LOCAL NEWS

SMILES AND SORROW AS VETERANS RECALL END OF WAR

Pavel Afonin remembers it as a day of triumph, while Tamara Semyonova remembers the salutes fired from the guns in what was then Leningrad. Yury Yavloko remembers it as the day on which he learned to whistle through his fingers, while Nikolai Shashkin recalls the tears of those who had lost so many loved ones over the preceding four years.

SIGNS POINT TO SOYUZ SYSTEMS ERROR

STAR CITY, Moscow Region - A computer software error likely sent a Soyuz spacecraft into a rare ballistic descent that subjected the three men on board to chest-crushing gravity loads that made it hard to breathe, space experts confirmed Tuesday.

LOCAL BUSINESS

RUSSIA, AMERICA END POULTRY TRADE WAR

WASHINGTON - The United States and Russia have resolved a squabble over health standards at U.S. poultry plants that had threatened American chicken exports to Russia, officials said.

Russian concern about sanitary issues at U.S. chicken plants was among the major topics at two days of discussions between Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and his U.

KASYANOV CALLS FOR RESTRICTIONS ON PIRACY

MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Tuesday pledged to toughen efforts to curb copyright violations, saying the government would draft a set of amendments to combat rampant piracy.

$4 M LUXURY YACHT BUILT FOR PUTIN LAUNCHED IN MOSCOW

MOSCOW - A secretly built yacht intended for President Vladimir Putin took to the water late last month at the Moscow Shipbuilding Factory.

A source in a river-transport company said the motorized Pallada yacht was indeed Putin's. Neither the shipbuilders nor the presidential property department denied this.

CITY GETS NEW LINK IN METRO CHAIN

ST. PETERSBURG - The German-based Metro Cash & Carry consumer-goods chain opened its first wholesale supermarket in St. Petersburg last week, the total construction cost of the project amounting to 25 million euros.

CULTURE

WHAT RUSSIANS MADE IN PARIS

The exodus of the Russian artistic elite after the revolutions of 1917 is something of which even most people without a specialist art background are aware. However, very few Russians have much idea of what these emigre artists did when they reached their new homes.

CHERNOV'S CHOICE

Leading local alternative-rock band Tequilajazzz, will play a gig in the unlikely setting of house club Par.spb on Friday.

The band, which uses the club as a rehearsal venue, will take part in Par's Victory Day party alongside DJs and other guests, but will play a full-length show, according to the club's management.

porn and lenin - good call!

Fifteen years ago, opening a place like Zov Ilicha (loosely translated by the venue itself as Lenin's Mating Call) would have been absolutely unthinkable - just nurturing the idea could have brought serious trouble from the authorities. But post-Soviet Russia has long generated looser public and sexual mores, and Lenin's Mating Call, which gleefully mixes pornography and Soviet symbols, comes across as just another slice of Soviet kitsch, despite its obvious vow to shock sensitive - or Soviet-minded - souls.