Notebook

Killing Continues

Post-referendum Chechnya

rocked by terrorism

A series of suicide attacks shook the separatist republic of Chechnya in May and June. The attacks made clear that the referendum held there in March, which adopted the new, pro-Moscow constitution, had not yet put an end to the bloody conflict in the breakaway republic. 

On May 12, an explosives-filled truck filled decimated a government building in the village of Znamenskoye, killing 60 people and injuring nearly 200. Forty-eight hours later, 17 people were killed and 145 wounded when a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a crowded religious festival in the village of Iliskhan-Yurt, east of the republic’s capital of Grozny. Another female bomber died in the blast before she had time to detonate her explosive-laden belt. The attack was said to have targeted Chechnya’s chief administrator, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was present at the festival, but escaped unhurt; five of his bodyguards were killed by the blast.

On June 5, a third female suicide bomber killed 20 passengers on a bus carrying air force personnel in Ossetia.

Despite the bombings, Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted an amnesty bill for approval by the State Duma in May. The bill was approved by the Duma in June and will pardon all Chechen guerrillas, army and members of security agencies who hand in their weapons before September 1. Foreign citizens and persons accused of capital crimes, such as murder, rape and kidnapping are not covered by the amnesty. 

Stars and Eagles

New military flag

approved

In June, the Duma approved President Vladimir Putin’s bill to create a new banner for the Russian armed forces. The new banner will be red, like the current one, and will feature eight stars – one in each of the corners on each side, two different eagles, with ornamentation and the words “Fatherland,” “Duty” and “Honor.” 

Last November, the Defense Minister proposed returning the (Soviet) red star to the military banner. The star replaced the imperial eagle on the military’s banner in 1918. Putin’s bill was seen as a compromise that sought to meld old and new symbology, yet already some are criticizing the flag for containing too many symbols.

Burning Questions

Forest fires spreading

in Russian Far East

By press time, the spring forest fire season in Russia had already claimed about 800,000 hectares, according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Siberia and the Far East were most heavily affected. Some 9,000 persons were involved in battling the blazes and the Ministry said that most were caused by careless burning of dried grass and poorly managed campfires in forests. In early May, a helicopter carrying reporters covering the fires, including four journalists from Rossiya television channel and Yezhenedelny Zhurnal magazine, crashed in Chita region, killing all 12 persons on board.

 

Reaching Out

MFA to establish ties

with emigre groups abroad

Eleonora Mitrofanova was appointed first deputy foreign minister responsible for international cultural exchanges and defending the rights of Russians living abroad. She was appointed to the post by President Putin in late May and is the first woman to occupy such a high position in the Foreign Ministry. 

Mitrofanova will head a new department charged with liaisoning with Russians abroad, as well as a new Russian Center for International Cultural Cooperation (Roszarubezhtsentr). In 1993-95, Mitrofanova served as a State Duma deputy from the right-wing LDPR, headed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Her brother, Duma deputy Alexei Mitrofanov, is one of the party’s most outspoken members. Mitrofanova has also worked as an auditor for the State Audit Chamber and, since January 2001, as deputy general director of UNESCO for administrative matters. 

Sausage and Politics

Duma can’t stomach

Mikoyan’s meat ad

The Moscow-based Mikoyan Factory, one of Russia’s top sausage and meat producers, was fined 400 minimum wages (about $1,300) by the Antitrust Ministry following a complaint filed by the State Duma. The fine was imposed for “diminishing the authority of the State Duma.” The subject of the crime was a Mikoyan Factory TV commercial which stated that the factory’s meats were the main entrée at “Duma lunches.” The ad showed the Duma’s headquarters and an actor playing the part of a people’s deputy consuming the factory’s meats. Legislators said that the ad undermined the State Duma’s authority as a state body and contradicted Article 8 of the Russian Law on Advertising. 

 

Deeper and Deeper

Moscow station now the

world’s deepest

A new metro station opened in May Moscow’s 165th – is allegedly the deepest in the world. The station is called “Park Pobedy” (Victory Park) and is on the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line. The station provides easy access to Poklonnaya Gora, which has a major memorial devoted to the Great Patriotic War. The station is 80 meters underground and has 125 meter-long escalators. The station is decorated with panels celebrating Russia’s victories against Napoleon and against the Nazis. The station was decorated by the Moscow mayor’s “court sculptor,” Zurab Tseretelli, and was immediately condemned by some critics as kitschy and tasteless.

Resource-full

Moves to monopolize oil 

and titanium industries

Top oil producers Yukos and Sibneft announced a merger in late April that will make the new company the largest oil company in Russia and one of the largest in the world. Yukos is already Russia’s second largest oil producer, after LUKoil, while Sibneft ranks fifth. Jointly, Yukos and Sibneft produce about 29% of all oil produced in Russia – some 754.2 million barrels in 2002. 

In the merger, to be completed this year, Sibneft will sell 20% of its shares to Yukos for $3 billion and will exchange their remaining shares for shares of the new company, Yukos-Sibneft. Yukos president Mikhail Khodorkovsky will be the CEO of the new company and Sibneft President Yevgeny Shvidler will be nominated for the position of chairman of the board of directors. 

The new company’s reserves, including the reserves of Slavneft, an oil firm bought by Sibneft at the end of 2002, will amount to 19.4 billion barrels of oil and 5.9 trillion cubic feet of gas. The company’s daily oil production was projected at about 2.3 million barrels. LUKoil currently produces about 1.5 million barrels a day.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Monopolization of Natural Resources front, Russian VSMPO-AVISMA Group and Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Technologies are creating a joint venture that they hope will one day control 50% of the world’s titanium market – each company already controls about 20% of the world market. The venture, to be dubbed Uniti, will target the construction, automotive, power-generation, and consumer-goods markets, while the two separate companies will continue to compete in other sectors. (RFE/RL Newsline)

Noisome Business

On September 25 last year, a bas-relief nose, which was a monument to Gogol’s story, “The Nose,” went missing from its place at the corner of Voznesensky prospekt and Prospekt Rimskovo-Korsakova. Local wags had great fun with the story, because Gogol’s fictional tale is about a nose that disappears from the face of its owner, Major Kovalyov, and runs amuck in the capital. Now a new nose has been sculpted by Vyacheslav Bukhaev, to replace the bas relief that was stolen. The new nose has not yet been installed, as additional funds are needed to finish the work. But it seems certain that this version will be more securely fastened down. The last thing locals want is to encourage thieves to do another nose job. (Interfax)

 

Foreigners’ Fears

A recent poll of foreigners in Moscow showed that their greatest fears are youth groups, including skinheads, lack of legal protections from dangerous situations, and the police, which, instead of protecting people from danger, represent a danger. The majority of respondents to the poll, conducted by Independent Research Center ROMIR for the Moscow government, termed the level of security in the city as “average.” Human rights abuses and non-compliance with the law were ranked as Moscow’s worst problems. The city’s ecology and business security were also both ranked “average.” (gazeta.ru)

 

Karelia’s Caves

A museum of petroglyphs, cliff drawings by ancient humans, is being created in Karelia. The center will open in the republic’s Belomorsky region, where a great number of petroglyphs have been found. There are over 2,000 known petroglyphs in Karelia, which have been included on UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites. The creation of the museum will help protect the ancient drawings, not only from natural forces, but also from uncontrolled tourism. (Rosbalt)

 

Beatle in the Kremlin

Former Beatle Paul McCartney visited Russia for the first time in May and gave a concert for some 20,000 fans in Moscow’s Red Square. Ticket prices ranged from $30-300. But, since the music could easily be heard in sidestreets just outside Red Square, which was cordoned off by about 1,000 policemen, the audience was actually much larger. McCartney met President Vladimir Putin, who personally gave McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills, a tour around the Kremlin. Before the concert, McCartney did a personal performance of “Let it Be” for Putin, thinking the leader would not make the concert. But Putin did attend, arriving almost an hour after the concert started and sitting down next to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and in time to hear McCartney’s encore performance of “Back in the USSR.” Before coming to Moscow, McCartney stopped in St. Petersburg, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. 

 

Political Murder

Political Murder

Leading reformer assassinated. 

Political motivations are rumored behind the killing.

State Duma Deputy and Co-Chairman of the Liberal Russia party, Sergei Yushenkov, was assassinated outside his Moscow home in April. It is the 9th assassination of a Duma deputy since 1994, and the most notorious political murder in Russia since the 1998 killing of liberal lawmaker Galina Starovoitova. 

Sergei Yushenkov, 52, started his career in the military and had a long reformist pedigree, dating back to the early years of perestroika. Yushenkov was a leading advocate of human rights, liberal reforms, including in the army, and was a vocal critic of the war in Chechnya. A Duma deputy since 1993, he was a member of the parliament’s Security Committee. 

While many deputies assassinated before Yushenkov were presumed to have been killed because of their business activities, Yushenkov is said to have had no business ties or business interests whatsoever. The majority of Liberal Party members and Duma colleagues who commented in the Russian press about the murder were unanimous in the opinion that Yushenkov’s killing, which happened on the eve of this fall’s parliamentary and presidential elections campaign, was politically motivated. Some of Yushenkov’s colleagues in the Liberal Party speculated that he may have been silenced because of his efforts to find evidence of the alleged FSB (Federal Security Service) involvement in the September 1999 apartment building bombings which killed nearly 300 people, and which were blamed on Chechen separatists.

 

 

Petrova Rising

Russian women climb

international rankings

In June, Nadya Petrova became the first Russian women’s singles player to advance to the semifinals of the French Open in nearly 30 years. The last Russian female tennis player to advance this far was Olga Morozova in 1975. 

On her road to the semifinals, Petrova defeated first Monica Seles, and then 2001 French Open winner Jennifer Capriati, before going on to beat 18-year-old Russian compatriot Vera Zvonareva in the quarterfinals. 

Zvonareva, for her part, took down four-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams in a toughly fought match: 2-6, 6-2, 6-4. 

Petrova lost her semifinal match to Belgian Kim Clijsters, who lost the final match to her compatriot Justine Henin-Hardenne.

Petrova, 21, was ranked 76th in the world at the start of the French Open and comes from an athletic family. The daughter of a hammer thrower and a bronze medallist for the 4x400 metres relay at the Montreal Olympics, she spent her teenage years in Egypt, when her parents moved there to coach local athletes. 

Many observers were quick to see Petrova’s advancement as the harbinger of a coming “Russian Age” in women’s tennis. At press time, 12 Russian women were in the WTA’s top 100, including Anastasia Myskina (10), Yelena Dementieva (15), Vera Zvonareva (20), Yelena Bovina (22), Yelena Likhhovtseva (31), Svetlana Kuznetsova (35), Tatiana Panova (38), Lina Krasnorutskaya (44), Dinara Safina (61), Anna Kurnikova (77), and Yevgenia Kulikovskaya (91). Petrova is currently ranked 29th.

 

Moscow 2012?

Capital joins in competition

for Summer Olympics

Moscow has entered the race to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, joining Paris, London, New York and other cities. Moscow, which hosted the 1980 Olympics (which floundered because of the US-led boycott after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), said it can offer state-of-the art sports venues, including the recently reconstructed 83,000-seat Luzhniki Olympic Stadium. 

City authorities also said they plan to build several more stadiums and double the number of hotel accommodations in the city by 2010. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said that Moscow would be able to guarantee complete security for athletes and spectators during the Games. 

The International Olympic Committee will short-list five official candidates in June 2004, naming the finalist to host the Olympics in July 2005, at its Singapore session. The 2004 Summer Games will be held in Athens, and the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

 

Scarves back in

In May, the Russian Supreme Court’s Appellate Chamber ruled that Muslim women can wear headscarves in passport photos taken for official documents. An Interior Ministry directive issued in 1997 stated that Russian citizens could not wear headwear in official photos. However, 10 Muslim women from Tatarstan took their case to the Supreme Court, claiming that the ban violated their constitutional right to freedom of conscience. Earlier, in March, the Supreme Court rejected their lawsuit on the grounds that Russia is a secular state. In June, the Interior Mini-stry revised its 1997 stance and ruled that headwear can be worn in official photos by persons whose religious convictions do not allow them to appear in front of strangers with their head uncovered. 

 

Public Defender

A regional committee whose self-defined mission is to “defend public morals,” has been established in the city of Samara. Ex-fighter pilot and secretary of the Samara Diocesan Administration of the Russian Ortho-dox Church, Victor Ushatov, founded and will head the committee. The committee has already won several victories against advertising it does not like. The first victim was a TV commercial by the Ener-go-polis insurance company, which em-ploy-ed the slogan “Your Guardian Angel Can Rest,” implying that Ener-go-polis’ agents put guardian angels out of work. In a second case, banners that showed flames and smoke shooting out of a model’s underwear were taken down. The committee said it intends to monitor all advertising in the city for morals. (Vremya MN)

 

Mirror, Mirror

City authorities will install mirrors in elevators of Moscow apartment blocks. Mirrors are said to have a psychological effect – discouraging vandals from writing graffiti on walls and otherwise defacing the elevators.

Author Cleared

In April, the Moscow city prosecutor dropped all pornography charges against avant-garde writer Vladimir Sorokin. The case was opened in July 2002 after the pro-Putin youth group Walking Together complained that Soro-kin’s 1999 novel Goluboye Salo (Blue Lard) contained elements of pornography. The book was examined by an expert panel which included well-known literary critics and sexologists. The prosecutor’s office said that the experts’ opinions were not unanimous.

 

Russia’s Rating Up

Russia received its highest investment rating ever when, on May 13, Fitch upgraded Russia’s sovereign credit to a BB+ rating, just one notch below “investment grade.” Observers speculated that Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s would follow suit in a few months. An investment grade ranking, which observers note would take a con-siderable change in the Russian economy, might provide Western -in---sti-tutional investors with greater confidence to invest in Russian securities.

 

Icon Registry Set

The Russian Interior Ministry is creating a complete registry of all icons in Russian churches, to protect them from theft. Some 34,000 icons are currently considered missing from churches in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. Invisible markers will be put on icons, making it easier to identify them.

 

Golden Ruble

Hare Tale

An unusual monument to the hare was unveiled in St. Petersburg on Zayachy ostrov (Hare’s Island) in May. The bronze hare was installed on one of the pylons of the newly renovated Ioannovsky Bridge, the city’s oldest. The bridge connects Petrograd Side, where Peter and Paul Fortress sits and Hare’s Island. 

Legend has it that, in 1703, Peter the Great, who was looking for a place to start building his fortress, visited a small island in the Neva river. He got some water in his jackboot, so he took the boot off and set it on the grass to dry. 

Later, as the story goes, when the tsar put his boot back on, he discovered a hare inside it. 

Peter reportedly laughed and named the island “Hare’s Island.”

 

Sakharov Honored

St. Petersburg is site

for first Russian monument

The first Russian monument to the Nobel Prize winning physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov was unveiled in St Petersburg in May. The 3.2-meter high bronze monument by St. Petersburg sculptor Levon Lazarev, which stands in the city square named for the physicist, depicts Sakharov with his hands clasped behind his back. Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, did not attend the unveiling ceremony, informing the media that she objected to the very idea of a monument to her deceased husband, as she did several years ago when the installation of a monument to Sakharov in Moscow was debated. “What’s the difference – in Moscow or St. Petersburg? I have already said that it is out of place to erect a monument to Sakharov in today’s Russia,” she said on Echo Moskvy radio. (Interfax)

 

 

 

“Before lunch they call and say: ‘press the right button,’ after lunch they call: ‘press the left one.’”

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist party,
about the work of 

the pro-Kremlin majority 

in the Duma (Itogi)

“To say that nothing will ever be stolen there, this can’t be said either, because all of us…we can’t insure that all of us, that each one of us, does not, so to say, take something.”

Victor Krokhmal, deputy to the presidential envoy in the Southern Federal District, about financing Chechnya’s reconstruction. (Itogi)

 

“A Russian muzhik is genetically self-sufficient, that is why it is so difficult for us to unite.” 

Nikolai Burlyaev, actor and director (Itogi)

 

“A man always tries to move up, while a woman always moves forward.”

Galina Karelova, vice-premier, about women and men in power (Itogi)

President Putin, in his annual address to parliament, called for a doubling of GDP in the next 10 years and for the restoration of a “golden ruble.” “Our principal task,” he said, “should be the return of Russia to the ranks of rich, developed, strong and respected countries. But this return will only be possible when Russia becomes strong economically, when it is no longer dependent on crumbs from international financial organizations.”

 

 

Russians who

 

will spend their 

summer vacation: 

at home 30%

at their dachas or
village homes 28%

will travel 

abroad 1%

will not take a 

vacation 19%

 

regularly use 

the internet 4.2%

 

think the head of 

the family is:

the husband 59%

 

the wife 13%

 

have never 

taken part in 

a protest march 

or demonstration 78%

 

are over 60 and have 

taken part in at 

least one 

street protest 31% 

 

would emigrate 

if they could earn 

a million dollars 23%

 

would not make

that sacrifice 50%

 

believe that the US:

interferes in the affairs of other 

countries, imposes its values on

them and seeks 

world dominance 61%

 

is a rich country 48%

 

is a strong 

military power 43%

 

promotes greed, bad 

taste and 

immorality 18%

 

is Russia’s main military 

and political 

enemy 17%

 

is Russia’s ally in the fight 

against world

terrorism 10%

 

is a democratic 

country 10%

 

is a guarantor of peace 

in the world 1%

 

22,000

Visitors to St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum the 

night of May 28

 

20,000

People at former Beatle Paul McCartney’s Red Square 

concert, May 20

 

43,000

People who took part in May Day demonstrations in Moscow

 

4,000,000

Russians aged 11-24 

who use drugs

 

20

Tons of old mobile phones 

thrown away each month in 

the Moscow region

 

36,000

Women who are physically abused in Russia each day

 

20,000

Russians killed in fires each year

 

1,300,000,000

Back salaries due state workers as of May 1, 2003 (in rubles)

 

400,000

Russians (in Bryanskaya and Kaluzhskaya oblasts) still 

feeling the effects of radiation 

some 17 years after the 

Chernobyl nuclear

catastrophe

 

1,840,000 

Decline in the Russian population between 1989 and 2003

 

17,000

Russian villages with 

10 residents or less

 

R4841

Average monthly salary in Russia

 

46.2%

Percent of all income earned 

by the top 20% of 

Russian households

 

5.5%

Percent of all income earned 

by the bottom 20% of 

Russian households

 

9

Computers per 100 Russians

 

Petersburgers

who

 

think too much was spent on the city’s 300th birthday 

celebrations 33%

 

think not enough 

money was spent 23%

 

have a negative opinion 

about the idea of moving 

the capital to 

St Petersburg 63%

 

have a positive 

opinion 24%

 

do not care 8%

 

STATISTICS SOURCES Numbers (page 8) 1. Hermitage Press-Service 2. Interfax. 3. Interfax 4. Education Minister Vladimir Filippov (RIA-Novosti) 5. Interfax 6. Amnesty International 7. Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu 8. First Deputy Finance Minister Aleksei Ulyukaev (Interfax) 9. Ministry of Emergency Situations 10. State Statistics Committee, preliminary results of the 2002 census 11-13. State Statistics Committee (Interfax) 14. Ministry of Communications and Informatization. Russians Who (page 7): 1-6. ROMIR Monitoring 7. Ministry of Communications and Informatization 8-12. ROMIR Monitoring 13-14 Institute of Comprehensive Social Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (utro.ru) 15-23: VTsIOM 24-28. Agency of Regional Political Research. Petersburgers who (page 9): VTsIOM.