Johnson's Russia List
#7198
28 May 2003
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org
[Contents:
1. Washington Post: Bruce Blair, We Keep Building Nukes For All the Wrong
Reasons.
2. International Herald Tribune: Sherri Goodman and Rose Gottemoeller,
Dismantling Russia's submarines. Raw material for terror.
3. AP: U.S. to Build Power Plants in Russia.
4. Rosbalt: 50% of Russian Oil and Gas Pipelines Are In Poor Condition.
5. Reuters: Russia, China to step up oil cooperation.
6. Moscow Times: Yulia Latynina, A National Energy Plan Fit for Caligula.
7. RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly: Donald Jensen, Virtual President.
(re Putin's Russia by Lilia Shevtsova)
8. RFE/RL Washington meeting: Human Rights in Russia: Putin's
Pre-Election Report Card.
9. slate.com: Stephen Kotkin, Unmarked Monuments. The legacy of the Gulag
is everywhere, so why don't we know more about it?
10. New PONARS memo on public support for Russian military reform.
11. US Department of State Fact Sheet: Status of Wrangel and Other Arctic
Islands.
12. AP: St. Petersburg Marks 300th Anniversary.
13. Moscow Times editorial: Peter's Party: Potemkin or Real Revival?
14. Christian Science Monitor: Fred Weir, Philanthropy still rare in
Russian
cultural landscape. As St. Petersburg celebrates its 300th year, many of
its museums
go begging.
15. RFE/RL: Jeremy Bransten, 'Window On Europe' Celebrates 300th
Anniversary.
16. New York Times: Sophia Kishkovsky, Warm and Weird Toasts to Russia's
Crown
Jewel.
17. Business Week: Paul Starobin, Russia's Watchdog Wakes. Can a new law
help
regulators stop stock manipulation? (re Federal Securities Commission)]
********
#1
Washington Post
May 25, 2003
We Keep Building Nukes For All the Wrong Reasons
By Bruce G. Blair
Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch officer, is president of the Center
for Defense Information, a nonpartisan think tank.
You would think the United States would be getting out of the business of
pursuing new nuclear weapons. After all, the Cold War is over, President
Bush warns of the danger of weapons of mass destruction and the
administration has cast doubt on the role of deterrence in stopping the
greatest threats of the 21st century -- "rogue states" and terrorists.
Yet last week Congress approved further research on nuclear bunker busters,
weapons that can penetrate deeply into the ground before exploding, and
"mini-nukes," weapons with explosive yields below five kilotons. Although
spending on these programs will remain minuscule by Pentagon standards, the
stakes are higher than the dollars suggest. America's nuclear future hangs
in the balance. The underlying question: If the United States wants to
reduce nuclear tensions and arsenals, why is anyone at the Pentagon even
thinking about building new nuclear weapons?
In the public debate over bunker busters and mini-nukes, it is commonly
assumed that the weapons' primary targets are the states still turning on
the "axis of evil" -- Iran and North Korea -- as well as the other leading
candidates for that dubious distinction: Syria, Sudan, Libya and Algeria.
All have aspired at one time or another to acquire chemical and biological,
if not nuclear, weapons. These countries indeed have come into the nuclear
cross hairs of the U.S. Strategic Command (SAC) in Omaha, Neb. Nuclear
targeting of a dozen or so countries is a cottage industry now that
President Bush has blessed the notion that U.S. nuclear weapons can, and
should, be adapted for use against a growing list of enemy weapons in a
widening array of circumstances. That notion was floated by Bush's 2001
Nuclear Posture Review, and codified in presidential nuclear guidance
issued in 2002.
The military utility of new U.S. nukes, however, would be limited, while
the risk to local civilians and friendly soldiers would be high. A nuclear
bunker buster powerful enough to destroy a deeply buried target would not
penetrate the Earth far enough to avoid venting deadly radioactive material
into the atmosphere. The practical maximum depth for earth-penetrating
warheads currently may not exceed 50 feet or so; at that depth, the warhead
yield could not exceed a small fraction of one kiloton without spewing
fallout. If strength of the warhead were that small, it might not destroy a
hardened subterranean target. So the choice is between an ineffective
weapon or one that could kill many thousands of local inhabitants and
friendly soldiers.
No U.S. regional commander would approve nuclear strikes of questionable
military impact that would also contaminate a battlefield, especially given
the variety of non-nuclear options at his disposal, from precision-guided
conventional weapons to assaults by Special Forces. Even against the most
subterranean of adversaries -- North Korea, with its innumerable caves and
mazes -- nuclear strikes and the contamination left behind would merely
complicate and delay a conventional victory that even South Korea alone
could win within 10 to 30 days.
Die-hard nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on targets in Russia
and China, including missile silos and leadership bunkers. For these
planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two candidates in Russia are
located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and
southern Urals. Both were huge construction projects begun in the late
1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist
Party's leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent
tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy
satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s. Yamantau is
expected to be operating soon.
According to diagrams and notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC senior
officers, the Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain,
about 3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation
facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter
than a command post, because the facility's communications links are
relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio
signals broadcast from inside the mountain. Therefore the main
communications links are either cable or radio transmitters that broadcast
from outside the center. These are vulnerable to nuclear weapons from the
existing U.S. arsenal and would be even more vulnerable to new bunker busters.
Kosvinsky is regarded by U.S. targeteers as the crown jewel of the Russian
wartime nuclear command system, because it can communicate through the
granite mountain to far-flung Russian strategic forces using
very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals that can burn through a nuclear war
environment. The facility is the critical link to Russia's "dead hand"
communications network, designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a
decapitating strike.
This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984 during the height
of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative
engineering. It features hard radio nodes near Moscow that can use remote
control to launch communications rockets, which in turn can launch
virtually the entire Russian missile force without human intervention. But
the Moscow-area radio nodes have grown vulnerable over the past 20 years.
Kosvinsky restores Russia's confidence in its ability to carry out a
retaliatory strike.
Kosvinsky came on line recently, which could be one explanation for U.S.
interest in a new nuclear bunker buster. If there's a new item on the
target list, U.S. strategy requires a weapon to destroy it. Even with a
"robust nuclear earth penetrator," as the bunker buster is called,
destroying Kosvinsky is not an easy assignment; the command center is
protected by roughly 1,000 feet of granite. More importantly, why would we
want to if Russia is no longer the enemy?
While logical in the alternate universe of Cold War-era nuclear war
planning, building a new weapon to threaten these mountain redoubts would
not increase our security. President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless
instructs the Pentagon to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky,
along with 2,000 other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China. But
such targeting requires very high-yield weapons, typically 10 to 100 times
more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. We are talking
about a doomsday plan in which Yamantau and Kosvinsky are struck as part of
an all-out nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
Apart from the horror of such destruction, now that Russia is no longer the
"evil empire," such a war seems more and more far-fetched.
So what is the real driving force behind the administration's chase for
bunker busters and mini-nukes? It is the U.S. nuclear security
establishment's desire to preserve -- indefinitely -- a nuclear weapon
design capability at the national laboratories, particularly Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore. The labs fear that atrophying intellectual capital in
this arena would leave the United States crippled if it ever wished to
re-start a nuclear design effort in a national emergency. They are
therefore trying hard to portray new nuclear weapons as essential to
national security.
This argument is self-serving for the national laboratories. Officials
there recognize that their mission is shrinking. Where nuclear weapons once
offered unique military solutions, precision conventional weapons now can
do the job. As long as two decades ago, a SAC study found that most of the
Soviet "soft" targets, such as electricity generating plants located east
of the Ural Mountains, could be destroyed by cruise missiles armed with
conventional warheads. SAC actually proposed replacing nuclear weapons with
such warheads in the U.S. strategic war plan. But both Strategic Command
and the nuclear laboratories are peddling the case for bunker busters and
mini-nukes because of their own stakes in new nuclear weapons.
At another level, however, this is not only a story of bureaucratic
self-interest. The nation faces a profound choice. The United States can
continue basic nuclear weapons research. However, it should forgo
designing, building, testing and fielding new weapons. This would enable
the nation to maintain and nurture its storehouse of intellectual capital,
while adequately supporting critical missions such as nuclear bomb disposal
and safeguards. And it would still promote nonproliferation and arms control.
Designing bunker busters and mini-nukes or any other new nuclear weapon is
yesterday's agenda. The old nuclear game is ending. The new missions that
will make Americans secure and attract new recruits to the nuclear
enterprise almost certainly will revolve around the challenge of preventing
nuclear terrorism.
********
#2
International Herald Tribune
May 26, 2003
Dismantling Russia's submarines
Raw material for terror
Sherri Goodman and Rose Gottemoeller
Sherri Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses; Rose
Gottemoeller is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
WASHINGTON A year ago, the Group of Eight industrialized countries launched
an initiative known as the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons
and Materials of Mass Destruction. First agreed to at the summit meeting in
Kananaskis, Canada, the Global Partnership for the first time brought G-8
members together as a coherent group committed to stopping weapons of mass
destruction from leaking out to illicit markets and terrorists.
The partnership's first goal is to work with Russia, and then with other
countries around the globe. As an incentive to get financial support from
all G-8 members, the Bush administration announced a "10 plus 10 over 10"
commitment - the U.S. would spend $10 billion over 10 years, and the other
G-8 members would match these funds with an additional $10 billion.
As the next meeting of the G-8 approaches in Evian it is time to take stock
of this initiative. When the G-8 members meet, will they have much progress
to report? It seems unlikely. Buffeted by discord over the U.S. war in
Iraq, the G-8 partners have had a hard time getting together in the past
six months. The Global Partnership is drifting, just at a time when it is
most urgent to keep nuclear, chemical and biological weapons out of the
wrong hands.
Repairing the damage cannot be achieved at the summit meeting alone. But
the Global Partnership offers unique opportunities for cooperation that
will go a long way to restoring the mutual confidence and good working
relationship of the G-8 countries. Take, for example, the dismantling of
Russian nuclear submarines, a top priority of President Vladimir Putin and
other G-8 leaders, but an effort that has dragged over the past year.
Russia has over 150 nuclear submarines that are no longer operational. The
U.S., through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, is
helping Russia dismantle its strategic ballistic missile submarines that
are covered by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. However, most of
Russia's outdated submarines are shorter-range attack vessels, more than 60
of which have not yet been dismantled. Destroying these submarines is an
important security and environmental matter. Most still have nuclear fuel
and nuclear waste on board and many are tied up at docks that are at best
lightly guarded. Some are in such bad condition that they have sunk at
pier-side, or have damaged reactor fuel that requires special handling.
These submarines contain the raw materials of nuclear terrorism-highly
enriched uranium to build nuclear warheads, and radiological materials to
build "dirty bombs." They urgently need to be dismantled in an
environmentally sound manner.
Four elements of the dismantlement effort are now coming together. First,
Norway and Japan are beginning pilot projects to dismantle Russian
general-purpose submarines. Second, the United States has built the
infrastructure at Russian shipyards for destroying strategic ballistic
missile submarines, which can in turn be used to dismantle the nonstrategic
attack submarines. Third, a joint program formed by the United States,
Russia and Norway has brought more efficient cooperation on
nonproliferation projects. And fourth, there is now an opportunity to use
private financing for submarine dismantlement, so that Western governments
and taxpayers need not foot the entire bill. This last trend is very much
in line with the Bush Administration's greater reliance on the private sector.
Russia now reprocesses reactor fuel from its submarines into fuel for
nuclear power plants. The same spent fuel also could be processed into fuel
for foreign customers, thus generating revenue that could be used to pay
for further submarine dismantlement.
At Evian, the G-8 should endorse these steps as a way not only to rid the
world of aging nuclear submarines, but also as a model for destroying other
weapons of mass destruction. Government projects from a number of countries
can come together to restore mutual confidence and make good use of mutual
resources. Most importantly, the private sector will take its place in
project financing.
As former Senator Sam Nunn has said: "Today we are in a race between
cooperation and catastrophe to secure nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons."
Here are some ways to help cooperation triumph over catastrophe.
*********
#3
U.S. to Build Power Plants in Russia
May 27, 2003
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department announced a $466 million deal
Tuesday to build two coal-burning power plants for Russia in return for a
Russian promise to close three plutonium-producing reactors considered
among the most dangerous in the world.
Two American companies - Washington Group International and Raytheon
Technical Services - will oversee construction of the two fossil fuel
plants. Most of the actual work is expected to be done by Russian companies
and workers.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called it a major step in the U.S.-Russia
nuclear nonproliferation effort, although it will be five to eight years
before the Russian reactors will shut down and stop making plutonium.
While the Russians have agreed to halt plutonium production and dispose of
34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium that is already stockpiled, they
have refused to shut down the three reactors until a way is found to
replace the electricity and industrial heat the reactors produce for nearby
communities.
In addition to making enough plutonium for three warheads each week, the
reactors in the Russian cities of Seversk and Zheleznogorsk also are viewed
as among the most dangerous because of their design, which is similar to
the Chernobyl reactor involved in the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine.
Unlike U.S. reactors, for example, they do not have concrete containment
domes to hold in radiation in case of an accident or major leak.
``They're the most dangerous reactors they've got,'' said Kenneth Baker,
the top Energy Department official involved in nuclear nonproliferation
issues. And, he adds, ``when you have three reactors producing enough
plutonium for three bombs a week you want to (deal with them) as fast as
you can.''
Abraham and Russia's nuclear minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, agreed in
March to replace the reactors with fossil fuel plants. As part of the
agreement, the U.S. government would arrange for the replacement power.
``Replacing these reactors with fossil fuel energy is critical to eliminate
the production of weapons-grade plutonium in Russia and closing these
facilities,'' said Abraham, who announced the contracts at a news
conference with Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov.
Abraham said the Russians would handle - and pay for - the shutdown of the
reactors, while the U.S. companies, working with the Russian contracting
firm of Rosatomstroi, will build the new fossil fuel plants.
Washington Group International - an engineering, construction and
management company headquartered in Boise, Idaho - will oversee work at the
Seversk site, where an old coal-fired plant will be refurbished and
expanded by 2008.
Raytheon, headquartered in Vienna, Va., will oversee construction of a new
plant at the Zheleznogorsk site with a completion date of 2011.
Abraham said that final contracts are expected to be completed with the two
companies by the end of June. Until then, he said, he could not provide
specifics such as how $466 million will be divided. The companies were
selected from a list of a half dozen companies provided by the Defense
Department, said Abraham.
*********
#4
Rosbalt
50% of Russian Oil and Gas Pipelines Are In Poor Condition
MOSCOW, May 27. 50% of Russian oil and gas pipelines are in a poor
condition and the average Russian gas pipeline is 22 years old. As a
Rosbalt correspondent reports, this was announced by Deputy Russian Energy
Minister Leonid Tropko yesterday.
The deputy minister said the current volumes of gas and oil produced in
Russia can only be transported if the existing transportation system is
updated and repaired. He emphasised that insufficient development of the
transportation systems are preventing new oil and gas fields from being
developed.
*********
#5
Russia, China to step up oil cooperation
By Jeremy Page
MOSCOW, May 27 (Reuters) - Russia and China agreed on Tuesday to strengthen
cooperation in the oil and gas sectors, including construction of a huge
oil pipeline to allow Russia to boost exports and help China diversify
imports.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a
declaration in the Kremlin saying the energy partnership between the
world's second largest oil exporter and the world's most populous nation
was a priority.
"This strengthening must be based on large oil and gas projects, including
construction of the Russia-China oil pipeline, and deliveries of natural
gas to China," the declaration said.
The text represents a key element of support for Russia's oil major YUKOS ,
which has masterminded the pipeline and plans to ship 400,000 barrels per
day to China's Daqing from 2005, rising gradually to 600,000 bpd.
The document casts further doubt over rival plans by Japan to import large
volumes of Russian oil in the near future, as Russian officials have said
their country lacks sufficient oil resources to justify two huge pipelines
to the east.
"I think the main aim of the visit was to reduce political risks by calling
for more confidence between the two states," said oil analyst Valery
Nesterov from Troika Dialog brokerage. "In this sense, the declaration
definitely moves implementation of the pipeline a step closer."
Russia's oil output is booming for the fifth straight year and the country
is looking for more export routes outside its traditional European market.
China, the world's third largest oil importer, depends heavily on supplies
from the Middle East, but is trying to diversify its sources away from the
volatile region.
Nesterov said he now expected the Russian government to approve the
pipeline implementation very shortly, which would mean the state pipeline
monopoly Transneft could start construction within months.
The head of Transneft, Semyon Vainshtok, who recently reversed his
long-standing opposition to the pipeline project, told reporters he
expected the government to take a decision on the issue within two weeks.
Industry sources said earlier the final deal between the crude seller YUKOS
and oil importer China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) on purchase
guarantees could be signed in the framework of the two leaders' talks in
Moscow.
CNPC's President Ma Fucai told Reuters he also expected the deal to be
finalised shortly, but declined to give details.
"We still need to work some things out. It will be signed soon," he said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told reporters the Chinese and
the Russian governments backed the deal, but the Russian side wanted more
time to study the project.
*********
#6
Moscow Times
May 28, 2003
A National Energy Plan Fit for Caligula
By Yulia Latynina
Last week, the government approved its national energy strategy up to 2020.
That is a long way off, and the government heaved a sigh of relief as it
resolved that oil production by 2020 would rise to between 480 million and
520 million tons. However, had the government focused on issues closer to
home such as its energy strategy between now and next year's presidential
election, the picture would not have been quite so unclouded.
Let's take, for example, oil pipelines -- an important element of the
energy strategy. The country's pipelines are on their last legs. If new
ones aren't built, we won't have much to export oil through. The
authorities, however, won't allow the construction of privately owned
pipelines for fear of losing a lever of control over Russian oil companies.
So the oil major Yukos, prevented from building its own oil pipeline, has
been lobbying the state to construct a pipeline from Siberia to the Chinese
city of Daqing. Construction costs would be approximately $3 billion, half
of which Yukos would stump up. Of course, first and foremost the pipeline
is good for Yukos, as it enables it to expand into the Chinese market. But
it's also good for Russia.
Unfortunately, Yukos is privately owned and its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky is
the richest man in Russia. Moreover, he has on occasion babbled in a manner
that was not to President Vladimir Putin's liking. And -- would you believe
it -- no sooner did Khodorkovsky get ideas "above his station" than an
alternative oil pipeline project materialized -- proposed by state-owned
Rosneft.
This pipeline is to run from Angarsk, near Lake Baikal, to the far eastern
port of Nakhodka along the Baikal-Amur Railroad -- that is, along a
fault-line.
The price tag on the project is such that its critics suggest it is not
really a pipeline construction project at all. Rather, for those lobbying
the project it is a means of pocketing budget money, and for the
authorities it is a way of teaching Yukos' CEO when to keep his mouth shut.
Another example is the issue of attracting foreign direct investment into
the oil sector. Recently, BP invested $6.5 billion in TNK. However, not
everyone in the Kremlin was overjoyed at the news: Foreign investment is
all well and good, but a foreign company is harder to force to carry out
the slops and wait on the Kremlin hand and foot.
Immediately after the BP-TNK deal was announced, two state-controlled
companies, Gazprom and Rosneft, wrote the president a letter in which they
proposed revoking a license held by Rusia Petroleum to exploit the massive
east Siberian Kovykta gas field -- both BP and TNK hold stakes in Rusia
Petroleum and, in fact, it is one of BP's most valuable strategic assets in
Russia.
Putin wrote on the letter: This deserves consideration. And that's not all;
it is said that one of the Russian participants in the BP-TNK deal was
summoned to the Kremlin and in a friendly chat with a very senior official
was advised to hand over the license.
From these examples, it is clear that this country has two energy
strategies. One is the private oil majors' energy strategy, and here the
emphasis is on expansion: Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships with
Western corporations in order to boost production, increase share value
and, most important, to decrease the dependence on those in power.
The other strategy is the state's energy strategy, and here the priority is
control. It involves clipping the wings of the private oil majors and
keeping them in a relationship of dependence on the state, even if slower
growth is the price to pay.
"Let them hate us, so long as they fear us," was a favorite saying of
emperor Caligula's. "Let them go under, so long as they are dependent" --
that's what the state's energy strategy amounts to.
Which national energy plan prevails will determine the main areas of growth
in the economy between now and 2020: Will it be oil production (which last
year was 380 million tons) or the market for bribes, which experts at the
INDEM think tank estimate at $38 billion per year?
Yulia Latynina is host of "Yest Mneniye" on TVS.
*********
#7
From: Donald Jensen <JensenD@rferl.org>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003
Subject: For the List
From RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly (forthcoming)
Virtual President
By Donald Jensen
Putin's Russia by Lilia Shevtsova, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 2003, 305 pp.
In Milan not long ago, I asked a man who had worked as Vladimir Putin's
interpreter during his recent trip to Italy what the Russian President was
like. "You know," he answered, "Putin takes more time to answer a question
after hearing it than any one else I've ever worked for." Indeed, Putin
unfailingly seems carefully tailor his words for his audience and midway
through his first presidential term, it is still difficult to get the
measure of the man. Many ordinary Russians see him as a reformer. To
business oligarchs he is insurance against prosecution, while to critics of
the oligarchs in the security services, Putin personifies the return to
Soviet-style centralized rule. In the West Putin is widely viewed as a
partner in the war against terror, even as he is faulted for continuing the
bloody war in Chechnya.
"Putin has become a symbol of a staggering mix of continuity and change,"
writes Lilia Shevtsova, perhaps the leading analyst of contemporary Russia,
in this excellent new book. She convincingly portrays the young president
as a product of Russia's post-Soviet disarray. Putin, Shevtsova writes,
"has been shrewd enough to let people think what they want and see what
they long for." She chronicles Putin's rise to power at the end of the the
Yeltsin era, when Russian elites seeking to protect themselves and their
property chose the little known former intelligence officer as President.
She concludes the narrative with Putin having consolidated power and
transformed Russia into a global partner of the United States in the war on
terrorism.
The book highlights several important points about contemporary Russian
politics:
First, Shevtsova correctly emphasizes the continuities of the Putin
presidency with the Yeltsin past. Although he wishes to play the role of
pragmatic manager and prefers loyalty and subordination to the chaotic,
patriarchal style of his predecessor, the essence of Russian politics since
Yeltsin is little changed. It blends money and power, formally democratic
institutions with a weak rule of law, constitutionalism with unfettered,
often authoritarian personal power. "Leadership," writes Shevtsova,
"continues to be Russia's major political institution - in fact its only one."
Second, in contrast to many Western analysts, Shevtsova emphasizes the
limits of Putin's power. The "managed democracy" he has built is, strictly
speaking, managed only with respect to formal structures of power. On the
one hand, the Duma has become an extension of the Kremlin; political
parties are even further weakened than they were under Yeltsin. The
Kremlin has largely intimidated the media. On the other hand, the real
centers of power - the oligarchs, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence
services, among others, manage Putin at least as often as Putin manages
them. While Putin prevails on some issues, he often does so only after
lining up coalitions and sometimes sees his goals subverted during
implementation.
Finally, Shevtsova reminds us that Putin's foreign policy turn toward the
US after the September 11 terrorist attacks "contains not only the
possibility of real partnership and Russia's integration into the West, but
the threat of Russian alienation." Putin's pro-Western tilt has received
only mixed support from Russia's political class. Many Russian elites
remain suspicious of Washington's intentions, jealous of US power, and
still interested in restoring their country's international stature. "If
there were a new misunderstanding or clash of interests," she writes,
"Russia would not revert to its previous hostility toward Western
civilization but rather descend to a murky zone of disenchantment with
everybody and everything - including Russia itself." So far, Shevtsova
asserts, the alliance is marked by a "Faustian bargain:" the West includes
Russian in the implementation of its geopolitical interests while closing
its eyes to how far Russian is from being a liberal democracy. The
alliance will only be temporary, she argues, until Russia embraces Western
values. How the US can foster such values, especially after the discredited
policies of the Clinton Administration, are unclear.
I have only few quibbles with the book. She casts little light on the
several blank spots in Putin's curriculum vitae. There is little here
about Putin's role in the St. Petersburg semi criminalized city government
in the 1990s, when the future president worked for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak;
nor does she say much about the persistent stories that The Family - the
still powerful Yeltsin entourage which virtually privatized the country
during the first Russian president's final months in power - have
compromising material on Putin with which they can manipulate him. The
author also adds little new to the story of the 1999 apartment bombings in
Moscow, which provided a convenient pretext for the war in the Caucasus
that propelled Putin into the Kremlin. Above all, Shevtsova places more
weight on the role of public opinion than would I. While Putin's election
and high personal approval rating give him legitimacy to rule, the elites,
not the society, limit his power. Growing popular opposition to the war in
Chechnya and many of Putin's economic policies seems unable to change the
Kremlin's course.
"The question for Russia," Shevtsova concludes, is whether Putin can trust
society to turn directly to it for a mandate to implement a transformation
of a new type - this time, not from above, as has always been done in
Russia, but with its participation.
The "urban, dynamic, educated strata have already made a choice for
individual rights and freedoms and are prepared to accept liberal democracy
as a system." Shevtsova is hopeful the approaching presidential elections
will enable Putin "fight his way out of the spider web in which he has been
trapped."
I am less sanguine than Shevtsova on the prospects for reform: far more
than a decisive reelection on a reform program would be needed to arouse
Russian society from its current torpor. The Russian elites would be more
likely to get rid of Putin, in my view, than tolerate fundamental threats
to their political and economic interests. Even Shevtsova hedges her bets.
She wonders if Putin is capable of understanding that the "rule he has
created will not allow him to realize his goal - forming a civilized market
economy and a modern state?" I suspect that even if he understands the
dilemma, which is by no means clear, he cannot and will not act differently.
********
#8
From: jonesme@rferl.org (jonesme@rferl.org)
Subject: REMINDER:Human Rights in Russia: Putin's Pre-Election Report Card
Sent: 5/27/03
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
invites you to a briefing by
Ludmilla Alekseeva
Chair, Moscow Helsinki Group
President, International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights
Tanya Lokshina
Executive Director, Moscow Helsinki Group
Human Rights in Russia:
Putin's Pre-Election Report Card
Friday, May 30, 2003
9:00AM-10:30AM
in Conference Room A (4th Floor) at
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
1201 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC
[entrance on Rhode Island Ave NW, next to St. Matthew's Cathedral]
Russians will go to the polls in December 2003 to elect a new parliament
and on March 14, 2004 to elect a president. It seems a foregone
conclusion that current President Vladimir Putin will run for a second
term. Long-time human rights activist and Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG)
Chair Ludmilla Alekseeva and MHG Executive Director Tanya Lokshina will
evaluate President Putin's human rights record during the first three
years of his current term and whether this record will become an issue in
either election.
Ludmilla Alekseeva was present at the birth of the human rights movement in
Russia in the
mid-1960's and helped found the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976. Since 1996
she has led the Moscow Helsinki Group, and since 1998 has served as
president of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. In
2002, Alekseeva was appointed to serve on Russia's Presidential Human
Rights Commission. Tanya Lokshina has worked on the staff of the Moscow
Helsinki Group since 1999 and
became Executive Director earlier this year. She is the Chief Editor of
numerous MHG publications, including the last four annual editions of
"Human Rights in Russian Regions".
Please RSVP by Thursday, May 29, 2003 by email to <dc-response@rferl.org>,
by telephone to Melody Jones at
(202) 457-6949, or by fax to (202) 457-6992.
*********
#9
slate.com
May 27, 2003
Unmarked Monuments
The legacy of the Gulag is everywhere, so why don't we know more about it?
By Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin is the author of Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a
Civilization.
Ever been to the Gulag?
Chances are you've seen Auschwitz-Birkenau. Perhaps you've also toured one
or more of the museums at Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec,
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Terezin, hauntingly familiar
names. But what about Ukhta, Iskitim, Karaganda, and Kolyma? Probably not.
And although Soviet travel restrictions collapsed with the country, it's
too late. Soviet labor camps never made any landmarks commission. Even
ruins are scarce.
In researching her fluent book on the Gulag (the Soviet prison-labor
system) Anne Applebaum crisscrossed Eurasia—and found the old brick
punishment block from camp No. 7 of Ukhtpechlag that an Armenian car
mechanic was using as a workshop. She also discovered a few memorials, in
the outskirts of Petrozavodsk (Karelia), Tomsk (Siberia), and Kiev
(Ukraine); crosses at the Vorkuta (Arctic Circle) coal mines; a modest
exhibition room at Solovki (Russia's far Northwest); and a commemorative
chapel in Syktyvkar (Komi). Only Perm-36 proved to have a full-scale Gulag
museum in the barracks of an actual camp, which local historians rebuilt,
establishing camp-reminiscent logging operations to defray reconstruction
costs. No national Gulag museum exists.
And yet the Gulag is everywhere. Some camps were incorporated into newer
and still functioning industrial-production prisons, especially in Western
Siberia, the densest part of Russia's regular prison system today. (Hard to
get a peek unless you get arrested.) The dank cells of a prison at the
former Dalstroi camps, headquartered in remote Magadan, house the archives
of the gold trust's accounting department—at least, they did as of 1993:
crumbling, moldy copies of reports to Moscow, phony statistics that turned
up on Stalin's desk.
In plain view, too, a continent's worth of monuments to slavery survive.
The main building of the Soviet Union's, and now Russia's, most prestigious
university, Moscow State, is a wedding cake to forced labor. Ditto many
airports, railroads, dams, and other infrastructure also built by the Gulag
penal system and inherited by the 15 former Soviet republics. A sizable
share of the property now owned by Russia's filthy rich gas monopoly,
Gazprom, was bequeathed by the Gulag. And don't forget the nickel mines,
diamond collieries, copper pits, and many oil fields that deliver
phenomenal revenues for today's private owners comprising Russia's or
Kazakhstan's Fortune 500. They were founded by involuntary pioneers, buried
in unmarked graves.
Applebaum, author of the prize-winning travelogue Between East and West
(1994), could have written a spectacular guide to the Gulag in the present,
probing moral ambiguity. She has written an encyclopedic synthesis of the
Gulag's past, advocating moral clarity.
Evoking the Nazis, Applebaum calls the Gulag sites "concentration camps"
even as she effectively details the Soviet obsession with captive, albeit
unproductive labor for their economy. At any given time, the Gulag held 2.5
million or so people, but turnover was fantastic, given the many short
sentences and releases. Once-secret reports record 18 million convicts
passing through the camps between 1929 and 1953. Another 6 million were
deported or exiled to far-flung work sites, and at least 4 million more
POWs were enslaved—for an estimated 28 million "zeks" during Stalin's time.
Between one-quarter and one-third were "politicals"—that is, fabricated
"counter-revolutionaries," innocents. The overwhelming majority consisted
of "criminals," a category that included unfortunates who were a few
minutes late to work or engaged in survivalist "speculation" as well as
thieves, rapists, and murderers. The latter, infamously, ruled the camps,
until genuine politicals—Baltic and West Ukrainian integral
nationalists—got swept up into the Gulag in the 1940s and organized mass
revolts, forcing regime concessions and auguring the onset of the end.
An idiot academic obligingly always turns up to minimize or rationalize the
horrific crimes, but, as Applebaum writes, the Gulag story suffers
principally from indifference. How many people read even Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's three-volume best seller The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
(1974-78), unsurpassable in its score-settling panache and psychological
depth? Applebaum's comprehensive account marshals the secret data
Solzhenitsyn lacked from the now declassified Gulag central archives in
Moscow (available also in sunny California's Hoover Institution, like a
Cold War victory trophy). After 2,000 endnotes referencing documents,
memoirs, interviews, and profuse scholarly studies in Russian, Polish,
French, and English, she delivers readers essentially to where the
anti-Soviet master's "literary investigation" did, despite gingerly
criticisms of him: Lenin, not Stalin, founded the camps; they were integral
to the Soviet system; they were evil. Still, it took cheek to tread where
the former zek Solzhenitsyn left such bigfoot imprints.
Incarcerated musicians, actors, ballerinas, and opera singers performed on
demand for camp bosses, whose commemorative photo albums constitute the
Gulag archive's perverse treasure. It was a multinational, wretched,
grotesque world, with its own convoluted customs and inventive argot, set
apart from, yet intimately linked to, the rest of Soviet society. "He who
has not been there will get his turn," says the labor camp proverb quoted
by Applebaum. "He who has been there will never forget."
--------
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982)
Samizdat poem to camp "goners," set in what today is a recreational
destination in Russia's Magadan province (translated by Anne Applebaum and
Galya Vinogradova).
I raise my glass to a road in the forest
To those who fall on their way
To those who can't drag themselves farther
But are forced to drag on.
To their bluish hard lips
To their identical faces
To their torn, frost-covered coats
To their hands without gloves
To the water they sip, from an old tin can
To the scurvy which sticks to their teeth.
To the teeth of fattened gray dogs
Which awake them in the morning
To the sullen sun,
Which regards them without interest
To the snow-white tombstones,
The work of clever snowstorms
To the ration of raw, sticky bread
Swallowed quickly
To the pale, too high sky
To the Ayan-Yuryakh River!
********
#10
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003
From: "Jacqueline Miller" <JMiller@csis.org>
Subject: new PONARS memo
Dear David,
A new PONARS policy memo by Ted Gerber and Sarah Mendelson on public
support for Russian military reform is available on the PONARS website
(http://www.csis.org/ruseura/ponars/policymemos/pm_index.htm).
Cheers,
Jackie
Jacqueline M. Miller
Assistant Director
Russia and Eurasia Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, NW
Washington, DC 20006
Tel: 202/775-3235
Fax: 202/775-3199
Email: jmiller@csis.org
*******
#11
US Department of State
Fact Sheet
Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
Washington, DC
May 20, 2003
Status of Wrangel and Other Arctic Islands
No negotiations regarding the U.S.-Russia maritime boundary have occurred
since 1990, when the U.S.-USSR Maritime Boundary Agreement was signed. The
negotiations that led to that agreement did not address the status of
Wrangel Island, Herald Island, Bennett Island, Jeannette Island, or
Henrietta Island, all of which lie off Russia's Arctic coast, or Mednyy
(Copper) Island or rocks off the coast of Mednyy Island in the Bering Sea.
None of the islands or rocks above were included in the U.S. purchase of
Alaska from Russia in 1867, and they have never been claimed by the United
States, although Americans were involved in the discovery and exploration
of some of them.
The U.S.-USSR Maritime Boundary Agreement, signed by the United States and
the Soviet Union on June 1, 1990, defines our maritime boundary in the
Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and northern Pacific Ocean. The U.S.-USSR
Maritime Boundary Agreement is a treaty that requires ratification by both
parties before it formally enters into force. The treaty was made public at
the time of its signing. In a separate exchange of diplomatic notes, the
two countries agreed to apply the agreement provisionally. The United
States Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification of the U.S.-USSR
Maritime Boundary Agreement on September 16, 1991.
The Russian Federation informed the United States Government by diplomatic
note dated January 13, 1992, that it “continues to perform the rights and
fulfill the obligations flowing from the international agreements” signed
by the Soviet Union. The United States and the Russian Federation, which is
considered to be the sole successor state to the treaty rights and
obligations of the former Soviet Union for the purposes of the U.S.-USSR
Maritime Boundary Agreement, are applying the treaty on a provisional
basis, pending its ratification by the Russian Federation.
The United States regularly holds discussions with Russia on Bering Sea
issues, but these discussions do not affect the placement of the
U.S.-Russia boundary or the jurisdiction over any territory or the
sovereignty of any territory. The U.S. has no intention of reopening
discussion of the 1990 Maritime Boundary Treaty.
********
#12
St. Petersburg Marks 300th Anniversary
May 27, 2003
By STEVE GUTTERMAN
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) - Priests chanted and cadets marched in tight
formation on a square steeped in St. Petersburg's turbulent history Tuesday
as the former imperial capital and the crucible of the Bolshevik Revolution
celebrated its 300th anniversary.
Thousands of people pressed against metal barriers erected around Palace
Square, which is bordered by the ornate, sprawling Winter Palace, the
one-time seat of czarist power.
The spacious square is linked in Russian minds with the October Revolution
of 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power and launched more than seven
decades of communist rule.
Despite the pageantry, 300 years is young for a Russian city: Moscow
recently celebrated its 850th anniversary. But St. Petersburg has undergone
a particularly grueling history of war, revolution and privation that gives
it a special role in the public imagination.
It has also endured misery. The city is said to be built on the bones of
thousands of slave laborers who raised St. Petersburg from a swamp.
Two-and-a-half centuries later, when it carried the Soviet-era name
Leningrad, hundreds of thousands starved to death during a nearly
three-year Nazi siege.
``It's a city that has had such a special history in a short period of
time,'' said scientist Vladimir Markov, 54, as he watched a procession of
red-robed Russian Orthodox priests bearing icons from St. Isaac's Cathedral
to Palace Square, where they chanted blessings for the city and took in the
military parade.
Tuesday's celebrations spilled across St. Petersburg's elegant downtown
area. St. Petersburg's city Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev and Valentina
Matviyenko, President Vladimir Putin's representative in Russia's northwest
region, laid flowers before the Bronze Horseman, a monument to the city's
founder, Czar Peter I - Peter the Great.
The statue inspired a classic poem by Russia's favorite poet, Alexander
Pushkin, and it dominates the square from which Russia's first
revolutionaries, the Decembrists, launched their failed reformist rebellion
in 1825.
Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg as Russia's window on the West, but
Putin - the city's most famous living native son - said Tuesday that it
also stands as a symbol of the triumphs and troubles of the vast country
that stretches eastward beyond it.
``Everything that is characteristic of the history of our entire country is
reflected in the history of the city,'' Putin said in a televised
interview. ``To be a citizen of Russia and a resident of the city is a
great honor and at the same time a difficult ordeal.''
With light still in the sky as midnight approached, hundreds of thousands
of people thronged the city's waterfront and nearby streets hoping for a
glimpse of a regatta and late-night laser show.
City landmarks got facelifts for the 10-day celebration, which culminates
over the weekend with a Russia-European Union summit and a meeting between
Putin and President Bush.
An ornate gate to the Winter Palace, which now houses the Hermitage art
museum, was opened in a ceremony Tuesday, providing access to the building
from Palace Square for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad a decade later, St. Petersburg got
its old name back as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
``For us, Leningrad was always Petersburg,'' said Alexei Volkov, 39, a
naval officer who watched the ceremony with his wife and daughter. ``We
always knew that Peter I founded it and we are proud that we were born here.''
********
#13
Moscow Times
May 28, 2003
Editorial
Peter's Party: Potemkin or Real Revival?
In the beginning of the 20th century, St. Petersburg famously changed its
status from imperial capital to "cradle of the Revolution." But once all
the Bolshevik big cheeses went south to Moscow, their love for the city
began to falter. Native Petersburgers over a certain age will tell you that
Stalin harbored serious suspicions against Leningrad because it was the
power base of men he feared as rivals, so he steadily cut funding.
The tradition stuck. Now, decades later, the once regal "Venice of the
North" is in a sad state, full of crumbling buildings and infrastructure,
with about one-fifth of its 4.7 million people living in communal
apartments. The collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, much of St.
Petersburg's industry pounded another nail into the coffin. Dirty business
and bloody turf wars in the early '90s gave Russia's cultural capital an
unshakeable reputation as its criminal capital.
But since the rise of President Vladimir Putin, the city's most famous
living son, things have been looking up. The 300th anniversary celebrations
-- now in full swing and raised to an international level thanks to the EU
and CIS summits -- have made the city a funding priority. The federal
government alone has pumped some 40 billion rubles into renovations over
the past three years, not bad considering that Petersburg's annual budget
is a measly 70 billion rubles.
One question on many residents' minds is how long the windfall will last.
Will the funding end as soon as the party does?
The efforts to prepare the city for the celebrations have been truly
impressive. But the makeover has also included some typical Potemkin
village elements, like the oft-ridiculed two-meter-tall fence built to hide
garbage dumps, graveyards and decrepit dacha plots along the highway that
will be used by foreign dignitaries traveling to and from Pulkovo airport.
Putin told journalists Tuesday that the work done ahead of the 300th
anniversary celebrations should be just the beginning of getting the city
back on its feet.
"I have regarded and continue to regard the tricentennial merely as an
excuse to draw the country's attention to the problems of a city that
belongs to all of Russia and all of Europe," he said.
Putin stressed that much of the responsibility would lie with the city's
government and lawmakers, but that federal support for major projects would
continue.
"The trigger has been pulled," he said, "the arrow is in flight and nothing
can stop it now."
Nothing, perhaps, except for bureaucracy and corruption. But let's hope the
president is right.
*******
#14
Christian Science Monitor
May 28, 2003
Philanthropy still rare in Russian cultural landscape
As St. Petersburg celebrates its 300th year, many of its museums go begging.
By Fred Weir | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA – In the grand entrance to the Winter Palace, where
the boots of Bolsheviks scuffed the sumptuous floors as they seized power
here in 1917, a small brass plaque thanks some of the giants of Western
capitalism for help in surviving more recent tumult.
The palace - which the Soviets converted into the Hermitage art museum - is
among many Russian artistic institutions learning the difficult ways of the
free market after state support dwindled.
In the post-Soviet search for private funding, a homegrown brand of
philanthropy has been slow to develop. Western companies have come to the
rescue of the highest-profile projects, and just a few of Russia's biggest
firms have followed.
With its three million exhibits, ranging from ancient Scythian gold to
Picasso, the world-renowned Hermitage - which at one point in the 1990s
couldn't even afford to pay its heating bill - is now in far better shape
than thousands of smaller Russian museums and other cultural institutions
inherited from the USSR. Most still eke out an existence on state
subsidies, which have stabilized but will never return to Soviet-era levels.
For most, following the trail blazed by the Hermitage in tapping the
private sector seems an impossibility.
"The conditions are not yet in place to permit private money to flow into
cultural purposes," says Yelena Kononenko, a historian with the St.
Petersburg Museum, which owns the Peter and Paul Fortress and several other
important sites. Though the museum started its own fund-raising department
a year ago, it has yet to see any corporate dollars. "In Russia, it seems
that problems can be clearly understood, but they are inevitably put off to
be solved in some vague future," says Ms. Kononenko.
One obstacle, most experts say, is the Russian government's refusal to
enact a tax policy that encourages cultural donations. "Every kopeck
donated to a museum is taxed to the hilt in this country; there are no
deductions," says Mikhail Kamensky, an art expert who worked at Moscow's
Pushkin art museum for many years and recently became an adviser on
cultural contributions to the powerful Bank of Moscow. "The government
regards such donations as money spent to buy advertising services," he
says. "This discourages companies from giving, and distorts their relations
with the museums when they do."
Another obstacle is the slow growth of medium-sized businesses in Russia.
The economy remains dominated by a a few corporate empires, which
increasingly do contribute to culture, but only to foremost institutions
such as the Hermitage.
Further, in St. Petersburg - Russia's top tourist draw, celebrating its
tricentennial this week - there is still no association of restaurateurs or
hoteliers that might see the point of raising money to assist the full
spectrum of local attractions. "Businesses here are too young, too focused
on their own immediate survival, to see the larger picture," says
Kononenko. "That will come eventually, and I hope we're still here to
benefit from it."
Museums use a variety of enticements to persuade companies to donate,
including free entrance tickets for the contributor's employees, the right
to stage publicity events on museum premises and even opportunities to
borrow art masterpieces for temporary display in company offices. The most
generous donors may have a permanent plaque, with the corporate logo,
placed inside the museum.
But in Russia, where the fine line between commerce and culture is still
largely unmapped, misunderstandings are frequent. "Museum directors often
feel entitled to money, and resent giving any acknowledgment to corporate
donors," says Mr. Kamensky. "On the other hand, some businessmen feel that
paying money gives them the right to demand anything. Mutual respect takes
time to develop."
Western corporations, with long experience behind them, seem to fit
smoothly into the complex role of art patrons. Coca- Cola, for example,
celebrated a decade of assisting the Hermitage in mid-May with a low-key
reception in the Winter Garden of Peter the Great, one of the museum's most
cherished halls - an event that satisfied both the company's desire for
publicity and the Hermitage's need for discretion.
As they seek corporate help, museums have faced controversy. St.
Petersburg's Russian Museum, which houses the world's premier collection of
Russian art, has taken public criticism for accepting funds from
multinational tobacco companies. "We had a lot of internal discussions
about this," says Irina Likhomanova, the museum's director of fundraising.
"We have agreed from the very start that we are not promoting tobacco, just
the noble face of art."
Most of Russia's struggling museums can only dream of such troubles. "For
all the starving cultural institutions across Russia, there is only one
way," says Mr. Kamensky. "Museum directors must learn to innovate, appeal
to the public, and reach out to local business. And Russian businesses must
see that it's in their interest to support regional art and museums.
Hardest of all, they must develop the tradition of working together with
mutual understanding and respect."
*******
#15
Russia: 'Window On Europe' Celebrates 300th Anniversary
By Jeremy Bransten
Russia's former imperial capital, St. Petersburg, marks the 300th
anniversary of its founding today. Birthday celebrations will last for
several days and culminate this weekend, when more than 40 world leaders
arrive in the city to take part in cultural events and a series of summits
with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Prague, 27 May 2003 (RFE/RL) --
"There, by the billows desolate,
He stood, with mighty thoughts elate,
And gazed; but in the distance only
A sorry skiff on the broad spate
Of Neva drifted seaward, lonely.
The moss-grown miry banks with rare
Hovels were dotted here and there
Where wretched Finns for shelter crowded;
The murmuring woodlands had no share
Of sunshine, all in mist beshrouded.
And thus He mused: 'From here, indeed
Shall we strike terror in the Swede;
And here a city by our labor
Founded, shall gall our haughty neighbor;
'Here cut'-- so Nature gives command --
'Your window through on Europe; stand
Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!'
Ay, ships of every flag shall come
By waters they had never swum,
And we shall revel, freely ranging."
The opening lines of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's epic poem "The Bronze
Horseman" are known to every Russian schoolchild. The verses take their
inspiration from the city's famous equestrian statue of Tsar Peter the
Great. They describe his founding of the city on the desolate banks of the
Gulf of Finland in May 1703, following a battle against the Swedes that
gave Russia its long-sought access to the sea.
Pushkin portrayed St. Petersburg's foundation as an epic struggle between
nature and man. Peter the Great's single-minded determination to build a
majestic imperial capital -- a "Window on Europe" -- on what was frozen,
flooded swampland cost thousands of lives. But ultimately, he and his heirs
succeeded and the city became the shining center of Russian political and
cultural life.
And this week, as Pushkin has Peter himself predicting, ships of every flag
-- or, rather, presidential aircraft from every continent -- will land
here, bringing more than 40 world leaders to take part in St. Petersburg's
300th anniversary.
They will be honoring a city that has stood at the center of Russia's
imagination since its foundation.
Generations of Russian poets and writers have had a love-hate relationship
with St. Petersburg, seeing it as a metaphor for Russia's unparalleled
capacity for grandeur and its equally unrivaled capacity for imposing
cruelty and enduring hardship. Fedor Dostoevsky called St. Petersburg "the
most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world."
The nation's obsession with St. Petersburg faded for most of the 20th
century. The Bolsheviks' decision to move the country's capital back to
Moscow in 1918 began a long process of decline. Soviet leader Josef Stalin
murdered much of the city's intelligentsia in the 1930s -- by that time
known as Leningrad -- and the Nazis' 900-day siege of the city during World
War II killed a third of the city's inhabitants.
But St. Petersburg survived to see its star ascend once more. In 1991,
following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city regained its original
name. In the year 2000, native son Vladimir Putin was elected Russian
president.
Putin has been the driving force behind the latest efforts to showcase the
city as a center of arts and culture, which he views as symbolic of a
resurgent Russia. Under his direction, the authorities allocated hundreds
of millions of dollars from the federal budget to restore the city's faded
facades and countless monuments, in time for its 300th anniversary.
As Putin explained in an interview aired on Russia television today, it was
a project worth undertaking. "Everything that is characteristic of our
country's history is reflected in the city's history," Putin said. "To be a
citizen of Russia and an inhabitant of this city is at once a great honor
and a heavy burden because our city was built in the face of many
difficulties. At all times, even in the most difficult periods of its
history, the city was always magnificent and great."
Today, 27 May, marks the official anniversary of the city's founding.
Parades, outdoor concerts, and street fairs will be capped by a giant laser
show tonight on the banks of the Neva River. But in many ways, today's
events are a dress rehearsal for the weekend, when world leaders arrive in
the city for what promises to be an extravaganza of culture and politics.
Fourteen thousand hotel rooms have been set aside for the foreign
officials, their aides and accompanying journalists. U.S. President George
W. Bush alone is flying in with 700 staffers. Thousands of extra police are
being deployed and plans call for the city's Pulkovo Airport to be closed
to ordinary traffic for four days, beginning Friday (30 May), as the city
prepares to host the biggest international gathering in its history.
Putin will use the occasion to host a series of bilateral and multilateral
summits at the 18th-century Konstantinovksii Palace, restored from
dereliction to its original splendor in the space of 18 months, at a cost
of $300 million -- mostly from private donors, according to the government.
On 30 May, leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) will
convene for a summit at the palace. They will be followed by leaders of the
European Union on Saturday (31 May), for a Russia-EU summit. Bush will hold
a bilateral summit with Putin on Sunday (1 June).
Chinese President Hu Jintao, who met Putin for talks in Moscow yesterday
and today, will also travel up to St. Petersburg for the festivities. He is
due to open a Chinese garden at the city's Institute of Oriental Studies.
So what do ordinary St. Petersburg residents think of their city's
anniversary and the impending media onslaught? Anna Sharogradskaya,
director of the Press Development Institute, told RFE/RL by phone from St.
Petersburg that feelings are mixed.
"Everyone remarks that if it weren't for the anniversary, the city most
probably wouldn't have come up with the funds to make itself so beautiful.
People are taking part in the various events around town, the different
street fairs. And I'm sure that many people will go to see the laser show.
On the other hand, working people are worried about all the traffic
restrictions. These restrictions are too numerous to allow you to make any
plans. And most city residents will be focused on just surviving this
period -- we'll have a chance to enjoy the city after this is all over,"
Sharogradskaya said.
Local politicians have in fact advised residents, after today, to stay out
of the city center as much as possible and consider even going out of town
this anniversary weekend so the foreign dignitaries will not be
inconvenienced. Happy Birthday, St. Petersburg!
("Pushkin's Bronze Horseman" -- Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1955. English translation by Waclaw Lednicki.)
********
#16
New York Times
May 28, 2003
Warm and Weird Toasts to Russia's Crown Jewel
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, May 27 — Pushkin wrote verse that immortalized this
city, the imperial capital of Russia, as a "window into Europe." Sergei V.
Pryanishnikov makes pornography that depicts it as a palatial peep show.
The Bronze Horseman monument of Peter the Great on a rearing steed stars in
one of Pushkin's most famous poems as the symbol of the city, in
Pryanishnikov's film as the setting for an orgy.
"St. Petersburg is a very beautiful city," said Mr. Pryanishnikov, who
claims sales of 100,000 videos a month. The office of his SP Company is
lined with titles like "Sexual St. Petersburg," "Sex Russian Style" and the
four-part series "White Nights of Sankt-Peterburg," which is dedicated "to
the 300th anniversary of the city."
His films are one of the weirdest examples of the anniversary frenzy
gripping the city that Peter willed into existence on a dank northern
swamp, a confection whipped up by Italian architects and thousands of serfs
who perished for the czar's whim.
Mr. Pryanishnikov pays decidedly low-budget erotic homage to St.
Petersburg's palaces and monuments, and to this city's natural assets — the
dusky, decadent white nights of summer and the waterways that provide a
perpetual cinematic quality, "as if the city were constantly being filmed
by its river," as Joseph Brodsky wrote.
"White Nights" is no "Russian Ark," the whirl through Russian history shot
by the St. Petersburg director Aleksandr Sokurov in a single take inside
the Hermitage, but Mr. Pryanishnikov has his own manifesto.
"We combined the dusk with erotica, the beauty of sex with the beauty of
architectural monuments," he said, sporting a beard, a portly belly and
leisure wear. He resembles Larry Flynt as imagined by Gogol, famous for his
own surreal tales of life here.
Mr. Pryanishnikov's pornographic paeans to St. Petersburg — muse to poets,
musicians and artists — would be merely a bizarre footnote if they didn't
so perfectly capture the absurdities of the anniversary, the offbeat
cultural rhythms of the city and its search for a post-Soviet identity. The
peak dates for the anniversary festivities are May 23 to June 1.
St. Petersburg regained its name in 1991, but it is still struggling to
reclaim bygone majesty and overcome the Soviet legacy that converted its
name to Leningrad, its palaces to Lenin Museums and its cathedrals to
potato warehouses and museums of atheism. Even Natalya I. Batozhok, the
chairwoman of the anniversary celebration committee, says, "I looked and
look at it as Leningrad." Most people call the city Peter, and everyone
seems to think it hasn't lived up to the prefix "Sankt."
"It will be Petersburg when the facades and bridges are fixed," said
Vladimir M. Grusman, director of the Russian Museum of Ethnography here.
The race to restore its imperial luster and secure its crown as the
cultural capital of Russia has been helped significantly by also being, in
a sense, Putingrad — the hometown of the Russian president, Vladimir V.
Putin.
Anniversary events today included a wreath laying at the Bronze Horseman
and the opening of a grand entrance to the Hermitage from the Palace
Square. On Saturday the recreated Amber Room in Catherine the Great's
summer palace is to be unveiled decades after the original was dismantled
and looted by the Nazis. Mr. Putin and dozens of dignitaries, including
President Bush, plan to attend the Saturday event.
And on Monday the Russian culture minister, Mikhail Y. Shvydkoi, scorned a
gift from France — a glass Tower of Peace unveiled today in Sennaya Square.
He said it breached the integrity of that Unesco heritage site famous as a
setting in the novel "Crime and Punishment."
An exhibition dedicated to the 300th anniversary and devoted to Brodsky,
expelled from Leningrad in 1972, has already opened at the Anna Akhmatova
Museum here, named for another of this city's sanctified writers and set in
the apartment where she lived and worked.
Plans to purchase property for a Brodsky house museum have been complicated
by the tangle of ownership surrounding Soviet-era communal apartments,
which can still be found behind many grand residential facades in the city.
Such housing "bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions about
human nature," Brodsky wrote in "A Room and a Half," about growing up in a
communal apartment in which the bathroom and kitchen were shared with
strangers. "You know the sounds they make in bed."
One of the rooms he lived in with his parents was bought with help from the
Alfa Bank. But there are other rooms to go, including Brodsky's half room,
with different residents and their escalating demands.
Nearby, in a St. Petersburg suburb, more than $200 million is being spent
to restore the 1,000-room Konstantinovsky Palace, which had been envisioned
by Peter as his Versailles; it is to become Mr. Putin's official St.
Petersburg residence. In a wholly unironic reiteration of the Potemkin
village, officials ordered construction of a huge shield to hide
dilapidated structures en route to the palace.
Recurring charges of financial misappropriation by city officials have
magnified the "let them eat cake" aspects of this anniversary. The Audit
Chamber, the Russian federal financial watchdog, requested that the
prosecutor investigate. After parliamentary hearings in April, the speaker
of the upper chamber of Parliament said there were financial
irregularities, but not crimes.
Andrei A. Aryev, a friend of Brodsky's and the editor of Zvezda, a
respected literary journal, said the city had no money this year to finance
the top literary prize in the city. "They're digging a canal instead," he
said of the construction near the restored Mikhailovsky Castle. "You can
launder a lot of things in a canal."
Historical sites like the Smolny Cathedral were dropped from the list of
restoration projects to be completed for the anniversary. Scaffolding that
covered the Peter and Paul Fortress, burial place of the czars, has come
down for the anniversary, and some will reportedly go back up afterward.
Mention of the anniversary elicits deep sighs from many involved in the
preparations.
"I'm a restorer, that doesn't allow for rushing," said Boris P. Igdalov,
director of the Amber Room restoration workshop. "When I'm told I have to
finish for the 300th, I start to shake."
This city may be most famous for the high-culture altars of the Hermitage
and the Mariinsky Theater (also called the Kirov abroad) with an
international reach bolstered by Valery Gergiev's perpetual motion and the
Hermitage's alliance with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
Domestically, however, St. Petersburg has had more of a below-the-belt
pop-culture influence on young Russians these days.
"Brat," a 1997 film, and its 2000 sequel, "Brat 2," have been two of the
most violent, racist and wildly popular movies in Russia in recent years.
They were made by a St. Petersburg director, Aleksei Balabanov, who also
directed an award-winning art-house feature film about the birth of St.
Petersburg's pornography industry in the late 19th-century. The soundstages
of Lenfilm, the Soviet film giant, churn out popular television shows with
titles like "Bandit Petersburg," reflecting the city's reputation as the
criminal capital of Russia.
"Leningrad," a controversial and critically acclaimed St. Petersburg
ska-punk band, offers welcome relief from the Russian pop scene's
relentless Britney Spears imitators. The band's explicit lyrics are a major
problem: most are rendered as an endless stream of expletives, a vernacular
known as "mat" (the term has roots in the Russian word for mother). Yuri
Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, has banned the group from stadium
performances there. (Limbus Press, one of Russia's first private publishing
houses and one of its most influential, has given all that foul language
intellectual credibility with its "Big Dictionary of Mat.")
Limbus has also published the recent hit "Give Me! (Song for Lovers)," a
no-holds-barred coming-of-age novel by Irina Denezhkina, a 21-year-old
student. Limbus sold rights for publication of that book in the United
States to Simon & Schuster.
In Limbus's St. Petersburg offices, strewn with books and manuscripts,
Viktor L. Toporov, the editor in chief, said that the city's slower pace
and "special aura" helped generate ideas, even if he was unromantic about
the realities of the city, reflected in forthcoming books.
Limbus is publishing a series of coffee-table photography books on this
city's history, from Petersburg to Petrograd, to Leningrad and back to
Petersburg. The series is the brainchild of Vladimir A. Nikitin, a local
photographer who spends his days in archives searching out photographs of a
lost city. Piles of boxes in his apartment are filled with pictures of the
Romanovs and painful scenes of revolution and civil war.
On his computer he flipped from images of giddy pre-revolutionary car and
air shows — "It was absolutely a European city," he said — to a girl
marching past a palace holding a portrait of Stalin, to Soviet workers
bunking in a hovel, to strip bars and alcoholics in post-Soviet St.
Petersburg. "Disguised Blockade," perhaps better translated as "The Unknown
Blockade," documents the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis, which
killed up to a million residents.
"I always worried about the question of what Leningrad is, but only after
seeing all of these documents, all of these archives, did I realize what a
tragedy it was for the 20th century, a tragedy of the city, of the whole
country," Mr. Nikitin said.
"The photographs are not just about palaces," he said. "They're a stage
set. They will remain. They're about the social state of the city."
St. Petersburg still offers salvation in its art. Behind the grandest and
gloomiest facades are restorers and artisans who have devoted their lives
to the city. At the Sampsonievsky Cathedral, Pyotr P. Ushakov, 74, puts
finishing touches of gilt on the altar doors he spent months salvaging from
decades of dirt and dust. Orphaned by World War II, he became an apprentice
to master restorers at Peterhof Palace, nearly destroyed in the war, and
worked at every great palace in this city.
"All the palaces are mine," he said.
Now a new generation has taken up the mystical burden. In the desperate
early 1990's, Igor Y. Lavrenenko, 40, was working at a railroad depot. He
moonlighted as a vodka salesman near the Kazan Cathedral, the Museum of
Atheism during Soviet times. From there he had a view of the Church on the
Spilled Blood, built to commemorate the assassination of Czar Aleksandr II,
the "czar liberator" killed by revolutionaries in 1881.
Then, he said, "miracles began."
Now he is restoring and recreating intricate Roman mosaics of Orthodox
saints for the iconostasis of the cathedral's altar. He spends months
toiling over each mosaic at his workshop in a shed by the train tracks at
the far end of the desolate depot.
"Sometimes I hear gunshots," he said, surrounded by icons, machinery
assembled from ancient Soviet parts and nooks full of nearly 300 shades of
opaque Italian glass for the mosaics.
Behind the Catherine Palace at Tsarkoye Selo, a St. Petersburg suburb,
artisans are putting the final touches on the magical Amber Room, a
500,000-piece puzzle that they have recreated from intuition and a handful
of surviving photographs. They finger the amber, which amazes them even
after all these years.
"It's 40 million years old," said Aleksei Murzov, an artisan working on the
project, as he paused for a moment. "Three hundred years one way or another
doesn't make much difference."
********
#17
Business Week
June 2, 2003
Russia's Watchdog Wakes
Can a new law help regulators stop stock manipulation?
By Paul Starobin
On a May 12 visit to New York, top Russian securities regulator Igor V.
Kostikov compared notes over croissants and coffee with fellow
troubleshooter Eliot Spitzer, New York State's crusading Attorney General.
At first glance, the contrast between the two breakfast partners could not
be greater. While Spitzer is constantly in the limelight for pursuing
high-profile cases against Wall Street firms, his Russian counterpart
Kostikov has yet to wrap up any significant probes in a market that's
widely viewed by traders themselves as rife with abuses. But now, after
three years on the job, Russia's top securities watchdog may finally be
rousing from his slumber.
A week before the morning meeting with Spitzer, Kostikov's Federal
Securities Commission (FSC) quietly launched a formal investigation into
alleged stock-price manipulation in a case that may define both the
usefulness of an untested new Russian securities law and the ability of
regulators to enforce it. The target: Brunswick UBS, a leading Moscow-based
brokerage half-owned by UBS Warburg, the global investment-banking arm of
Swiss banking giant UBS. The investigation centers on allegations involving
possible leaks of unpublished Brunswick UBS analyst ratings of publicly
traded stocks. No charges have been filed, and it's still unclear if any
employees of Brunswick UBS will be implicated. The company denies
wrongdoing and says it maintains close contact with Russian officials. "We
are cooperating with the regulators," says Jeffrey R. Costello, Brunswick
UBS's American CEO.
Whatever happens in the case, it's clear Kostikov wants to send a signal
that Russia's days as an anything-goes marketplace are over. That's
precisely why Russian regulators view the very launching of this
investigation as a milestone. "Traders are asking us to create a
transparent and fair market and to use the powers we have to protect them,"
says FSC Deputy Chairman Gennady Kolesnikov, a former Balkans U.N.
peacekeeper who is in charge of the commission's 100-member team of
investigators. "It's important to restore confidence in the markets."
Russian regulators certainly need to start regulating. Such dicey practices
as insider trading and front-running have long been rampant in Moscow's
bourses. "In the eight years that I have been in Russia, I have not seen
anyone taken to task for insider trading," says James Fenkner, a U.S.
native who's head of research at Moscow brokerage Troika Dialog. After the
market meltdown following the ruble crash of 1998, fixing these abuses was
not a high priority. But five years later, stock prices, although still
below peak precrisis levels, are rising again, and foreign investors are
returning to Russia.
Now, Kostikov, armed with a law passed last December designed to stamp out
stock manipulation, is promising to crack down on corruption. FSC
investigators are demanding trading records and other data from officials
at Brunswick UBS and the Russian Trading System (RTS), one of the country's
prime exchanges. The probe grew out of a complaint, filed on Apr. 28 by a
Brunswick UBS client, that describes a pattern of spikes in the volume of
shares traded in seven companies on the RTS shortly before the release of
Brunswick's latest ratings for these equities (table). In some cases, the
share prices of several of those stocks rose substantially after the
release of the reports, which in six of the seven cases involved "buy"
ratings on the stocks.
The FSC confirms that it has opened an investigation but won't provide
details. "It's in a very early stage," Kostikov says. If the FSC finds
Brunswick UBS has violated the market-manipulation law, sanctions could
include temporary suspension of trading privileges or revocation of the
brokerage's license.
Industry observers say that proving misconduct in a case like Brunswick UBS
may prove very difficult for Kostikov's team. Although the new law
ostensibly prohibits price manipulation, no provision on the books defines
and sets penalties for insider trading. So Russian officials may lack the
kind of tool that serves as a powerful disincentive to leaking sensitive
information in more industrialized economies such as the U.S.
The action targeting Brunswick UBS also raises fairness questions, such as
why the FSC chose to act on this tip-off. The regulators say the probe into
Brunswick UBS was set into motion by the specific complaint from a reliable
source -- and add that their policy is to check out grievances against any
brokerage. The complaint's allegations are "serious" and seem credible,
says the FSC's Kolesnikov. But brokers claim it's hard for them to know
exactly what's legal and who's liable. "What we have at the moment are
relatively untested regulations," says Brunswick UBS head Costello, a
former U.S. securities lawyer in Washington.
The complaint against Brunswick describes a distinctive pattern of trading
in the seven stocks cited. Prices of some went up sharply in the first week
after the high turnover day, although in other cases, the share price
declined. The dollar sums in question -- a maximum of $18.5 million in a
day's trading -- aren't large by U.S. standards, but the trading-volume
upticks are eye-catching and could have provided opportunities for tidy
profits.
For example, according to the complaint, on Jan. 9, 2002, an obscure
regional telecom, Moscow Electrosvyaz, showed trading volume of 1,200,000
shares, 23 times higher than the stock's average daily turnover on the RTS
over the previous three months. That was prior to a Jan. 15 Brunswick UBS
research report recommending a buy on the stock. One week after the
high-turnover day, Electrosvyaz' stock price had gained 21%, with much of
the gain coming before the report was published.
Brunswick UBS's Costello says the brokerage has strict Chinese walls
separating its research and trading arms and further denies that the
brokerage has ever tipped off clients on the contents of upcoming reports.
"They are not going to find any evidence of that," he says matter-of-factly
of the regulators' probe. A London spokesman for UBS Warburg echoes: "We
cooperate closely with regulators and adhere to both international best
practices and local regulations."
The recent complaint against Brunswick UBS is not the first. As far back as
August, 2000, the FSC says it received a request from national electricity
monopoly Unified Energy Systems to investigate possible manipulation of its
stock price by Brunswick UBS. But the FSC says at that time it was
powerless to deal with the complaint. Brunswick UBS claims the allegations
were baseless. A probe by Russia's Association of National Stock Market
Participants, an industry self-regulatory body, cleared the firm of any
wrongdoing.
Kostikov himself has faced accusations from Russian financiers of secretly
retaining ties to the St. Petersburg brokerage, AVK, he founded in the
early 1990s. He has strongly denied these allegations, and a probe
conducted by a U.S. law firm that advises the FSC concluded that he
divested his interest in AVK in 1998. Still, the allegations show how hard
it is for anyone in Russian finance to have an unsullied reputation. Even
savvy players such as Brunswick UBS must prove that they don't deserve to
bear a stigma for the collective sins of the industry.
********
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