
In other games, it was: N.Y. Yankees 7, Baltimore 0; Oakland 17, Toronto 2; Detroit 10, Anaheim 9; Cleveland 7, Tampa Bay 5; Minnesota 8, Kansas City 1; Texas 5, Chicago 0; N.Y. Mets 2, Los Angeles 1; St. Louis 3, Philadelphia 0; Houston 6, Cincinnati 3; Atlanta 12, Colorado 6; Chicago Cubs 5, Arizona 3; Montreal 8, San Diego 4; and Milwaukee 9, Pittsburgh 8.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Khorkina Triumphs
ANAHEIM, California (AP) - With the all-around gold medal on the line and an entire arena spellbound, Svetlana Khorkina was at her captivating best Friday night in the World Gymnastics Championships. She oozed charisma and charm as she sashayed through her floor exercise, giving the "routine" the feel of a prima ballerina's finest performance.
Edging American Carly Patterson by 0.188 points, Khorkina became the first gymnast, man or woman, to win three all-around titles at worlds. She's won 10 gold medals at worlds and the Olympics, a medal haul entire countries can't match.
"I'm so, so sad, but I know I have to finish someday," the 24-year-old Khorkina said. "I think I gave very, very nice gymnastics lessons to many kids in many, many countries."
China secured four medals in the second and final individual apparatus program, with Li Xiaopeng successfully defending his titles on men's vault and parallel bars.
Compatriot Fan Ye took gold on the women's beam, while Huang Xu shared a silver medal on the men's parallel bars alongside Alexei Nemov.
The Russian said he would not defend his all-round crown at next year's Olympic Games, and revealed he planned to retire from the sport in 2006.
"I won't do all-round, because I have a weak shoulder," Nemov told reporters. "After the Olympics I will be around for two more years."
Japan's World Series
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania (AP) - Tokyo Musashi-Fuchu routed East Boynton Beach 10-1 on Sunday night, with Yuutaro Tanaka striking out 14 and homering and Hokuto Nakahara hitting a grand slam to net the Little League World Series for Japan.
Japan (6-0) broke open a scoreless game with eight runs in the fourth inning.
Eito Ono was hit by a pitch with two outs and the bases loaded and Kazumasa Sakamoto drew a walk from Michael Broad (2-1). Nakahara sent the next pitch over the wall in center field for a 6-0 lead and his first home run of the series.