SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #897 (65), Friday, August 29, 2003
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TITLE: N. Korea Planning To Test Its Nukes
AUTHOR: By Yuri Kageyama
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - North Korea told a six-country conference that it has nuclear weapons and has plans to test one, a U.S. official said on Thursday. However, other participants said delegates agreed on the need for a second round of talks.
 
The remarks by North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il set a negative tone at the conference and raised questions about the success of the negotiations, which were scheduled to conclude Friday morning.
 Kim at one point accused delegates from Russia and Japan of lying at the instruction of the United States when they tried to point out positive aspects of the American presentation, according to a U.S. official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.
 Kim said that North Korea intends to formally declare it has nuclear weapons, has the ability to deliver them, and intends to conduct a test, the U.S. official said.
 The North Korean said that his country was maintaining its position because the United States clearly had no intention of abandoning its hostile policy toward North Korea, the official said.
 The statements, coming on the second day of a three-day conference, startled the delegates and left the Chinese representative visibly angry, the official said.
 Nevertheless, the diplomats agreed on the need to hold more talks and probably will, a South Korean official said.
 The current round of talks are scheduled to end Friday after three days. The United States, North and South Korea, Russia, Japan and China are trying to balance U.S. demands for an end to North Korea's nuclear program and the communist country's insistence on a nonaggression treaty with Washington and humanitarian aid.
 "There is a consensus that the process of six-party talks should continue and is useful," said Wie Sung-rak, director-general of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's North American Affairs Bureau. Like other delegates from the talks, he chose his words carefully to avoid suggesting a formal agreement had been made.
 Asked to verify a Russian media report that all six would meet again within two months, he said: "It's possible, but you have to wait until tomorrow morning."
 Russia's Alexander Losyukov, the deputy foreign minister and the head of Russia's delegation, earlier had said that the six reached a "common understanding" to meet again within the next two months, probably in Beijing, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
 The United States said that it would hold no formal one-on-one talks with North Korea at the three-day summit and the Americans played down the importance of an informal meeting Wednesday between the top U.S. and North Korean envoys on the sidelines of the talks.
 That half-hour meeting between Kim and Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly ended four months of official silence between the two countries.
 A U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Beijing said that "there will not be any separate formal bilateral meetings with the North Koreans." The official spoke on customary condition of anonymity.
 Pyongyang had long demanded one-on-one talks with the United States, but dropped its objections to the multilateral arrangement after Beijing agreed to host it.
 Many believe that North Korea wanted such direct talks to increase its standing in East Asia and to convey its demands directly to the United States. Washington, though, wanted the opposite, and said that the situation affected the entire region and should be dealt with multilaterally.
 The three-day summit came together after months of political maneuvering when China - political ally of North Korea and economic partner of the United States - agreed to be the host. The six-party talks are a continuation of discussions from April, when U.S., Chinese and North Korean officials met in Beijing.
 Tensions and hostilities have been escalating since October, when Pyongyang acknowledged - to Kelly himself - that it had restarted a nuclear program it had supposedly shut down. The United States has demanded that North Korea stop the program immediately, while impoverished North Korea has refused to budge without guarantees of security and economic aid.
 U.S. officials say that they believe North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, and experts believe it could produce five to six more in a few months.
 In a separate meeting after Thursday's talks adjourned, Japan urged North Korea to let the children of five Japanese citizens kidnapped and spirited to North Korea years ago join their parents, who were permitted last year to return to their homeland.
 North Korea, however, reiterated its assertion that Japan had broken a promise by not returning the five abductees to Pyongyang, according to a statement by the Japanese government.
 The kidnapping of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s by North Korea - to train its spies to assume false identities - has stalled efforts by the two countries to set up diplomatic relations and halted Japan's food aid to impoverished North Korea.
 Delegates from the North and South also got together after the talks ended Wednesday, meeting for a half-hour, said Shin Bong-kil, spokesperson for the South Korean delegation.
 The Koreas were divided in 1945 and share a heavily fortified border. The Korean War of 1950 to 1953 ended without a peace treaty.

TITLE: Putin To Get Star Treatment in Italy
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin will kick back this weekend at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's luxury villa on Sardinia, where he will go sailing, be serenaded by tenor Andrea Bocelli and get a chance to check out 400 cactuses planted especially for his visit.
 
Putin, his wife, Lyudmila, and their two teenage daughters arrive Friday for a three-day stay at the 2,500-square-meter La Certosa residence on the island's northern Costa Smeralda, famous for its crystal-clear waters, white sand beaches and pink granite rocks.
 Berlusconi, a lover of what the Italian press refers to as "entertaining diplomacy," has special treats in store for his "caro amico Vladimiro," or "dear friend Vladimir" - the informal way Berlusconi addresses Putin.
 Life has been very busy in recent weeks at La Certosa, which is on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea and surrounded by 50 hectares of park. Workers have enlarged the park's artificial lake and planted a 500-year-old carob tree near its shores. Berlusconi, who has a passion for gardening, bought the tree at the botanic gardens in Cagliari, the Sardinian capital.
 Gardeners also have planted 400 cactuses that Berlusconi ordered from the Canary island of Lanzarote. The cactuses form a natural amphitheater that Putin will be able to admire from an enormous gazebo at weekend concerts.
 For the concerts, Berlusconi has invited the platinum-selling Bocelli, who sings opera arias and Neapolitan folk songs. According to Italian media reports, Berlusconi is planning to sing a duet with Bocelli.
 Neapolitan folk singer Mariano Apicella, who the press calls Berlusconi's private minstrel, has been invited as well.
 Apicella, 39, became a star a few years ago when Berlusconi heard one of his performances in an Neapolitan restaurant and invited him to sing at one of his villas. Since then, Berlusconi and Apicella have been inseparable. The prime minister loves to compose songs for Apicella to sing, and the two often sing together.
 "[Apicella] will sing Berlusconi's songs especially to the Russian president," said Giampiero Cocco, a reporter with the La Nuova Sardegna newspaper.
 Berlusconi, who is trying to lose 350 grams a day on a diet, loves jogging and, according to Italian media reports, is planning to invite Putin to go jogging with him in the morning.
 "If Putin does not like to jog, he will be given the chance to go horseback riding," said Augusto Ditel, a La Nuova Sardegna reporter who has been covering Berlusconi's guests for years. Ditel said Berlusconi has a stable of horses.
 Berlusconi, who has said he wants to make his villa a kind of U.S. Camp David presidential retreat, receives foreign dignitaries and holds news conferences there.
 Sardinia Island also is a popular vacation spot for wealthy tourists, and a number of Russians have been spending their summer vacations there in recent years.
 "Putin won't be the only Russian on Costa Smeralda. More and more Russians are coming to this area," said Vito Fiori, a reporter for the Unione Sarda newspaper.
 "Russian is one of the main languages spoken here these days," he added.
 This is Putin's first visit to the island, but his daughters Masha, 18, and Katya, 17, stayed there as Berlusconi's guests last summer. Berlusconi's daughter Barbara, 18, is studying Russian, according to Italian media reports.
 Security is high for the visit - and the Italians are getting a kick out of the fact that Russian navy ships that are part of Putin's security detail are anchored several hundred meters from a U.S. naval base.
 Three ships from the Black Sea Fleet anchored off the Sardinian coast on Wednesday, and two of them are near the Santo Stefano base, which is visited by U.S. nuclear submarines for routine maintenance checks and supplies.
 The Moskva cruiser and its escort ship, the Smetlivy, are about two kilometers from the Maddalena Archipelago, off Sardinia's northern coast, an Italian navy spokesperson told the Italian press. The third vessel, the Ivan Bubnov tanker, is staying in international waters.
 "This is the first time that we have seen Russian navy ships so close to an American base," said Cocco, whose newspaper, La Nuova Sardegna, ran a story Thursday with the headline "The Russians Are Close to the Americans."
 Unione Sarda announced the ships with the headline "Tsar Putin's Vessels Have Arrived."
 "People here understand that this is an important event," Cocco said. "We are seeing Russian vessels near an American base for the first time. You have lines of cars trying to catch the scene from different panoramic spots."
 Italian press reported that Putin and Berlusconi will hold a joint news conference on board of the 186-meter Moskva. The Black Sea Fleet's commander said a reception also will be held aboard the cruiser, Interfax reported.
 It was unclear which day the events on the ship would be held. Berlusconi's office and the Kremlin are refusing to comment about the visit.
 An official from the Olbia airport, located 30 kilometers from Berlusconi's villa, said that two Tupolev jets with "a lot of KGB guys on board" landed Wednesday. The official, who asked not to be identified, said four armored cars were unloaded from the planes.
 Italy has beefed up security on the island with scores of officers from the police, the military police, the finance police and the secret services.
 "For the Italians, security also is not a joke," Cocco said.
 On Saturday, Berlusconi and Putin are to board the 25-meter Yacht Argo, owned by the Italian navy, and sail along the northern Sardinian coast.
 Putin will not spend the whole weekend relaxing. He and Berlusconi plan to hold informal talks about Russia-EU ties and international problems.
 The visit is the first of two Putin plans to make to Italy while Berlusconi holds the rotating EU presidency, which he took over in July for six months.
 Putin will visit again in November to hold bilateral talks and take part in a Russia-EU summit. Russia wants the summit to focus on visa-free travel between Russia and the EU and its bid to join the World Trade Organization.
 Berlusconi visited Russia in February and July this year.

TITLE: Buildings' Residents Out of Hot Water
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While the city's previous governor, Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Yakovlev, is traveling around the country inspecting the level of preparedness for the upcoming winter, the people who live in the apartment buildings at 24 and 26 Bulvar Novatorov don't have much faith that it will help them.
 
Their heating and hot water were switched off a number of times in February and then, in May, it was turned off completely. The residents say that they there is little hope that they will receive these services again any time soon.
 "We sent [complaints] everywhere. I have all the documents here, but no hot water," Ivan Vorobyov, a 72-year-old pensioner, said on Thursday.
 Vorobyov says that he moved from Petrodvoryets to the newly built three-room apartment at No. 26, for which he paid local real-estate developer LEK, $26,000 in 19998.
 Now, he is sitting in a kitchen of his neighbor with a file folder filled with dozens of copies of letters that a group of residents of the buildings have sent to the local administration, City Hall, the office of the presidential representative in the Northwest Region and the Prosecutor's Office. All of the letters have received the same kind of reply: "Your information has been sent to the responsible organizations for examination."
 The reason that the residents have not been receiving heating or hot water, according to officials at the property department of the Kirovsky District, in which the buildings are located, is the state of the pipes in the building. The property department says that the separate station that was built along with the buildings to provide them with hot water and heat was constructed without a special device to filter excess salt and oxygen from the water that it pumps. In the six years since the buildings were finished, the insides of the pipes had become crusted with salt and other sediment, leaving little room for water to flow.
 "We found out from City Hall that there is a regulation requiring that the pipes be replaced every 15 years. Does that mean that we have to wait another ten years without hot water?" Voryobov asked. "That is why we went out on to Leninsky Prospect. What else could we do?"
 At 8 a.m. on Thursday, a group of about 100 of the buildings' residents, carrying posters demanding that their complaints be addressed, blocked traffic on Leninsky Prospect for an hour. The police arrived on the scene after about 20 minutes, and tried to convince them to clear the road, but they finally left only after Kirovsky District authorities came and discussed their complaints with them.
 But the tenants remained angry during interviews only a few hours later.
 "It was so cold here in the winter that my son and I had to sleep together in one bed," Tatyana Chernykh, 33, an independent financial expert, said in the apartment of her kitchen on Thursday. "He is in school, but he was ill for about 30 percent of the days this winter."
 Chernykh said that she paid $32,000 for her three-room apartment in 1998, and had a water heater installed when she moved in.
 "We had it installed for situations in the summer when the hot water is switched off for repairs, as usually happens," she said. "We didn't imagine that we would end up using it like this.
 Olga Gorshkova, 45, a doctor, moved to a three-room apartment with the help of the municipal administration, as part of a program to move people from the extremely cramped apartment buildings built in the 1960s. The buildings are commonly referred to derogatorily as <i>Khrushchyovky</i>, after Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at the time.
 &quot;Conditions are terrible. I have no faith in the government,&quot; Gorshkova added. &quot;There was the 300th anniversary, and they talk about pension reform, but they can't even help with this. My pipes ruptured three times this year alone. Twice they were heating pipes and once it was in the bathroom.&quot;
 Gorshkova said that she is forced to boil water on her electric stove, which raises her electricity bills - money that no-one is planning to pay her back.
 &quot;We haven't had hot water for about a year already. Even when it's running, it's running cold,&quot; she said.
 Konstantin Afanasyev, an official with the property department in the district, says that heating will not be a problem in the winter, as the pipes for this are in better shape than those that provide the hot water.
 He also says that the difficulties are not the fault of his department.
 &quot;This is all the fault of the comrades at Dachnoye [the property-management firm for the buildings],&quot; Afanasyev said. &quot;Today, an inspector from Lentransgas wrote them a request to take cover their debts to the utility.&quot;
 He said that Dachnoye owes gas suppliers and producers 530,000 rubles (about $17,500) and has already written letters promising to cover the debts in order to get the delivery of gas resumed.
 Igor Zhivitsky, the head of Dachnoye, said that the developer doesn't have the money to cover the gas bill because the City Housing Agency, which collects money for communal services - including utilities payments from the buildings' residents - does not make up for the difference between the discounted prices some of the residents are charged and those the company is actually responsible to pay to the utilities providers.
 &quot;They owe us about a million [rubles] ... I'm not a rich person. What do I have to do? To sell my apartment, to take clothes from my child? I am not going to do that,&quot; Zhivitskiy said in a telephone interview on Thursday, &quot;They will switch the water back on, only to turn it off again because there is no money to pay for it.&quot;
 In the second quarter of this year, St. Petersburg residents paid just 77.6 percent of all money owed to utilities suppliers, including heating, gas, electricity and water suppliers, RBC reported on Aug. 11.
 Zhivitskiy did admit that there was a is a problem with the condition of the pipes and with the absence of the filtering device at the heating station, but said that work to replace the pipes was on the way and just depended on financing.
 &quot;The right pipes weren't installed originally because it wasn't included in the project,&quot; he said.
 Afanasyev suggested that the residents should file a law suit against Dachnoye and LEK based on the fact that the wrong pipes had been installed in the buildings and that the heating station was approved without meeting proper requirements.
 &quot;LEK got approval for the completion of the station and then just forgot about it,&quot; Afanasyev said.
 LEK could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
 Zhivitskiy says that he is convinced that such a law suit would inevitably be unsuccessful.
 &quot;On what grounds could this type of law suit be filed against me. I didn't sign any agreements with the residents,&quot; Zhivitsky said. &quot;This is the Housing Agency's fault,&quot; he said.
 The City Housing Agency could not reached for comment Thursday.
 Gorshkova says that what was, for her, meant to be a step up in living conditions, has turned into a nightmare.
 &quot;Now, when I think of my old apartment, I remember it with good feelings,&quot; she said.

TITLE: Anniversary Events Are Far From Finished
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although the current race to fill the vacant post of St. Petersburg governor has largely distracted public attention away from the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations, the list of events dedicated to the tercentenary still looks to provide some hectic times ahead.
 
The events include festivals of the cultures of various countries, all sorts of sporting events, cultural happenings of various shades and a raft of more scholarly gatherings. There are also some more idiosyncratic events - such as a bread holiday, slated for early September.
 In total, the St. Petersburg 300 Committee currently has 45 events scheduled for September alone, and the figure is set to rise to over 120 by the end of the year.
 In the short term, the ongoing Days of Thailand in St. Petersburg, which kicked off on Tuesday, wraps up on Sunday. By the time it finishes, the event will have included a spectrum of attractions ranging from a Thai-cuisine festival and Thai massage sessions in the Grand Hotel Europe to a Thai Fair at Lenexpo, a youth Thai-boxing tournament and performances by the Thai Royal Ballet at the Musical Comedy Theater on Ploshchad Iskusstv.
 Coming up soon are Days of Delhi, from Sept. 1 to 7; the Scottish Highland Games, a traditional event in the city that, this year, has signed up as part of the anniversary celebrations, from Sept. 5 to 7; the Week of Finland, from Sept. 8 to 13; Japanese Autumn, another festival of Japanese culture, from Sept. 14 through Oct. 18; days of the Netherlands and Lithuania; as well as a whole month of European culture.
 The events are all being organized by the City Administration's External Affairs Committee.
 &quot;The Days of Delhi will include an exhibition of ancient Indian manuscripts at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a meeting of Indian and Russian artists and a gala concert by Indian singers,&quot; committee press secretary Vyacheslav Burtsev said in a telephone interview this week.
 According to Burtsev, the Week of Finland will be broad in scope, featuring a visit by the Finnish prime minister, an exhibition about Finns in St. Petersburg, workshops, photographic exhibitions and other events.
 Meanwhile, the Scottish Highland Games will indulge St. Petersburgers with plenty of Scottish music, dancing, traditions like tossing the caber - and probably a fair amount of whiskey.
 &quot;The festival of European culture will also be very interesting,&quot; Burtsev said.
 The cultural program for the next month includes &quot;Singing Nevsky,&quot; a festival of street musicians (Sept. 13-14); a festival of Latin-American dance (Sept. 20-27); an exhibition called &quot;Museums of Russia to the State Russian Museum&quot;; a tour by Sicily's Massimo Bellini Theater (Sept. 13-30); concerts by local stars such as Shostakovich Philharmonic Artistic Director Yury Temirkanov; and the sixth running of the Earlymusic festival (Sept. 17 through Oct. 10).
 Meanwhile, the international charity the Pushkin Foundation is planning to host a Pushkin-themed ball &quot;Golden Fall&quot; to honor the city's jubilee in the White Hall of the State Russian Museum's Marble Palace.
 The scholarly aspects of the celebrations will also be continuing on a substantial scale. This side of the 300th anniversary got off to a high-profile start in June, when Nobel Prize winner Zhores Alfyorov, a native of St. Petersburg, assembled dozens of Nobel Prize laureates in the city for the first time.
 This month will see a congress of the CIS Cardiologists' Association (Sept. 18-20); an international seminar on questions of metal treatment at the St. Petersburg College of Mining (Sept. 10-12); and the second international seminar on optical electronics at the Ioffe Physics Institute (Sept. 15-16).
 On the food front, anyone with a sweet tooth should head to Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa on Sept. 9 for the Cake Festival. For those interested in less extravagant food that is more traditional and stable, the City Administration's Economic Development, Industry and Trade Committee is organizing the Milk Festival on Sept. 6 and the Bread Holiday on Sept. 13. Both of these events will take place on Ploshchad Ostrovskogo.
 &quot;Visitors to those events will be offered a very wide range of milk and bread products,&quot; committee press secretary Alexander Sazhin said in a telephone interview this week.
 &quot;There'll be all sorts of bread - white bread, gingerbread, and the latest bread products from local bakeries,&quot; Sazhin said.
 On the sporting front, the anniversary-events list includes this year's ninth running of the annual St Petersburg Open tennis championship (Oct. 21-27).
 The event last year won the ATP award for the best-run event on its circuit. This year will see the return of home favorites and former champions Marat Safin and Yevgeny Kafelnikov, as well as last year's champion, France's Sebastian Grosjean.
 Oct. 24 sees the start of an international chess tournament, while horse lovers will want to head to Komarovo on Nov. 8-9 for the St. Petersburg Governor's Cup international equine-sports championship. December sees the turn of another favorite local sport, hockey, when the St. Petersburg Hockey Federation plans to host a game at the Ice Palace with some of the biggest Russian names in the sport playing.
 The St. Petersburg 300 Committee, which keeps an updated list of events on its Web site, www. spb300.com, says that, although most of September's events are already fixed, the schedule for the last three months of the year is still subject to change.


TITLE: Moscow Looking for Solid Evidence in Iran
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia will not suspend construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran unless the UN International Atomic Energy Agency finds solid evidence that Iran is secretly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, the Nuclear Power Ministry said Thursday.
 
&quot;There have to be solid reasons presented before one suspends cooperation,&quot; a ministry official said in an interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.
 IAEA has prepared a confidential report confirming that its inspectors had found particles of weapons-grade uranium at a nuclear facility at Natanz, the Western press reported earlier this week.
 Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on Thursday confirmed that inspectors had found traces of enriched uranium in Natanz, Reuters reported.
 The leak of the report prompted Washington, which has accused Teheran of seeking nuclear weapons, to renew its call for Russia to suspend construction of the Bushehr plant.
 According to the Russian official, however, the recently found particles of highly enriched uranium do not qualify as a smoking gun, given the possibility and Iran's assurances that the substance was brought in on equipment that was previously imported.
 Thus, the official said, Russia does not expect the IAEA at its Sept. 8 meeting to find Iran in non-compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would require the nuclear watchdog to submit the issue to the UN Security Council for consideration.
 He repeated the ministry's position that Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran is &quot;transparent&quot; and adheres to the nonproliferation treaty and other international nuclear safeguards. He said that Russia will complete construction of the first reactor of the Bushehr plant in 2004 but may send the first batch of nuclear fuel to Iran this year.
 Representatives of the Nuclear Power Ministry and their Iranian counterparts will meet in September to sign an agreement that would require Iran to ship all spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr back to Russia.
 During the meeting, the Russian side will again call upon Iran to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that would enable the IAEA to conduct random inspections of its nuclear facilities, the official said. However, the ministry-controlled contractors will complete Bushehr's first reactor, construction of which was started but then abandoned by Germany's Siemens, even if Iran refuses, the official said. Iran has agreed to sign the protocol, but on condition it is given broad access to peaceful nuclear technologies as stipulated in the treaty.
 While its contractors are busy completing the first reactor, the Nuclear Power Ministry advised Iran not to complete the second reactor. A feasibility study, which was conducted by the ministry earlier this year, shows that it would be more cost-efficient to build a new reactor from scratch, the official said.

TITLE: Rebels Stage Incursion Into North Ossetia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia - Federal forces on Thursday battled a group of Chechen rebels who were heading from Ingushetia toward North Ossetia, the North Ossetian Interior Ministry said.
 
Ministry spokesperson Alan Doyev said that the military pushed the group of about 10 rebels back into Ingushetia's forested mountains near the village of Galashki. There was no report on casualties.
 Officials in both North Ossetia and Ingushetia said that the fighting ended later Thursday in an apparent indication that the rebels had fled.
 Chechen rebels have mounted similar incursions into regions neighboring Chechnya and launched suicide bomb attacks as part of their campaign to push federal forces out of Chechnya.
 Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said Thursday that the authorities would tighten security in Moscow to prevent terror attacks, the Interfax-Military News Agency reported.
 &quot;Controls will be tighter and more thorough at public events, airports, stadiums and everywhere it's necessary,&quot; he said.
 Gryzlov also suggested that organizers of public events should assume full responsibility for the security of the audience.
 In Chechnya, at least seven federal troops were killed in the latest rebel shellings and mine explosions since Wednesday, said an official with the Moscow-appointed Chechen civilian administration.
 Unidentified attackers also broke into the house of Daman Dashiyev, the head of the local administration in the village of Prigorodnoye, and shot him at point-blank range, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Dashiyev was hospitalized in critical condition.
 Federal forces killed five rebels in a clash in the southern Shali region Wednesday, according to the military.
 In Grozny, a teenager was killed as he attempted to set up a landmine, said the Emergency Situations Ministry branch for southern Russia.
 Meanwhile, pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov proposed Thursday setting up a special committee to investigate reports of missing civilians. Rights advocates blame the large number of disappearances in Chechnya on Russian troops, who they say kill civilians or hold people for ransom. This year, more than 300 people have been officially reported missing, Itar-Tass said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Largest Heroin Bust
 </b>

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) -Russian border guards patrolling Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan have seized more than 330 kilograms of heroin in one day - the largest drug bust this year, officials said Thursday.
 The seizure came as Russian officials voiced strong concern about a steadily rising flow of drugs streaming from Afghanistan via Central Asia into Russia, which Russia says has become a major threat.
 Russia's drug-control chief, Viktor Cherkesov, had already visited Tajikistan this week for talks on closer anti-drug cooperation.
 The Russian border guards made the latest heroin bust after an overnight clash with a group of some 10 drug traffickers who tried to cross the border from Afghanistan about 180 kilometers southeast of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, said border guards spokesperson Colonel Alexander Kondratiev.
 
 
<b>Blast From the Past
 </b>

TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) - Residents of Vandra in rural Estonia got a blast from the past as they received voting cards for an upcoming EU referendum in Soviet-era envelopes complete with hammer and sickle, the post office said Thursday.
 National post office Eesti Post apologized for any upset caused by local officials using envelopes from a huge stockpile that was left from before the Baltic country regained independence in 1991, which also carried the acronym CCCP and other Soviet symbols.
 "It's not our practice to use envelopes from Soviet times," Eesti Post spokesperson Inge Rumessen said. "We banned them long ago."
 
<b>
 Jilted Lovers
 </b>

MOSCOW (MT) - Five women in Yekaterinburg are suing a 24-year-old man for dating all of them at the same time and promising to marry two of them, local media reported Thursday.
 All of the women worked with the defendant at the same law firm. They say they now have lost all faith in men and are each seeking damages of between 1,000 rubles and 3,000 rubles ($33 and $100).
 
<b>
 Rocket to ISS
 </b>

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - A Russian rocket, Earth's only link to the International Space Station, is ready for launch Friday with fresh supplies for the cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut working there, Russian space officials said.
 "All is proceeding strictly according to schedule. Everything here on the launch site is as usual, in perfect order," Yevgeny Chorny, deputy head of Baikonur Cosmodrome, said Thursday.
 
<b>
 Schools Closed
 </b>

MOSCOW (MT) - More than 100 schools countrywide will remain shuttered when the school year starts Monday because they fail to meet heath safety standards, the Health Ministry said Thursday.
 New standards involving meals, lightening, heating and other issues were introduced over the summer.
 



TITLE: Subway Plans Return To Sandwich Market
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Subway, the American fast food chain that lost $1.2 million and eight years due to a conflict with a local partner, is making its second attempt to enter the St. Petersburg market. 
 
According to Alexander Popov, legal counsel and acting director of the Nevsky 20 company, which represents Subway Russia in the northern capital, the St. Petersburg Subway shop will open in September. It will occupy the same space on Nevsky Prospekt where in 1994 the first Subway in Russia was opened by Minutka together with East-West Invest, then the owner of the Subway label in Russia.
 The first Subway in St. Petersburg operated under the American sign for just one year. By 1995 relations between the founders were strained and the St. Petersburg company kicked the American partners out of the space on Nevsky. Then the Minutka restaurant continued until May 2002 at this address to sell sandwiches prepared using American technology. It closed only after the City Property Committee managed to annul the lease agreement in court and initiate a case against the owners based on article 330 of the criminal code (taking the law into one's own hands).
 Meanwhile, the Americans filed a case with the Stockholm Arbitration Court, which in 1997 ruled that Minutka should pay $1.2 million (the estimated investment made by the American partner). This ruling was upheld by St. Petersburg City Court and Russia's Supreme Court.
 In April of this year the City Property Committee signed a long-term lease agreement for the vacant restaurant with Nevsky 20, a subsidiary of Subway Russia.
 According to Popov, Subway has yet to see the $1.2 million invested eight years ago. &quot;The company would like to recover either the money or the business,&quot; said Popov.
 Popov declined to comment on further plans in St. Petersburg and said only that the company will be testing the market for about a year before continuing to develop.
 The restaurant is bound to be successful given the prime location, although director of the St. Petersburg Bistro Association Rashid Magdeev says St. Petersburg is not as attractive for Subway as Moscow, where there are currently six restaurants with three more in the works. &quot;The generation raised on hamburgers and Coca Cola is not as numerous in St. Petersburg, and that's Subway's target market... On the other hand, it makes sense for Western operators to stake out space here even with low profits.&quot;
 Subway is second after McDonald's in terms of the number of restaurants worldwide, with more than 19,300 restaurants in 75 countries and 2002 revenues of $5.7 billion.

TITLE: Answers to Russian Complaints About Visas
AUTHOR: By James D. Pettit
TEXT: Two pieces critical of U.S. visa practices and their impact on Russian applicants appeared recently in The St. Petersburg Times: &quot;U.S. Visa Mess Hits Students' Summers,&quot; a staff news article, and &quot;The Real Problem? Visas,&quot; an op-ed piece by Russian Ambassador to the United States Yuri Ushakov, reprinted from The Washington Post. As the newly arrived U.S. consul general in Moscow, I would like to respond with the hope of clarifying certain inaccuracies and misperceptions.
 
First, let me emphasize that the United States remains deeply committed to supporting contacts between ordinary Russians and Americans. Our government spends tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage U.S.-Russian exchanges. In fact, it is the largest bilateral-exchange program we have anywhere in the world. The administration and the U.S. Congress have supported these programs because we believe that people-to-people contacts are the cornerstone of the fundamentally new relationship that our two countries have established over the past decade.
 It is obvious, therefore, that the U.S. Embassy wants Russians to visit the United States, and that we are committed to making it as easy and convenient as possible for them to do so - while remaining consistent with the requirements of U.S. law. We sincerely regret that a number of students and visitors had difficulties with the visa process, and that some were even prevented from traveling at all. This is all the more regrettable because it could have been avoided. Yes, it is true that the U.S. government has instituted new visa procedures over the past year in response to post-Sept. 11 concerns over terrorism. However, this embassy also made a concerted effort to inform exchange organizations about the new procedures and what the various requirements were. Moreover, during the busy summer season, embassy staff worked overtime in order to process a record number of visas.
 Unfortunately, some organizations, such as the one noted in the article, for whatever reason, failed to submit applications in a timely fashion and to instruct applicants properly on application procedures. It was primarily these problems that created the delays in visa processing this summer. We certainly hope that these organizations will be well prepared next year, so that we can avoid this summer's difficulties. Our goal is to provide all applicants with rapid and efficient service but, given the high volumes of applications, our office simply cannot process the large number that do not meet the basic application requirements.
 Despite the fact that we have tightened our visa-processing procedures around the world since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been no significant change in our policy towards Russian visa applicants. Refusal rates for Russian visa applicants have not increased, and continue at levels close to the global average. The number of Russian travelers to the United States continues to grow. Our current system of accepting visa applications by appointment through a private courier service has greatly enhanced the convenience of the process for the average applicant. When I last served in Moscow, there was no appointment system for visa interviews and most visa applicants were required to stand outside in long queues, regardless of the weather. At the time of writing, the average wait for a visitor visa is less than two weeks, and we hope to reduce it even further. The vast majority of applicants for visitor visas receive their visas. In contrast to requirements imposed by the Russian authorities, visitors to the United States do not need to have a &quot;sponsor&quot; in the United States in order to obtain a visa, nor do they need to purchase a hotel or tour package in advance, as most American tourists to Russia are required to do.
 Moreover, it has long been U.S. policy to encourage, on a reciprocal basis, the issuance of visas valid for multiple entries and lengthy validity periods. For example, we extend ten year, multiple-entry visas to citizens of dozens of countries and do not charge separate issuance fees (although the standard $100 application fee applies to citizens of all countries). To date, Russian authorities have not been willing to provide such visas to American visitors and business travelers, and continue to charge hundreds of dollars for multiple-entry visas. Many American business travelers can attest to the difficulties of dealing with the Russian visa regime, which necessitates repeated applications for visas abroad and onerous registration requirements within Russia.
 Finally, however, I must note that, much as we want to help Russians visit the United States, consular officers are also responsible for preventing illegal use of our tourist and non-immigrant visas. By law, all visa applicants have to convince U.S. Embassy consular officers that they are not intending to emigrate to the United States. The plain fact is, some &quot;tourist&quot; visa applicants are intending to do just that, and history shows that over the years many visitors to the United States have overstayed their visas or have found a way to work there illegally.
 I fully support Ambassador Ushakov's desire to improve and foster contacts between our two countries. I myself first came to Russia on a student-exchange program, and I believe the summer-work program described in the earlier article is an excellent example of the kind of opportunities the United States has made available to tens of thousands of young people from Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. There are many such programs throughout the United States. It is my hope and expectation that such programs and opportunities will continue to flourish between our countries and, as consul general, I can assure you that we will do everything we can to support them. It is especially important at this time in history that, even as we work to overcome the inconveniences inherent in any immigration system, we protect the close and friendly relationship we wish to maintain with Russia and the Russian people.
 
 <i>James D. Pettit, consul general at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Just a Little Bit of (Soviet) History Repeating
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: I don't know why exactly, but native St. Petersburgers aren't always happy when people move here from other places in the former Soviet Union - from Ukraine, for example. It's an attitude that seems to have been formed during the city's stint as Russia's imperial capital, and reinforced by a sense of cultural superiority to everyone else - particularly Muscovites - during the Soviet era. Once again, it seems that some things never change.
 
Alexei Timofeyev, one of the candidates in next month's gubernatorial elections, decided to play the anti-outsiders card against Valentina Matviyenko, who is being referred to as St. Petersburg's &quot;governor in waiting&quot; by just about anyone who isn't running against her.
 &quot;Alexei Timofeyev works and lives in St. Petersburg. Valentina Matviyenko was born in Shepetovka and worked in Moscow,&quot; was the slogan written on jackets worn by his election workers while they were gathering the necessary signatures from voters to have him registered as a candidate.
 Timofeyev was saying that Matviyenko's origins are wrong for the city - she is an alien.
 I should explain that the poor future governor (I'm one of those who, by virtue of not running against her, is already allowed to call her this) had the misfortune of being born in Shepetovka, Ukraine. Before anyone writes me an angry letter, I'm not saying it's a bad place. I've never been there, and know virtually nothing about it. But it isn't St. Petersburg, and that, as I've said, doesn't sit well with the locals.
 Part of the misfortune lies in the fact that the name of the town has a comical ring to it, like a place in a satirical novel by Gogol. St. Petersburg, of course, knows its Gogol.
 Another part of her misfortune, according to her campaign literature, is that her family was not blessed with a high income. One pamphlet describes how she came to Russia &quot;in clothes that had been handed down to her by her older sisters.&quot;
 She, needless to say, overcame her humble beginnings to carve out her own place in our city, as the pamphlet (the biography can also be found on the campaign Web site, www.Matviyenko.info.) also points out.
 &quot;She initiated and organized a holiday trip to Leningrad,&quot; the biography says. &quot;She fell in love with the city right away. At once she made her decision: to study, work and live in Leningrad.&quot;
 There was nothing wrong about wanting to come here. Matviyenko was moving within the borders of the Soviet Union, and was just looking for a better life.
 It's likely that the motivations for two other &quot;outsider&quot; candidates to come here - Vadim Voitanovsky was born in Alupka in Crimea, Ukraine and Victor Yefimov was near Pskov - were much the same.
 Matviyenko, should she win, will actually just be following a precedent set by the city's two other post-Soviet leaders. Anatoly Sobchak, St. Petersburg's first mayor, was born in Chita. Recently departed governor Vladimir Yakovlev's biography is even more interesting. His mother, Hilma Lahtinen, a Finn, was sent into internal exile at Olemensk, Yakutia in 1942, after the Red Army had taken her hometown in Karelia from Finland. Yakovlev was born in Olomensk two years later (I'm tempted to believe that his part-Finnish background helps explain some of the gaffes he commits with the Russian language).
 It's common for people here to say &quot;I don't live in Russia, I live in St. Petersburg.&quot; I used to say it myself, when I was still in school. But I don't anymore. Now, I think that it's a shame that some people don't think that others should have a right to chose where they want to live in the country. It's a leftover attitude from the past, and I think that we should jettison it.
 While we're at it, I'd like to toss out another tradition as well: the tear-jerking stories of the humble beginnings of the candidate. When I first read Matviyenko's biography, I had this mental image of the poor girl showing up at a Moscow train station in 1967 with a dirty face and holes in her stockings.
 Yakovlev, at least, was good enough not to spend any time during the 1996 and 2000 campaigns going on about the difficulties of his childhood. Given where he started out, I am quite sure there were times in Yakovlev's early life when he was trudging through the puddles of Olemensk in dirty socks, trousers with holes or shirts with buttons missing.
 The Soviet-era election tradition of the biography of the (only) candidate beginning &quot;Born in a poor family of peasants in a small village ... &quot; should be left as part of history. Not, as the Matviyenko case seems to indicate, a history that is repeating itself.

TITLE: alexandriinsky gets new face
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi was in St. Petersburg this week for symbolic events at two of the city's leading cultural institutions.
 
On Tuesday, Shvydkoi introduced Valery Fokin as the new artistic director of the Alexandriinsky Theater, after presiding at the handover of an historical military standard to the State Hermitage Museum.
 Moscow director Fokin promised a careful approach to the traditions of the venerable Alexandriinsky, which boasts the largest theatrical troupe in Europe, but declared his intention to &quot;end the notorious traditional directing style&quot; that has recently made the theater the butt of critical scorn.
 Ideally, Fokin said, he would like to turn the Alexandriinka, as it is familiarly known, into the Russian version of Paris' Comedie Francais, with fresh and daring experimental renditions of classic works.
 &quot;This theater obviously needs changes,&quot; he told reporters. &quot;But the changes must be well weighed and measured. It would be very wrong to start from a clean sheet with such a venerable troupe.&quot;
 Shvydkoi also made an important change in the Alexandriinsky's organization, with the post of artistic director now the top job above that of director. Theater Director Georgy Sashchenko will remain at the theater, but will no longer have any input into its artistic side.
 As a state theater, changes at the Alexandriinsky must be made by the culture minister.
 Earlier, Shvydkoi was at the Hermitage for the donation to the museum of the St. George Standard that had belonged to the Russian Imperial Army's Lifeguards Grenadier Regiment.
 The regiment was formed on March 30, 1756, by order of Empress Elizabeth. After victories over the French in 1812, it was granted lifeguards status and awarded the St. George Standard. In 1856, Alexander II gave the regiment the standard handed over on Tuesday.
 After the revolutions of 1917, the standard was taken to Paris in secret by the regiment's surviving officers. In 1957, it was taken to London, where it was kept until this summer in the barracks of the Grenadier Regiment of the Royal Guards.
 According to Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, the museum began looking at ways to bring the standard back to Russia almost 10 years ago. In 1994, the standard was brought to the country on the yacht of Queen Elizabeth during an official visit.
 &quot;I then approached the Duke of Edinburgh [the queen's husband] with a request to hand the standard back to the Russians, and the duke promised to think it over,&quot; Piotrovsky told reporters.
 In 2001, a decision was made to return the standard to Russia, following a request from the Hermitage and the Culture Ministry's Cultural Valuables Preservation Department, and it was handed over to President Vladimir Putin during his state visit to Britain in June. 
 The standard will eventually be displayed in the Russian Guards Museum, slated to open in December in the Hermitage's General Staff Building. For now, it can be seen in the museum's St. George's Hall.
 Also during Tuesday's ceremony at the Hermitage, two other local museums, the Tsarskoye Selo Park and Reserve and the State Russian Museum, received artworks that once left Russia in dramatic circumstances.
 The Russian Museum got Fyodor Bognevsky's painting &quot;Portrait of the Great Princess Alexandra Pavlovna,&quot; which was thought to have been lost during World War II. It subsequently turned up at a recent auction at Sotheby's in London, where it was bought by London-based financier and arts patron Jacob Rothschild, who donated it to the Culture Ministry.
 The Alexandrovsky Palace at Tsarskoye Selo was given three watercolors by Mikhail Zichi and Heinrich Kumming that were taken out of Russia by a German officer during the same war.
 &quot;In recent years, Russia, and the Culture Ministry in particular, has purchased artworks for state museums more and more often,&quot; Shvydkoi said Tuesday. &quot;The museums don't just get new items for their collections, they're getting works of art that were taken out of the country or stolen during the Civil War [of 1918 to 1921] and World War II.&quot;
 &quot;The work involved in searching for many of these things has been enormous,&quot; he said. &quot;In some cases, it took decades to find even a trace of a particular work of art.&quot;

TITLE: anglo-dutch psychedelia? join the dots
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With 30 full-length albums in 23 years, a relocation from England to Holland and a huge cult following all over the world, the Legendary Pink Dots have certainly earned their name. 
 
Based in Amsterdam, the seminal Anglo-Dutch band has stretched the bounds of musical style with its signature blend of psychedelia, industrial music and goth. This week, it brings its legendary sound to St. Petersburg. 
 &quot;We are working on fairly recent songs for the Russian shows, because we really enjoyed the tour that we just did in America, at the end of last year. We're adding a few extra things,&quot; singer, keyboard player and lyricist Edward Ka-Spel said by telephone from his home in Amsterdam last week. 
 Over two decades, the band has gone through a series of lineup changes, with its list of former and current members numbering around 30 - as well as various &quot;guests and friends.&quot;
 The current members include keyboardist and group co-founder Phil Knight (a.k.a. The Silverman), saxophonist Niels van Hoorn (a.k.a. Niels van Hoornblower), who joined the band in 1989, and recently-added guitarist Eric Drost. Consolidating the lineup is Raymond Steeg, responsible for the sound.
 Having grown up in east London, Ka-Spel moved the band to Amsterdam in 1985 for personal and political reasons. 
 &quot;I had a Dutch girlfriend at that time ... one very big motivation for me,&quot; he said. &quot;I also didn't really like the way England was. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher, and reflecting on the British Empire again, which is long dead and I'm quite glad for that. There was something very unpleasant in the air back in the middle of the 1980s in Britain.&quot;
 He said the move was productive for his work.
 &quot;In Holland, I just took a big jump and tried to live from music alone,&quot; he said. &quot;I was squatting for the first few years there in a house in Amsterdam ... I could focus completely on just making music. That really helped. That sort of put me on my feet. ... In England I don't think it would have really worked.&quot;
 The political events of the last few years, such as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made a particularly strong impression on the Legendary Pink Dots that can be seen in the band's most recent albums, &quot;All the King's Horses&quot; and &quot;All the King's Men&quot; (both released in 2002), which Ka-Spel described as &quot;brother and sister.&quot;
 &quot;It was like the world had turned upside down, and you can't help being influenced by such enormous events as those,&quot; Ka-Spel said of the Sept. 11 attacks. &quot;As frightening and uncertain as the world became, it also meant there was a plenty of food for thought. I wrote furiously after that event, still am. It's almost as though there isn't enough time to say what you have to say.&quot;
 While the band's 2001 album, the three-CD &quot;Chemical Playschool, Vols. 11, 12 &amp; 13,&quot; is, in Ka-Spel's words, &quot;our ultimate psychedelic release ... a 3 1/2-hour psychedelic journey,&quot; the 2002 discs are gentler and more melodic.
 &quot;We wanted to present the lyrics in a very forthright way,&quot; he said. &quot;So perhaps they were little less psychedelic, but very, extremely direct.&quot;
 The Legendary Pink Dots gig at B2 in Moscow on Thursday was not the first Russian performance by the band, which played a much less publicized concert in Kaliningrad in 1999.
 &quot;That was a great experience, I absolutely loved that show,&quot; said Ka-Spel.
 His own Russian experience goes back to even more distant past - to the late 1970s, when he came to Moscow and St. Petersburg by train.
 &quot;I felt a little lonely, as I knew ten words of Russian, I tried them all out. And people were very kind to me,&quot; he said. &quot;There were odd things, like the phone in a hotel would ring in the middle of the night, but I think it was down more to a faulty phone service than anything more sinister. I basically walked around Moscow and St. Petersburg just to explore ... to get a feeling of the two cities.&quot;
 Although Ka-Spel did not meet with Russian musicians on that first visit, he said he later had brief contact with ZGA (&quot;fantastic group&quot;), an experimental band from Riga, Latvia, that moved to St. Petersburg in 1991. He also boasts a collection of albums by the late local experimental composer Sergei Kuryokhin.
 &quot;Kuryokhin [is] someone I admired very very much,&quot; he said. &quot;I have a lot of records that he made when he was alive. [Kuryokhin's band] Pop Mekhanika is wonderful, actually.&quot;
 With over two decades of music-making behind him, Ka-Spel, whose favorite acts include Krautrock bands from the 1970s and Sid Barrett-era Pink Floyd (&quot;Barrett was absolutely fantastic!&quot;), insisted he is in no way looking backwards. 
 &quot;There's obviously many people who speak in a way that things are not what they've used to be, etc. etc., but frankly I'm not one of those,&quot; he said.
 Instead, he sounded very positive about the current rock music scene.
 &quot;There's a hell of a lot of interesting music around,&quot; he said. &quot;One of the most popular bands in the world is also one of the greatest bands that I've ever heard - Radiohead. ... They are the proof that the music hasn't died.&quot;
 
 <i>
The Legendary Pink Dots play Red Club at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Links: www.brainwashed.com/lpd/. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: As summer limps toward its conclusion in a blaze of showers, St. Petersburgers are returning to the city. Local clubs, of course, are wise to this, and are preparing for the influx of potential clientele. Those clubs, that is, that chose to shut down for a while and have a break - unlike the heroic trio of Moloko, Griboyedov and Fish Fabrique.
 
Red Club reopens on Saturday with a show by psychedelia-tinged Anglo-Dutch Band <strong>The Legendary Pink Dots</strong> (see article, this page), while Par.spb has scheduled its comeback for Sept. 5. Stary Dom, having made a fitful start to its existence earlier in the summer, will be working more regularly starting with the <strong>Kukyrniksy</strong> concert on Saturday.
 Strangely, at the height of all this activity, <strong>(812) Jazz Club</strong> is leaving us for what is known as &quot;reconstruction&quot; - an enigmatic and dangerous place to which many clubs have gone and never returned.
 The saddest example of this phenomenon is Fakultet, or Faculty, which called itself the official club of St. Petersburg State University. Fakultet closed abruptly for &quot;reconstruction&quot; at the beginning of the year, and rumor has it that it will never reopen. Unlike Fakultet, however, (812) sent out emails about its &quot;reconstruction,&quot; meaning there is some hope for a reopening, although no definite date has been set.
 Afro-Caribbean band <strong>Markscheider Kunst</strong> plays at its favorite club, Moloko, on Friday. Since its album &quot;Krasivo Sleva&quot; came out on EMI, the band has been getting some attention abroad, with the BBC's world-music programs playlisting its tracks.
 Saturday night provides a dilemma, with The Legendary Pink Dots performing at Red Club and the extremely lively, punkish <strong>Kacheli</strong> at Fish Fabrique.
 However, given that it is only a 10-minute walk between the two, that gigs at Fish Fabrique rarely start before 11 p.m., and that Kacheli is notorious for only going on stage after consuming several teapots of vodka, it should be more than possible to catch both shows in the course of the evening. The band claims that its shows there are more fun because it has many fans among the club's regulars.
 Another gig not to be missed is <strong>Greblya</strong> a.k.a. <strong>Chufella Marzufella</strong> at Orlandina on Thursday.
 But probably the most interesting event this week will be a secret one - this column was even asked not to disclose the date.
 On an unspecified night, <strong>Tequilajazzz</strong> will celebrate its 10th anniversary while the club <strong>Fish Fabrique</strong> will mark its ninth. It seems that this will be the last chance catch Tequilajazzz's current set before the band goes on sabbatical to reinvent its style.
 
 <i>- By Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: far from the top of the pyramid
AUTHOR: By Greg Walters
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: No matter what you're looking for in a cafe, you probably won't find it at Kair.
 
I say &quot;probably&quot; because Kair (Russian for &quot;Cairo&quot;) does have one moderately distinctive feature: for 100 rubles, you can smoke apple tobacco out of a traditional Middle Eastern water pipe, either in the bright yellow dining room or in the walled-in concrete patio outside. But for non-smokers, such as myself, there is little to recommend this Egyptian-themed cafe tucked away in a backstreet just a few blocks from Gostinny Dvor.
 Although I am no stranger to Middle Eastern cooking, I recognized little on the menu. Undaunted, I ordered the Bedouin salad for 30 rubles ($1), which was billed as <i>tvorog</i>, pepper, bulgar wheat, tomatoes, olive oil, parsley, salt and spices.
 But they didn't have that. So I aimed at something a little more prosaic - the Greek salad. 
 But that was a no-go as well.
 I finally settled on the vegetable salad - not because I wanted it, but because in order to write a restaurant review it is necessary to actually eat something. And they'd put me in a tight spot.
 What actually came was an anonymous pile of cucumbers and tomatoes, unceremoniously supporting a small heap of mayonaise, and for this I was charged 25 rubles ($0.85). So far, I was duly unimpressed.
 But not as unimpressed as I would soon become.
 After my false starts with the salad menu, I decided on a different tactic. I took the advice of the kindly looking Arab gentleman standing behind the counter when he suggested the &quot;kushari,&quot; for 80 rubles ($2.65), as a main course.
 But when the dish arrived, I realized that, although I was not particularly thirsty, it was time to start ordering beer. The microwaved pile of rice, macaroni and lentils was far too bland a dish for what was already an overcast, rain-sodden day. A bottle of Tuborg, at 35 rubles ($1.15), helped, but not enough.
 It is true, and must be said, that the kushari is a hearty meal. And at 80 rubles, it may be among the cheapest and fastest ways to get full without straying more than a few blocks from Nevsky Prospekt. 
 But it is also true that the odd mish-mash of improperly boiled grains and macaroni harkened me back to my college days, when I had stubbornly refused to learn to cook and subsisted for months on things that would not spoil and could be prepared with only boiling water and salt. A reminder of that culinary desert is something I would not wish on anyone, least of all myself.
 Perhaps the waiter saw me struggling, as he soon brought to my table a small glass jar of orange condiment, which he smilingly identified as, &quot;sauce.&quot;
 &quot;Careful,&quot; he said, &quot;it's hot.&quot;
 No, I quickly discovered, it wasn't, and with a sigh I reached into my bag to retrieve a bottle of Tabasco that I keep handy for just such emergencies as boiled beans on a rainy day. And while that precious sauce started to work its magic, I sank back into my chair and reflected that the life of a restaurant reviewer is not always as glamorous as I was raised to believe.
 Determined to find something to like about Kair, I made a desperate last stab at a sure thing - tea (20 rubles, $0.65) and baklava (80 rubles, $2.65). And yes, the baklava was good. Quite good, in fact. Although smallish, and valued as dearly as my main course, that cube of honeyed pistachios topped with paper-thin pastry flakes was a delightful reprieve from what was otherwise a completely colorless dining experience.
 To avoid being overly cruel, I must add that the service was relaxed and friendly, and the atmosphere (apart from the absolutely dire musical selection, terrible even by local restaurant standards) was not entirely repellant. I can imagine that Kair would be a decent choice if, on some summer's evening, I was for whatever reason inclined to sit on a patio eating baklava, smoking apple tobacco and watching the white nights.
 But barring such a unique urge, dear reader, I recommend you go out for <i>bliny</i> instead.
 
 <i>
Kair. 4 Apraxin Pereulok. Tel.: 310-1370. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Credit cards not accepted. Dinner for one, with alcohol (bring your own Tabasco): 228 rubles ($7.60). </i>

TITLE: the brighter side of new-look bratislava
AUTHOR: By Sam Thorne
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Drop into conversation that you've been to Bratislava and most people will probably gaze at you blankly in response. For years, just about its only distinction was being Czechoslovakia's third city, overshadowed not just by bigger, more beautiful Prague but also by Brno, no less. Point out that Bratislava is now in its second decade as capital of independent Slovakia and some people will still be none the wiser - take U.S. President George W. Bush, for example, replying here to a question from a Slovak journalist: &quot;The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas.&quot; In fact, Bush had entertained the leader of Slovenia. 
 
For all its relative anonymity, however, Bratislava is a lively, up-and-coming place, with an attractive old town set along the north bank of the River Danube and a vibrant student population. In the past decade, much has been done to spruce up the city, and the mostly pedestrianized, cobbled streets of the old town are now packed with cafes and bars, and thronged with thoroughly westernized bright young things. 
 Situated at the meeting point of Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria, Bratislava has also regained some of the cosmopolitan atmosphere it was known for in its pre-communist days, when it was an important center in first the Hungarian and later the Austro-Hungarian empires. In the 18th century, the Italian adventurer Casanova was even moved to describe Bratislava as the most beautiful city in Europe. Such flattery would be a little far-fetched today but Bratislava is still a pleasant, relaxing destination, with some of the attractions but none of the sightseeing hordes of Prague.
 The main pleasure of Bratislava consists in just wandering the narrow old streets, stopping off to drink the odd coffee and watching the world go by, but there are a few sights worthy of closer inspection. A good place to start exploring is in the conjoined main squares of the old town, Hlavne Namestie and Frantiskanske Namestie, a lovely tree-shaded space surrounded by stuccoed mansions (now given over mainly to cafes) and centered on Maximilian's Fountain, with its statue of the 16th-century Hungarian king Maximilian II. Legend has it that the fountain used to be decorated with four urinating boys, but prudish townsfolk replaced them with the four cherubs holding strategically placed fish that you can see today. 
 On the east side of Hlavne Namestie, you'll notice the patterned, tiled roof and Baroque clock tower of the Old Town Hall, which has an elegant, arcaded inner courtyard and contains a medieval torture exhibition in the dungeons. Also worth visiting here, in a quiet little piazza behind the town hall, is the late-18th-century Primate's Palace, painted pastel pink and topped by a cast-iron archbishop's hat to honor its first occupant, the head of the Hungarian Church. The palace's star attraction is its Hall of Mirrors, where Napoleon and the Austrian emperor Franz II signed the Treaty of Pressburg (as Bratislava was then called) in 1805, following the Battle of Austerlitz, in which the French routed the Austrian and Russian armies. 
 South of Hlavne Namestie, on the corner of Panska and Rybarska, is one of Bratislava's quirkier sights, Cumil (the Peeper), a life-size statue leering at passers-by from inside a manhole. The Peeper almost lost his head a couple of times to careless driving, so the city council has put up a traffic sign to warn people of his presence.
 A little further south, you come to the grandiose late-19th-century Slovak National Theatre, in front of which is the Ganymede fountain, made of bronze and depicting the eponymous Trojan youth being abducted by Zeus disguised as an eagle. The theatre dominates the east end of Hviezdoslavovo Namestie, a boulevard lined with trees and cafes leading down to the waterfront and the Most SNP (Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising), an audaciously designed suspension bridge with a UFO-shaped cafe perched on top of two massive leaning stilts at its southern end. Construction work on the bridge, which is known also as the Novy Most, began in the late 1960s and controversially involved bulldozing most of the old Jewish quarter. The bridge's busy access road has also seriously undermined the foundations of the Gothic St. Martin's Cathedral, which for almost three centuries was the coronation church of the kings and queens of Hungary and is now undergoing extensive repairs.
 Cut off from the rest of the old town by the bridge is Bratislava's hilltop castle, a solid-looking, boxy structure that was reconstructed in the 1950s and 1960s after drunken Austrian soldiers burnt down the original 15th-century building in 1811. The castle now houses an interesting museum of Slovak crafts and furniture, but it is worth visiting as much for its wooded grounds, which catch a breeze off the Danube even on a hot day and offer terrific views over the old town and across the river to Bratislava's high-rise suburbs. The Hradna Vinaren here is a great place for a drink or a meal, preferably on its shady terrace.
 East along the waterfront from the Most SNP are the eminently missable Slovak National Gallery and Natural History Museum, as well as a hydrofoil terminal with boats to Budapest and nearby Vienna. Continue heading east, however, and just off Safarikovo Namestie, at Bezrucova 2, you'll find one of Bratislava's architectural gems, the sky-blue, Art Nouveau St Elizabeth's Church, otherwise known as the Little Blue Church. Designed in the early twentieth century by Odon Lechner, the church is made of concrete but it looks, with its rounded edges and decorative swirls, more like an icing cake.
 To the north of Safarikovo Namestie is the long, thin Namestie SNP, where thousands of Slovaks gathered in 1989 to play their part in the Velvet Revolution, the series of mostly peaceful mass demonstrations that brought about the end of Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution was followed just over three years later, on January 1 1993, by the Velvet Divorce, which divided Czechoslovakia into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, after 74 years of troubled coexistence. At the centre of Namestie SNP is the Monument to the Slovak National Uprising, an earlier attempt to win Slovak independence that was brutally suppressed by Czechoslovakia's Nazi occupiers in 1944.
 At its western end, Namestie SNP merges into Hurbanovo Namestie, where you'll find the hefty Kostel Trinitarov, filled with red and grey marble and superb <i>trompe l'oeil</i> frescoes. Across the road from the church, a footbridge passes over the old city moat and through the first arch of the last remaining double gateway into the old town. Above the second arch soars St. Michael's Tower, its graceful Baroque spire reaching more than 50 meters into the sky. The tower contains a reasonable exhibition of weapons, but the main reason to venture inside is to climb up to its viewing platform. From this vantage point, you'll notice the occasional dilapidated old house amongst all the restored finery of the old town, hinting at harsher times that are hard to imagine now, sipping a cappuccino in one of the chic pavement cafes below. 

<strong>How To Get There.</strong> Aeroflot (Tel. 753-5555) has two flights weekly and Slovak Airlines (Tel. 234-4446) has three flights weekly from Moscow directly to Bratislava.
 
From St. Petersburg, you can fly by Pulkovo Airlines to Vienna's Schwechat airport, which is only 45 kilometers from Bratislava and connected every one to two hours by bus.
 
 <strong>
Where To Stay.</strong> Caribic's (Zizkova 1/A. Tel. 421-2-5441-8334. www.caribics.sk) offers pleasant rooms in an old fishermen's lodge below the castle, as well as a well-regarded fish restaurant on the ground floor. Doubles are priced from $51 per night.
 
The best-value option in the old town is Gremium (421-2-5413-026), with basic en suite facilities plus a good cafe and lively sports bar downstairs. Doubles are priced from $38.
 
 <strong>
Where To Eat</strong>. The Viennese-style Kaffee Mayer, on Hlavne Namestie, is a good place to stop for coffee and cakes, as is Korzo, on Hviezdoslavovo Namestie overlooking the Most SNP.
 
Hradna Vinaren, on the castle grounds, is worth visiting for its excellent Slovak dishes, while Caribic's (see above) specializes in fish dishes. Prasna Basta, near St. Michael's Tower at Zamocnicka 11, is a cozy, low-ceilinged place with a pleasant summer terrace, serving up tasty Slovak and international cuisine.

TITLE: lock down at vladimir central
AUTHOR: By Sveta Graudt
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VLADIMIR, Central Russia - Even veterans of St. Petersburg's most exclusive cafes and clubs would be impressed by the hurdles they have to jump to get into the museum at Vladimir Central. Armed guards are one thing, but aren't high brick walls and four rows of barbed wire pushing it a little too far? Not at all, administrators seem to think. After all, Vladimir Central is a working prison, and one of Russia's oldest and most notorious at that. 
 
The museum at Vladimir Central provides a fascinating look at more than 200 years of Russia's prison system, which today ranks second in the world in rate of incarceration (the United States ranks first). But located on the prison grounds, the exhibit is also a total immersion into life at Vladimir Central today. The prison's current inmates, all male, have been convicted of particularly violent crimes or transferred from elsewhere for repeat violations of prison regime. Their sentences begin at five years and run to life.
 Just to be safe, the museum sticks to wooden mannequins of its inmates for its regular exhibit. Greeting visitors at the door is one of these wooden convicts, dressed in a gray and black-striped suit and matching hat. His hands are covered with massive rings and tattoos, and behind him is a narrow prison bed.
 &quot;After the war with the Nazis in 1945, all of the clothes from the concentration camps were passed on to the gulag and since that time it has been customary to dress the most dangerous prisoners in striped robes,&quot; said Major Igor Zakudayev, the museum's director. 
 Opened five years ago, the two-room museum showcases handmade playing cards, as well as knives and saws that were found hidden in wooden spoons or hollow books during cell searches. One of the glass cases even features a $100 counterfeit bill that an inmate painted by memory.
 Together, these objects piece together the private life of a prison that has been at the hub of Russian history for as long as it has existed. Founded in 1783, Vladimir Central housed many of Russia's most illustrious political prisoners of the 19th and 20th centuries. Photographs of these inmates and prison documents modestly decorate the walls of the first showroom.
 Staring out of one of these pictures is a 19th-century convict, his forehead and cheeks branded by a hot iron. Branding thieves and dangerous convicts before their exile to Siberia was customary until Alexander II's prison reforms declared the practice inhumane. New and improved shackles were introduced in its place, as well as the custom of shaving off half of the prisoner's hair. As to whether the newer shackles were any better, visitors may judge for themselves from the spiked throat-cuff in the exhibit and the handcuffs, circa 1906, that are still being used at the detention center. 
 According to Zakudayev, the older methods have their advantages. &quot;These handcuffs were twisted around the convict's wrists, like some garage locks today, while modern handcuffs can be opened with a pin,&quot; he said, adding that there had even been an instance when a pair of handcuffs was unlocked with a wad of chewing gum.
 After the revolution in 1917, the prison was delegated to inmates found guilty because of their high social status - a serious offense in the new Bolshevik state. Many former prison wardens were shot or imprisoned. In the chaos that followed, the Soviet Union's inexperienced new prison authorities turned over the administration of several prisons to their inmates.
 Vladimir Central soon became the punitive destination for several famous writers, scientists and civil rights activists who had been imprisoned for anti-Soviet propaganda. Among the inmates profiled in the exhibit are philosopher Daniil Andreyev, well-known Duma deputy and White Army supporter Vasily Shulgin, space medicine pioneer Vasily Parin and singer Lidiya Ruslanova. 
 By 1940, there were 510 active prisons in Russia, including six prisons specially marked for enemies of the state. Vladimir Central was among the latter. The exhibit shows photographs of several of those prisoners, their faces marked with black ink. The political prisoners were also clearly branded with yellow stripes on the side of their trousers and caps with yellow bands. 
 Prison regime mirrored Communist party life, with some prisoners allowed special privileges - pocket money, permission to write and family meetings - that other prisoners were not. Such inmates included Josef Stalin's son, Vasily, and relatives of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the dictator's wife. Required to keep a low profile in the prison, they went by numbers instead of names.
 From the 1950s to the 1970s, the prison was home to famous writers, scientists and civil-rights activists imprisoned for anti-Soviet propaganda. A faded document on display describes American pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down in central Russia in 1960. Sentenced to ten years in prison, Powers was released from Vladimir Central in 1963 in exchange for Russian spy Rudolph Abel. 
 The last part of the exhibit brings the museum's history into the present, with display cases filled with boxing gloves, soccer balls, judo kimonos and telephones, produced by the inmates during the workday. In a more private gesture, the exhibit also showcases a set of brightly-painted figurines molded from bread during the prisoners' off-time. Among them are pirates, buxom beauties, and miniature self-portraits of the inmates themselves, sporting prison stripes. 
 
 <i>
The museum of Vladimir Central is located in Vladimir at 67 Ulitsa Bolshaya Nizhegorodskaya. Tel.: (0922) 32-3997/2033. Visits must be arranged in advance. An admission fee, based on the size of the group, will be charged.
 
Getting to Vladimir involves going first to Moscow, whence Vladimir is 180 kilometers northeast. The journey takes about three hours. By car, take Shosse Entuziastov to Gorkovskoye Shosse, which will lead to Vladimir. Commuter trains and buses leave Moscow from Kursky Station. From the train or bus station in Vladimir, take trolleybus No. 12 to the Ploschad Frunze stop.</i> 


TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: Dukh</i>: new conscript (army slang)
 <i>Dukh</i>, like <i>dusha</i>, takes you through a universe of meanings, idioms and useful expressions. The most common meaning of dukh is &quot;spirit.&quot; <i>Dobry dukh</i> is an angel or good spirit, <i>zloi dukh</i> is an evil spirit and <i>Svyatoi Dukh</i> is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. <i>Dukh</i> can also mean a ghost: <i>V etom dome nochyu khodyat dukhi</i>. (At night spirits visit the house.) It can also mean &quot;spirit&quot; or &quot;spirits&quot; in the sense of emotional state: <i>On segodnya ne v dukhe.</i> (He's out of sorts today; he's off today.) <i>Ne padai dukhom!</i> (Don't lose heart! Buck up!) <i>Nado mne sobratsq s dukhom i pozvonit emu.</i> (I have to pluck up my courage and give him a call.) <i>U menya dukhu ne khvatayet.</i> (I don't have the heart for it.) It can also signify the essence or meaning of something, as in the phrase <i>dukh vremeni</i> (the spirit of the times), or in the very common expression, <i>chto-to v etom dukhe</i> (something of that sort, something like that). This is a lovely phrase to pull out of your pocket when you cannot think of the right word in Russian. You might also hear the phrase <i>o nyom ni slukhu ni dukhu,</i> which we translate into the odd-sounding &quot;I haven't seen hide nor hair of him.&quot; 
 <i>
Dukh,</i> in the sense of &quot;spirit,&quot; has produced many words connected with spirituality and religious life. <i>Dukhovny chelovek</i> can mean a &quot;spiritual person,&quot; or a &quot;warm person,&quot; depending on the context. <i>Dukhovenstvo</i> is the clergy, <i>dukhovny otets</i> or <i>dukhovny nastavnik</i> is one's &quot;spiritual leader&quot; or &quot;confessor.&quot; <i>Dukhovnoye zaveshchaniye</i> is what we call in English one's Last Will and Testament, although I prefer the whiff of &quot;spiritual legacy&quot; in the Russian. I'm also fond of the archaic phrase <i>Dukhovnoye oko</i>, which we translate as &quot;mind's eye,&quot; though in Russian there is a whisper of the inner spirit creating pictures in one's head. <i>Dukhovidets</i> is a &quot;clairvoyant&quot; or &quot;medium&quot; - literally, someone who sees spirits or ghosts. 
 Dukh still has a few echoes of the &quot;life's breath&quot; meaning it had at the dawn of Russian language: <i>Dai mne perevesti dukh</i> (let me catch my breath); <i>ya eto sdelayu odnim dukhom</i> (or <i>na odnom dykhanii</i>). (I can do that in one go, or &quot;one fell swoop,&quot; literally &quot;in one breath.&quot;) You can find the notion of breathing or air in related words, like <i>vozdukh</i> (air), <i>dut</i> (to blow) or <i>dutsya</i> (to pout, in reference to the inflated cheeks of a serious pouter). The adjective from this, duty, means something exaggerated, inflated or overblown: <i>Po-moemu, u nego imidzh duty.</i> (I think his image is inflated.) <i>Dukhovoi</i> is an adjective that refers to a wind instrument (<i>dukhovoi instrument</i>) or brass band (<i>dukhovoi orkestr</i>). <i>Dukhota,</i> on the other hand, is the absence of air: <i>Otkroi okno! Zdes takaya dukhota!</i> (Open the window! It's stifling in here!). And as everyone knows, <i>dukhovka</i> is an oven, where there is not a bit of fresh air. 
 In the Russian Army, <i>dukh</i> is a conscript in his first six months of training. By analogy, this can also be slang for any inexperienced person. In English, we call him a rookie or a greenhorn. You ought to be careful about context, though, since <i>dukh</i> is also military slang for an Afghan guerrilla (shortened from <i>dushman</i> and perhaps mixed with the connotation of &quot;evil spirit&quot;). 
 Russian, like English, widely uses two expressions involving spirit: <i>Nado soblyudat i dukh i bukvu zakona</i> (you must observe the letter and spirit of the law) and <i>Dukh bodr, plot zhe nemoshchna</i> (the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak). Both are from the Old Testament and can be used to great effect in everyday life. <i>Ty ostalsya na rabote?</i> (Did you stay at work?) <i>Da net - dukh bodr, plot zhe nemoshchna!</i>
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator.</i>
 



TITLE: eric the red looks back at his life
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hitchens
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: In March 1950 there was a public debate in New York City, moderated by the eminent radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. The motion before the meeting was: Is Russia a socialist community? Proposing for the ayes was Earl Browder, a loyal Stalinist who had nonetheless been removed by Moscow (for some minor deviations) from the leadership of the American Communist Party. Opposing him was the mercurial genius Max Shachtman, later to become a salient cold warrior but then the leader of the Trotskyist (or Trotsky-ish) Workers Party. Reaching his peroration against Browder, Shachtman recited the names of the European Communist leaders who, for their own minor deviations, had been liquidated by Stalin. Turning to his antagonist, he pointed and said: &quot;There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!&quot; Eyewitnesses still relish the way in which Browder turned abruptly pallid and shrunken. 
 
Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones. 
 For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In &quot;Interesting Times,&quot; he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. Willing as I was to be repelled by such reasoning (blood is not to be rated like milk, after all), I found that I was instead rather impressed by its minimalism. If you wanted to teach a bright young student how Communism actually felt to an intelligent believer, you would have to put this book - despite its rather stale title - on the reading list. 
 To have marched in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin in 1933 may have been an experience as delicious as protracted sexual intercourse (Hobsbawm's metaphor, not mine), but the experience of defending the indefensible and - more insulting - of being asked to believe the unbelievable was far less delightful and, equally to the point, very much more protracted. Again, Hobsbawm's vices mutate into his virtues (and vice, as it were, versa). He is determined to show that he was not a dupe, but went into it all with eyes open, while he is no less concerned to argue that he did not want to become one of those &quot;God That Failed&quot; ex-Communists. Is this idealism or cynicism? He was one of a group of solid and brilliant English Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson and John Saville, none of whom could stomach the Communist Party after 1956. Yet he soldiered on as a member until the end of the Soviet Union itself, while admitting that he hardly ever visited the place and that when he did, he didn't much care for it. 
 Now he tells us that he suffers nostalgia for what he never much liked. I think he has nostalgia all right. He mourns the lost Britain of trams and bicycles and hiking and cheap lodging and labor solidarity, and he misses the intellectual companionship of a Europe, part Parisian and part Mitteleuropa, where names like Henri Lefebvre and Ernst Fischer really meant something. He also possesses a strong feeling for the Italy that took Antonio Gramsci seriously and, in his absorbing passages on his long stays in the United States, says that he felt most at home in the 1950's of jazz and the Village and counter-McCarthyite bohemia. (Under the nom de plume of Francis Newton, he was for many years a jazz critic of some aplomb.) 
 I would say that by 1968 Hobsbawm had become a fairly distinguished political and cultural conservative. He already knew that the Soviet Union was going nowhere but down, and in Latin America, where Communist revolution was still thinkable, he regarded the idea as neither possible nor desirable. (Who else, in a memoir, would throw away an anecdote about interpreting for Che Guevara at a conference in Havana, commenting dryly that the glamorous hero of the insurgents &quot;said nothing of interest&quot;?) 
 Avoiding all postmodernist fads and hewing to a line of detachment and objectivity, of the sort that Marxists once had the nerve to call &quot;scientific,&quot; he continued to produce admirable works on labor history, slightly promiscuous studies (in view of his disdain for Guevara) of the social role of bandits and gangsters, and highly evolved attempts to capture the essence of the epochal. If we now periodize our historical understanding by reference to decades or even centuries rather than reigns, then we are partly using his method. And if, when considering modern nationalism and the nation-state, we refer knowingly to &quot;invented traditions,&quot; we are borrowing something of his cosmopolitan ease; while a popular neologism such as &quot;globalization&quot; would seem like a no-brainer to someone like Hobsbawm, who had been studying empire and the Industrial Revolution since the 20th century was in short pants. 
 Thus there is less paradox than first appears in the willingness of such a civilized man to align himself with such a barbaric and philistine politics. He did it, he tells us in effect, because the Communist International supplied the elements of family and fatherland that were unavailable to a deracinated Jewish orphan intellectual. In other words, he did it because of his displaced yearning for family values, religion and patriotism: the Tory virtues. In a memoir that is often very reticent (a whole bad marriage goes by in a blink) he reveals perhaps more than he intends when he tells us, &quot;I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a Communist in the full sense of my youth.&quot; 
 A great deal is compressed into that wry, arid sentence. 
 Since Hobsbawm was at Cambridge University for much of his earlier academic career, he feels obliged to give some account of his membership in the Apostles and of the relationship, if any, between this open conspiracy and the more occult world of the Cambridge spies. He doesn't increase much the sum of our knowledge of this overtrodden field, though he does note, with a glacial matter-of-factness, that if invited to work for Stalin's secret police he would have obeyed the call without hesitation. The most absorbing chapter of the book discusses not past battles but contemporary ones. In 1978, in the journal Marxism Today (a monthly, now defunct, linked to the British Communist Party), Hobsbawm wrote an essay pointing out that labor militancy was either (a) a thing of the past or (b) a sectional and essentially apolitical phenomenon. This was timed with extraordinary, if accidental, deftness. For many people on the existing left, it raised the curtain, not only on the decline of British Labor but also - and then much less thinkable - on the corollary ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. Hobsbawm, in a whole chapter on this episode, makes it clear that he understood and even welcomed the logic of what he had said: the left had to be defeated, and its illusions dispelled, if progress was to resume.
 After a long, arduous shakeout, this has culminated in the near obliteration of the Tory party and the rise to power of Tony Blair, at once the most radical and the most conservative of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right, the doctrines of which might be termed Hobsbawmian. Thus a long life devoted to the idea that history was inexorable has, as its summary achievement, the grand recognition that irony outlasts the dialectic. 
 
 <i>
&quot;Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life.&quot; By Eric Hobsbawm. Illustrated. 448 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $30. 
 
 Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and an adjunct professor of liberal studies at New School University. His most recent book is &quot;A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.&quot;</i>
 



TITLE: 'sinbad' still sailing across the same old seas
AUTHOR: By Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: Though you wouldn't know it from &quot;Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,&quot; the original Sinbad was a merchant from Baghdad, a truth-stretching, tale-spinning protagonist of the celebrated Arabian Nights. If he appeared on the scene today, he might be detained by John Ashcroft rather than appear as the hero of a new animated feature.
 
The latest version of &quot;Sinbad&quot; is a pleasure to look at. It's filled with fine, imaginative moves and an overarching sense of visual freedom, a feeling of play that entices us into enjoyment. But, when it comes to dialogue and story, this &quot;Sinbad&quot; apparently used up all its initiative changing its hero's ethnicity to generic Greco-Roman. There's little here that isn't overly familiar and formulaic, nothing that's even in the same arena with the eye candy of those vivid adventures.
 What mainstream animation desperately needs is men (and women) to match its mountains - creators able to bring the same sense of excitement to the drama that has become almost second nature to the art. It's been managed in items like DreamWorks' &quot;Shrek&quot; and Pixar's &quot;Finding Nemo,&quot; it just has to happen more often.
 It's especially dispiriting to see this conventionality in a film driven by Eris (voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer), the Goddess of Discord and a major believer in &quot;glorious chaos.&quot; If anyone would like to see a story that tries for something different, it would have to be her.
 Eris gets things moving by spying on &quot;a noble prince, a priceless treasure, and a black-hearted thief&quot; all about to come together on the open seas of an ancient world where humans are playthings of the gods. &quot;This is going to be fun,&quot; she enthuses. &quot;Let the games begin.&quot;
 Said treasure is &quot;the world's most valuable object, on its way to Syracuse.&quot; No, it's not the NCAA basketball trophy headed for upstate New York, it's something called the Book of Peace, which is headed for that other Syracuse, where it has guaranteed international security for generations.
 Guarding it is a king's son, Proteus (Joseph Fiennes), noble as advertised. The black-hearted thief is Sinbad (Brad Pitt), but anyone who believes he's really black-hearted also probably believes that &quot;Sinbad&quot; producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and Disney's Michael Eisner like to get together and split a six-pack every chance they get.
 Sinbad and Proteus, it turns out, were inseparable childhood friends until something mysterious came between them a decade ago. It's not completely clear where Sinbad has been in the interim, but given the line of patter screenwriter John Logan (&quot;Gladiator&quot;) has written for directors Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore, hanging out with stand-up comics in Las Vegas seems like a good possibility.
 Continuing a trend that has become a veritable animation plague, Sinbad's dialogue consists of nonstop wisecracks of the &quot;things to do, places to go, stuff to steal&quot; variety. &quot;Did you catch that last move, pretty cool,&quot; he says mid-sword fight, and punctuates the tossing of an explosive into a fish with the glib &quot;stand by for sushi!&quot;
 The original reason for this type of chat was probably to amuse adults who have to accompany their children. But it has become so hollow and repetitive, it might not be a bad idea for someone to simply do an animated feature on Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and be done with it.
 Through a variety of plot turns, Sinbad ends up chasing the Book of Peace in the general direction of Eris' domain of Tartarus.
 Accompanying him is Proteus' fianc&eacute;e, the feisty and beautiful Lady Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who ignores Sinbad's antediluvian &quot;a ship is no place for a woman&quot; wails and proves herself to be as fine an action hero as any man.
 Many of Sinbad's best visuals come on the trip to Tartarus, including a spooky ride through the ever-dangerous Dragon's Teeth and encounters with enormous mythological beasts, whose huge computer-generated forms make an interesting contrast with the film's hand-drawn characters. Possibly best of all are the legendary sirens, whose seductive yet watery forms are both fantastical and completely convincing.
 Along the way &quot;Sinbad&quot; endeavors to answer the question asked of the protagonist by Marina early on: &quot;Which are you, a thief or a hero?&quot; She's probably the only one in the theater who really doesn't know.
 
 <i>
&quot;Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas&quot; is showing at Avrora, Kolizei and Mirage Cinema. </i>

TITLE: Blair Takes the Stand in Investigation
AUTHOR: By Jill Lawless
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair told an inquiry on Thursday that his office did not exaggerate estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said that he would have had to resign if it had.
 
Facing the worst crisis of his six years in office, Blair questioned the credibility of a British Broadcasting Corporation report that his government distorted the threat presented by Hussein to bolster the case for an Iraq war.
 &quot;It was an extraordinary allegation to make and an extremely serious one,&quot; he told an inquiry in to the death of a government weapons expert, who was caught up in a political storm over the government's Iraq policy.
 &quot;This was an absolutely fundamental charge ... this was an allegation that we had behaved in a way that, were it true ... would have warranted my resignation,&quot; he added.
 Blair is only the second British prime minister to appear in public before a judicial inquiry.
 He said a contentious government dossier on Iraq's arsenal was based on intelligence sources, and was not manipulated for political reasons.
 &quot;At that stage [in September], the strategy was not to use the dossier as the immediate reason for going to conflict, but as the reason why we had to return to the issue of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction,&quot; he said.
 The failure of the coalition to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq since the war ended has seemed more damaging to Blair than to U.S. President George Bush, who relied heavily on Blair as his top coalition partner.
 Looking calm, Blair said a claim in the dossier that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes came from British intelligence and was not inserted at the insistence of his office.
 &quot;I also knew it had to be a document that was owned by the Joint Intelligence Committee and its chairperson, John Scarlett. We could not produce this as evidence that came from anything other than an objective source,&quot; he said.
 Blair was giving testimony before an inquiry on why arms expert David Kelly, 59, apparently committed suicide after being identified as the likely source of the BBC report that the government exaggerated the threat of Iraqi weapons to win support for military action.
 Blair has vigorously denied misleading lawmakers or the public in the run-up to war. The BBC report sparked a bitter dispute between the public broadcaster and the government, with the credibility of both at stake.
 Dozens of anti-war protesters jeered Blair as he arrived Thursday at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. Scores of people had lined up outside the building for a chance to hear Blair give evidence before the inquiry, headed by senior appeals judge Lord Hutton.
 The Hutton inquiry is trying to determine how the government came to expose Kelly - a move that placed him under intense media pressure and led him to give testimony before two parliamentary committees. On July 18, three days after he testified, police found Kelly's body with his left wrist slashed.
 Blair has denied responsibility for identifying Kelly. But in Wednesday's hearing, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Blair's office authorized a news release saying an unidentified official at the Ministry of Defense - where Kelly worked - had acknowledged speaking to a BBC journalist. That created a rush by British reporters to identify the source, with some guessing names until they came up with Kelly's and it was confirmed by the Ministry of Defense.
 Hoon also told the inquiry that Kelly had been treated well and protected by his bosses.
 The BBC report, broadcast May 29, said an official dossier in September about Iraqi weapons had been &quot;sexed up&quot; by including a claim that Iraq's biological and chemical weapons could be deployed in 45 minutes.
 The story cited a then-unidentified source as having said Blair's office overruled intelligence advice when it included the claim in the dossier. Kelly said he didn't believe he was the report's source for that information, but after he died the BBC said he was.
 Also scheduled to appear before Lord Hutton on Thursday were Gavyn Davies, chairperson of the BBC, and Tom Mangold, a journalist and close friend of Kelly.

TITLE: Another Bosnian Grave Excavated
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Forensic experts have recovered the remains of 270 victims in five weeks of digging at Bosnia's largest known mass grave and expect to find more as they burrow deeper, officials said Thursday.
 
The mass grave, with a surface area about the size of a tennis court, was opened last month on Crni Vrh hill, near the border with Serbia and about 80 kilometers northeast of Sarajevo. 
 It is the 14th mass grave found in Bosnia this year.
 Clothing and documents found indicate the victims were mostly civilian Muslims killed by local Serb troops between April and June 1992 in and around the eastern town of Zvornik.
 Experts have dug more than three meters deep and expect to dig at least one meter deeper, said Murat Hurtic, the head of the regional branch of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons. Work is expected to be completed within four weeks.
 The site is a secondary grave where bodies initially buried elsewhere were moved to.
 The remains are being transferred to the northern town of Tuzla for DNA analysis.
 About 250,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed during the war between local Muslims, Croats and Serbs that began in 1992 and ended 3 1/2 years later. 
 So far, forensic experts have exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves throughout Bosnia.

TITLE: Davenport Enjoying Comeback
AUTHOR: By Janie Mccauley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Lindsay Davenport is protecting her troublesome left foot by spending as little time as possible on the court. 
 
She reached the third round of the U.S. Open in just under two hours, dropping only seven games along the way. 
 Davenport didn't dazzle by any means in her 6-2, 6-4 second-round victory against Maria Elena Camerin on Wednesday. It didn't matter. 
 What was most important to the 1998 Open champion was that she didn't focus more attention on her foot than the woman on the other side of the net. 
 &quot;I didn't feel it at all today,&quot; a cheerful Davenport said. &quot;I think, hopefully, as more days go by, if it doesn't flare up, I'll be more and more confident pushing off it and not really worrying about it.&quot; 
 World No. 1 Kim Clijsters joins the third-seeded Davenport in the third round of the season's final Slam, after overpowering Laura Granville 6-1, 6-1. 
 The top-seeded Clijsters, who took over the No. 1 ranking from Serena Williams this month, is aiming for her first Grand Slam title. 
 &quot;If it's in their head they're playing the No. 1, maybe that's a little bit intimidating,&quot; Clijsters said. &quot;On the other hand, that could even be also more motivating as well. I think it depends on the character of your opponent.&quot; 
 U.S. Davis Cup player James Blake pulled off an upset against 27th-seeded Mariano Zabaleta 7-6 (7-4), 6-3, 6-2. Blake hit a 168-kilometer-per-hour second-serve ace on his fourth match point, then called for a ball from the ballboy and hit it into the stands. 
 Defending Wimbledon champion Roger Federer won his first-round match against Argentine Jose Acasuso after Acasuso called two injury timeouts and eventually retired two games into the fourth set with a groin problem. The score was 5-7, 6-3, 6-3, 2-0. 
 Acasuso took an injury timeout earlier in the match to receive drops in his right eye. During the second delay, between the third and fourth sets, Acasuso lay with his stomach to the hard court as a trainer massaged his back and legs. 
 Instead of sitting down, Federer juggled the ball with his feet and hit a few serves. 
 &quot;You're always scared because it was not very hot today,&quot; Federer said. &quot;There was always a breeze, at least for us players. I didn't want to risk any injury. I started serving a few and moving around. I played some soccer as well.&quot; 
 The man Federer beat in the Wimbledon final, No. 20-seeded Mark Philippoussis, won his first-round match Wednesday, as did 2002 Wimbledon runner-up David Nalbandian, No. 7 Carlos Moya, and No. 10 Jiri Novak. Philippoussis, also a finalist at the 1998 Open, pounded 20 aces to beat Janko Tipsarevic 6-2, 7-6 (7-4), 6-4. 
 Women's winners included No. 5 Amelie Mauresmo, No. 9 Daniela Hantuchova, French Open semifinalist Nadia Petrova, No. 14 Amanda Coetzer, and No. 13 Vera Zvonareva, who eliminated U.S. teenager Ashley Harkleroad 6-3, 4-6, 6-1 thanks in part to a 37-16 edge in winners. 
 In the second set, Harkleroad screamed at the chair umpire after what she thought was a series of missed calls. 
 &quot;You can never be my chair umpire again! That's horrible!&quot; Harkleroad yelled. She later said she could have handled the situation with more maturity. 
 Davenport has been battling a nerve problem in her left foot and will undergo surgery after the Open. She received a cortisone shot Saturday night after retiring in the final of the Pilot Pen against Jennifer Capriati. Then, she canceled her practice session Sunday at the National Tennis Center, raising questions as to whether she, too, would withdraw. 
 After winning her first-round match in 46 minutes Monday, Davenport was able to practice Tuesday. She's the only past women's winner in a field that is without injured sisters Venus and Serena Williams, who split the past four Open championships. 
 Davenport won despite hitting 46 percent of her first serves and making more unforced errors than winners, 23-22. 
 Since winning the 2000 Australian Open - she won Wimbledon in 1999 - Davenport hasn't added another major title, but she has fared well, making two finals and three semifinals at Slams. 
 Davenport's frustrations this year had her considering retirement. Now, she's having fun again. 
 &quot;I've had such a great time playing this summer on the hard courts and playing in the States,&quot; she said.
 
 <i>
(For other results, see Scorecard) </i>

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Thomas Sacked
 </b>

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AP) - Rick Carlisle will likely get another chance to lead the Pacers. 
 Carlisle is the top choice of Larry Bird, who, in his first move as Pacers president of basketball operations, fired Isiah Thomas on Wednesday and paved the way for the return of his former assistant. 
 "He's my first choice," Bird said. "We've got other guys on the list, so if we can't work anything out with Rick, we'll just move on." 
 Carlisle spent the past two seasons as coach of the Detroit Pistons before being fired in May - despite winning two straight division titles and the 2002 NBA Coach of the Year award. 
 Thomas was abruptly fired after three seasons and a 131-115 regular-season record. The Pacers made the playoffs all three years, with one of the youngest rosters in the league, but never advanced past the first round. 
 
 
<b>Heat Sign Odom
 </b>

MIAMI (AP) - Lamar Odom officially joined the Heat on Wednesday, signing a six-year, $65-million contract after the Los Angeles Clippers declined to match the offer. 
 After four rocky years with the Clippers, the fourth overall pick in the 1999 NBA draft said it was time to move on and turn his career around somewhere else. 
 "I thought it was time to find something new," Odom said at a news conference Wednesday. "Being here is a great opportunity for me to prove all the doubters wrong. I don't think nobody's doubting I can play basketball. They're making doubts on other things." 
 While Odom's playing skills leave few questions - he averaged 15.9 points in his first four seasons - the 23-year-old's off-the-court behavior has been a source of criticism. 
 The 208-centimeter, 100-kilogram swingman was suspended for eight games in November after violating the league's anti-drug policy. He also served a five-game drug suspension in March 2001. 
 
 
<b>Smertin Loaned Out
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - Chelsea has sent its new Russian midfielder, Alexei Smertin, to Portsmouth on a season's loan, just two days after signing him from Girondins Bordeaux, Portsmouth officials said on Wednesday. 
 "We must have made football history by bringing in a captain of his country who, two days before, signed in a Pound3.5-million [$5.49-million] deal for Chelsea," Chief Executive Peter Storrie told his club's Web site.
 Chelsea would not immediately confirm the deal, which is subject to a work permit and would provide an unlikely twist to Chelsea's spending spree since a takeover last month by Russian oil tycoon Roman Abramovich. 
 But Smertin was quoted as saying by Sport-Express on Wednesday: "It's probably the best possible solution for me right now."
 "I first need to get accustomed to life in England, to the Premiership, to learn English. It'll be a smoother transition playing for Portsmouth. They are newcomers to the Premiership, but are an ambitious club," he said. 
 
 
<b>Moscow's Fed Cup
 </b>

LONDON (AP) - Moscow was selected Wednesday to host the semifinals and finals of the Fed Cup. 
 Moscow beat a Belgian bid to hold the finals, which start Nov. 17 and will be played indoors at Olympic Stadium. The Russian capital was chosen unanimously. 
 The United States will play Belgium and Russia will face France in the best-of-five semifinals.
 The Russian bid is subject to the signing of an agreement with a promoter.