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Russia Honors American

From Big Macs to the Circus

PepsiCo chief helped re-vamp Mariinsky Theatre

George Cohon explains the Russian market

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One Black WidowNo life for a woman marked as a terrorist

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NEWS IN BRIEF

IN THIS ISSUE

No U.S. official has explicitly backed President Dmitry Medvedev for re-election in 2012, but U.S. Vice President Joe Biden came within a hair’s breadth of giving Medvedev his endorse-ment in a series of blunt messages during his visit to Moscow earlier this month, according to The Moscow News, Biden reportedly sug-gested to a group of opposition leaders that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin should not run for president. Earlier, Putin moved to discuss a visa-free regime between the countries. Biden said the presidents should discuss the matter.

Russia’s first lady Svetlana Medvedeva present-ed Japanese Ambassador Masahuro Kono with flowers. As the catastrophe in Japan unfolds, of-ficials in Moscow are seemingly setting their hopes on earthquake diplomacy, a term coined when earthquakes led to unexpected rapproche-ments. Officials now say they hope for such a result with Tokyo as Russia focuses on sending humanitarian aid to its eastern neighbor. “Griev-ous events sometimes show us what is impor-tant and what is not,” said Arkady Klimov, dep-uty chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee and a member of United Rus-sia. Japan and Russia are suddenly silent about the dispute over a chain of islands Russia calls the Southern Kurils.

Biden Nearly Endorses Medvedev

Moscow Bets on Quake Diplomacy

OPINION

Jonathan Fianu talks about race in Russia.

REFLECTIONS“How I Conquered Russia While It Conquered Me”New Book by Lennart Dahlgren

Fort Ross has been nearly abandoned more than once. In 2010, the Russian outpost purchased from Native Americans and built by Vologda immigrants in 1812 almost closed for good. An outcry from the Russian diaspora and interven-tion by the Russian government convinced then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep the park open. In the hopes of keeping the Fort Ross legacy alive, Russian director and producer Yury Moroz and executive producer and script writer Dmitry Poletaev are creating both a documentary and a feature film about the subject. The team said they will begin shoot-ing the films this spring.

Fort Ross Inspires Film E� ort

Advertising Can the city transform Moscow’s visual blight?

The road from the airport into Vladikavkaz, the regional capital of North Ossetia, passes by the graveyard in the village of Be-slan and the monument to over 330 people, most of them chil-dren, killed during the tragic 2004 school siege that shocked the world. “A horrible tragedy, several of my relatives are bur-ied here,” said Oleg Karsanov, the 43-year-old local minister of tourism, walking by the graves on a misty afternoon.

Yet Karsanov, who earned his MBA in London, is determined to reimagine his native North Ossetia and turn the mountain-ous republic into a magnet for tourists despite some deep skepticism that the turbulent region can attract large num-bers of visitors. Karsanov, an amiable but somewhat stoic character, has been cultivating tourism for four years, long be-

Tourism Where Terror StruckSociety The struggle to develop tourism in the North Caucasus

fore the federal government’s recent involvement in the re-gion’s tourism. “We have gone from under 30,000 tourists a year to about 100,000 a year, thanks to the work that’s been done,” he said.

Soon his initiatives will be supported by an ambitious fed-eral development plan revolv-ing around Mamison, a $1 bil-lion ski resort about two hours southwest of Vladikavkaz that is currently under construction. The resort will have more than 60 miles of slopes of all diffi-culty levels at altitudes between six and ten thousand feet.

“Mamison will offer our coun-trymen the opportunity to ex-perience world-class skiing with-out leaving the country,” said Karsanov, who noted that the government also plans to build hiking trails through the sur-rounding mountains, which offer dramatic beauty.

The ski resort is part of a broad $15 billion federal pro-gram to develop resorts across the North Caucasus, an effort that has drawn a few arched eyebrows because of the threat

of terrorism in the region. Rus-sian officials hope the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, which lies to the west, will revitalize this area of Rus-sia as a ski destination, both for Russia and foreigners.

But terrorism is still a threat. In 1999, Vladikavkaz’s central market was rocked by an ex-plosion that killed 62 people. In 2010, a smaller attack hit the city. The region’s reputa-tion as a tourist destination re-mains damaged.

“It all sounds a little utopic to me,” Galina Gokashnavili, a teacher in Vladikavkaz, said of the tourism development.

Officials are aware of the de-gree of difficulty they face. “When people look at a map and see we’re only millimeters away from places like Chech-nya, they are discouraged,” said Oleg Kalayev, first deputy prime minister of North Osse-tia. “But when we had West-ern experts examine the loca-tion ... they said the potential was there.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

It looks like a Moscow evening from inside the TGIF restaurant on Pushkin Square, even though it is daytime. There are plenty of windows, yet something stops the sun from coming in.

GALINA MASTEROVASPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

ARTEM ZAGORODNOVRUSSIA NOW

Twenty years ago, a sign on top of a building was an exhortation to work harder. But today even advertising executives wonder about the visual chaos.

Life in the Caucasus is known for violence, not tourism. But in North Ossetia, local efforts may yet pay off.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Black and a Foreigner

BIBLIOPHILE PAGE 5

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The monument to the victims of the 2004 Beslan school siege (above), a trag-edy that occurred in the picturesque North Ossetia (below).

The building’s facade is sheathed in an advertisement for a Sochi ski resort, covering most of the early 20th-century Constructivist building on two sides. The ad, which shows two skiers on the mountain, has the appearance of Soviet nostal-gia.

Just across the street, anoth-er building is shrouded on two sides with an advertisement for Chanel. Huge neon ads top buildings around the square.

Twenty years ago, a sign on

preservation group Archnad-zor. “It is all because of a de-sire to get the most money out of every square foot in the city.”

Pushkin Square could be Moscow’s equivalent of New York’s Time Square or London’s Piccadilly Circus. But the ads are so ubiquitous that travel-ing through the center feels like going from one Time Square to another.

Turn Left at L’Oreal, Rightat Toyota, Straight on Intel

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Even some marketers feel Mos-cow’s adver-tising boom is out of control.

of Manned Space Flight 50th Anniversary

top of a building was a Soviet exhortation to work harder, but Moscow has taken advertising to such an extreme that even business executives say the city has descended into “visual chaos.” Moscow is drowning in its advertising—legal, ille-gal—on roofs, on sidewalks, straddling streets, down the sides of high-rises and pump-ing neon day and night.

How to Reform Visual BlightThe new city government,

which took over after long-term mayor Yuri Luzhkov was fired last year, has vowed to reduce the amount of outdoor advertising in Moscow by 20 percent by the start of 2013, and city officials want much of the historical center to be com-pletely cleared of ads.

“Historical buildings should rule, and not ad constructions in the central postcard area with its panorama views,” said Konstantin Mikhailov, an ad-vocate with the architectural

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george, 73, and craig cohon, 47, have their eyes set on the russian entertainment market after already bringing mc-donald’s and coca-cola to the "wild east."

inverview A father-and-son team shares their success story, from fast food to high-flying entertainment

the cohons brought mcdonald’s to russia. now they are launching a $57 million entertainment venture. rn talks to the pair who quintessentially define the term "bullish on russia."

In 1976, George Cohon, an American transplant to Canada, ran into a Soviet delegation to the Montreal Olympics. This was perfect networking for the chair-man of McDonald's Canada, who had an idea to bring the brand to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. He did not anticipate it would take him 14 years of cajoling a skep-tical Communist bureaucracy to open one McDonald’s.

When his first restaurant opened on Pushkin Square in the heart of Moscow in 1990, more than 30,000 people came on the first day, clamoring for a taste of capitalism, and they had to be held back with po-lice barricades. Years later, some Muscovites still recall the event fondly. (Russians have a habit of saying they hate McDonald’s, but just try getting in line on a Sunday afternoon.)

From the beginning, Cohon had the instinct to make it a people’s burger joint, trigger-ing his own Russian revolution in service, cleanliness and, more controversially, fast food.

"There were these restaurants back then that had long lines for customers with rubles and practically no lines for people with [dollars]," 73-year-old Cohon recalled recently over lunch at the glitzy Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow. "We didn't do it that way. We put the 'rubles only' sign outside to emphasize the point."

Cohon now has 280 restau-rants in Russia and 25,000 em-ployees. Eighty percent of what he sells is domestically pro-duced, an inconceivable statis-tic in Soviet times. "We even export the odd pie to Germa-ny," he said.

Cohon’s son, Craig, worked as a top executive for Coca-Co-la during its introduction to the newly opened markets of East-ern Europe in the 1990s. The two have more recently moved from fast food to big-stakes en-tertainment. Their newest deal, the $57 million Cirque du So-leil show Zarkana, is an ambi-tious production scored by none other than Elton John.

"It took 14 years to bring Mc-Donald's to Russia, four years to set up Coca-Cola distribution and production and eight

months to get Cirque de Soleil rolling," George Cohon said. "I think that's a good barometer for the ease of doing business here."

risk FriendlyThe Cohons have been outspo-ken advocates of doing busi-ness in Russia and are dismis-sive of the concerns of more risk-averse entrepreneurs. "I was here when tanks shot at the White House in 1993," Craig Cohon said. "We continued business. I signed the latest deal in the Kremlin in January half an hour before the bomb went off at Domodedovo [Airport]. That's just a part of life.

"I could easily picture myself as a Russian investor in the Unit-ed States saying, 'I was here dur-ing the Oklahoma City Bomb-ing, 9/11 and the Arizona shootings, and we continued business,'" he said.

"Business is often far away from dramatic political events," commented Dmitry Butrin, busi-ness editor at leading daily Kom-

mersant. "As long as an owner is physically able to continue running a store or restaurant, he will do so even in the bleak-est times. This is true for all countries."

keys to successCraig Cohon said the key to suc-cess in Russia is three-pronged: First, a commitment to the long haul for real returns; second, cultivating personal relation-ships; and third, not managing from afar.

"It’s a handshake market," he added.

The Cohons said they have never been asked for a bribe, a common complaint of both Russian and expatriate business-men.

"It could be because we have maintained our core principles from the start," Craig said. "We hire locals and we help devel-op other sectors like agriculture. People who complain [about corruption] could be the ones who were burned because they came for the quick buck."

Butrin's opinion on why the Cohons have not encountered corruption stems from the brand and business. "McDon-ald’s is a franchise and is essen-tially selling a financial and lo-gistical model in Russia," he said. "They are also selling an estab-lished brand that has been in Russia for a very long time. I wouldn’t expect them to en-counter corruption for those rea-sons. And there are businesses that don’t pay any bribes."

George Cohon emphasized that philanthropy is another crit-

ical component if you want to be taken seriously.

"You’ve got to do charity," he said. "A lot of my friends want-ed to come to the opening of the first McDonald’s here. I said, 'Okay. You pay for your own airfare, hotel and meals. And then you cut me a check for $10,000.' All that money went to the first Soviet charity for kids. Now we've got our own char-ity that converts unused rooms in children’s hospitals to apart-ments so parents can stay with their kids. It's good stuff."

all in the FamilyAt the end of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, Craig Co-hon’s two children, ages 10 and 12, participated in the ceremo-nial handover to the Russians organizing the next Winter Games in Sochi. "I think that's the perfect archetype for the last 30 years of my life," Craig said.

The Cohons’ latest project, the deal with Cirque du Soliel and the Kremlin Palace Theater, is sure to be a high-profile spec-tacle. The show will open at Radio City Music Hall in New York before moving to its main stage in the heart of Moscow.

"We'll try it in New York and then take it to the Kremlin," George said. They have also struck a deal to bring Cirque's main traveling show, 'Saltim-banco,' together with the The-ater, to four major Russian cit-ies in 2011. Cirque has invested close to $50 million in Russia since 2008, and the company’s founder spent $35 million to

be a space tourist with the Rus-sian space program.

"Cirque du Soleil is amazing," said Craig. "It'll be in New York, it'll be in the Kremlin. We're the first Western entertainment company to partner with [the Kremlin]."

Both men say they are opti-mistic about Russia’s future and insist that Western critics of the country’s democratic develop-ment could be a little more pa-tient.

Said Craig: "By 2030, I see four key points of development:

the middle class learning to de-fend its rights via the evolution of strong political parties; busi-ness moving away from raw materials and investing into manufacturing and high tech, which is already happening; cul-ture developing with a local base as opposed to being im-ported from the West; and Rus-sia becoming a leader in anti-terrorism efforts, together with the U.S. and India."

George, smiling, said he was looking forward to it all.

"I'll be 93 then," he said.

From big macs to the circus

artem zagorodnovrussiA now

The Cohons’ new project is the first venture between a western company and the Kremlin.

“it’s a handshake market,” Craig Cohon said of doing business in russia.

mcdonald’s in russiaThe average McDonald's in Russia, at 850,000 visitors, is twice as busy as any Mc-Donald's in the United States, according to The New York Times. It all started when the restaurant came to the U.S.S.R. in 1990. George Cohon hired a young Chechen as the manager of the first Pushkin Square Mc-Donald's. The manager position was no easy job in Moscow; 80 percent of the products had to be imported. A proprietary fac-tory called the McComplex was built to make the 300 ingredi-ents for each store as the chain grew. In those days, there were no private suppliers.Today, 80 percent of the prod-ucts are made by local suppli-ers and Khamzat Khasbulatov, "the young Chechen," is the president of the entire Eastern European division. The chain

currently operates 280 restau-rants in Russia, some in pre-viously remote locations like Tyumen and Siberia, and con-tinues to expand rapidly. Mc-Donald’s celebrated anoth-er milestone last year when it closed its McComplex out-side Moscow upon outsourcing the last ingredient—hamburg-er buns—to a local company. French fries are imported due to the lack of a market for fro-zen potatoes—Russians still prefer to buy them fresh.

Serving up Chinese food with lashings of mayonnaise for his Russian clients, restaurant owner Liu Yanzhao is one of many Chi-nese hoping to make money in Russia’s Far East.

“In the old days, Russia was like China’s big brother,” said the 26-year-old owner of White Nights restaurant in the Russian border town of Blagovechensk. “We all looked up to Russia but

investment Chinese investors explore resource-rich Far East

china’s insatiable demand for raw materials is driving infrastructure development in russia’s remote provinces.

now the relationship has changed.”

Liu is one of the many Chi-nese businessmen who are hop-ing to make money in the re-source-rich expanses of Siberia.

With thousands of miles of unexplored forest and tundra, Russia’s Far East is sparsely pop-ulated. But what the Far East lacks in people it makes up for in natural resources that China needs to feed its hurtling eco-nomic growth.

Chinese investors have al-ready come to places like the Amur Region and the Primorye and Khabarovsk territories, as well as in the Jewish Autono-mous Region, investing $3 bil-

lion in various projects. That compares with less than $1 bil-lion in direct state investment allocated for the same areas by Moscow in 2011. The Russian government has said that it wants to invest $100 billion to develop the region over the next five years, and China will be a key partner.

“We know that Russia needs to cooperate with another coun-try to open up the Far East, and the natural partner is China,” said Boris Krasnojenov, metals and mining analyst at Renais-sance Capital.

Though not all Russians are pleased with the developments. “The growth of China so close

to our borders is really fright-ening,” said Svetlana Ivanova, a secretary in Blagovechensk. “I know they want to invest, but many of us fear they will want to control things here.”

However, the Russsian gov-ernment is moving forward with cooperation, and the K&S iron ore project in the Jewish Auton-omous Region of Birobijan is a good example.

The Kimkhan mine, which is the first stage of the K&S proj-ect, is currently producing about 1.2 million tons of ore that is now being exported to China, with plans to export 10 million tons a year to China.

“This area is a hugely excit-ing one for companies like us, and we would welcome new companies in the region, which would increase investors’ com-fort,” said Jay Hambro, execu-tive chairman of Hong Kong-based mining group IRC Limited.

The region’s key challenge, in common with other isolated mining projects from Africa to Mongolia, is infrastructure, said Krasnojenov, and China has the funds to solve the problem.

The economic crisis of 2008 made China look hard at ways to diversify its supplies of raw materials from iron to coking coal, much of which it import-ed from Australia and Brazil. Russia was a natural alterna-tive. The economic crisis also made Russian companies aware of their need for foreign invest-ment.

“Chinese investment is quite welcome in this area,” Kras-nojenov said.

China Drives Development of Russia’s Border

miners work at an open-cast coal mine in the khabarovsk region.

rachel morarjeeBusinEss nEw EuropE

news in brieF

U.S. frozen yogurt chain Pink-berry became the latest Amer-ican franchise to set up shop in Moscow this month with the opening of a restaurant in Moscow’s business district.A study conducted by the company determined that Rus-sians are increasingly conscious of healthy eating, convincing management to enter the mar-ket, The Moscow Times report-ed.The steady growth of Ameri-can snack and coffee shops will continue for the next several years, Deutsche Bank chief economist Yaroslav Lissovolik said. “The Russian consumer is ready to graduate to the higher level of consumption,” he said.Other recent arrivals show that Russians are interested in fast food as well; they include Dunkin’ Donuts, Cinnabon and Chili’s, with Wendy’s expected to open this year.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s plan to turn Moscow into a global financial hub took an-other stop forward with the formation of a 27-member ad-visory board consisting of major Wall Street bankers like Goldman Sachs Group chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon. Only eight members of the group are Rus-sian.A number of major problems, including red tape, infrastruc-ture and corruption, prevent Russia’s capital from joining the ranks of New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt. Blankfein has already singled out grinding traffic jams as a major impediment to Medvedev’s goal, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin announced.Medvedev has made econom-ic modernization and a call for “modernization alliances” with major international players a cornerstone of his presidency and foreign policy agenda.

pinkberry enters russian market

kremlin hires wall street bankers

Web-search company Yandex and anti-virus software devel-oper Kaspersky Lab fly the Rus-sian flag in a 2011 ranking of the world’s most innovative companies. The Moscow-based companies are both new entrants on the list, released by U.S. business journal Fast Company. The news will cheer blogger-in-chief President Dmitry Medvedev, fitting neatly as it does into his model to trans-form the Russian economy. The Russian pair sits proudly in The World’s 50 Most Inno-vative Companies above glob-al giants of the genre such as Microsoft, Cisco and Sam-sung.Yandex, which holds a 65 per-cent share of the Russian In-ternet search market, ranks at 26, with Fast Company prais-ing it for being one of the few around the globe to fend off Google, which sits sixth on the list. The company’s real-time traffic maps, alerting Musco-vites where the worst of the city’s jams are waiting to en-snare them (as well as those in other major centers) are sin-gled out.

top ranking for yandex and kaspersky

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Indeed, several new hotels are under construction, the infra-structure has improved, and some Russians are already com-ing to ski and take in the local hospitality.

“It’s been fun,” said Alyona, who came as part of a tour group from St. Petersburg. That kind of endorsement is price-less, local leaders say.

“We have to change the image of the North Caucasus in the long term,” said Taymu-raz Mamsurov, president of North Ossetia. “We can’t do this through a barrage of advertis-ing. That will only have the op-posite effect. What we need is for people to come, have a good time, and recommend it to their friends.”

Regional observers agree that building up tourism is a legiti-mate way of injecting money into the local economy and boosting other sectors such as construction and the service in-dustry. “But it won’t resolve the problems it’s designed to fix,” said Nikolai Petrov, a scholar in residence at the Carnegie En-dowment for International Peace in Moscow. “Even if jobs are created, they most likely won’t be suited for the local population,” he added.

Most people in the region do not have the experience to pro-vide high-quality services, ac-cording to Petrov, which most likely means a lot of the talent may have to be imported.

An alternative is to open a local school for tourism and hos-pitality to train local youth, an-alysts have suggested.

In North Ossetia, it falls to Karsanov to get the word out and people in. He is relying not just on mega-projects but on his small-scale toursim efforts that are centered on the local population.

With the average salary at around $500 a month, locals don’t mind the opportunity to make extra cash. “I’d be happy to open a guest house or store right along the road here,” said Elbrus Elkanov, 51, a local farm-er who does construction work on the side. Elkanov lives along the valley road outside the vil-lage of Fiagdon, about an hour’s drive west from Vladikavkaz. “But right now there are too few incoming tourists.”

“There’s good potential here,” Suslan, his 40-year-old brother, chimes in. “For us, a guest is sacred.”

Another half hour west lies the abandoned 14th-century farmers’ village of Tsemeti, a cluster of stone temples and roads perched atop a hill a few hundred feet above the valley

floor. “It’s a great place to make an ethnic village for tourists,” Karsanov said. “Most of these stone buildings are in pristine shape. I want to convince a few locals to move in seasonally, ac-commodate guests and raise livestock like they did hundreds of years ago.”

Karsanov stops for lunch at a newly opened roadside café

and restaurant, where an indi-vidual dining room stands on four wooden pillars above a stream. “We catch the trout right out of the water and serve it to you,” our waitress ex-plained. All of the cheese and meat come from local animals. On the drive back to the capi-tal, Karsanov points out the small wooden house by the side of the road where his mother was born. “There aren’t that many Ossetians in the world. We’re all family,” he said.

That too is an important part of the plan. When pressed about who would have the funds and confidence to build hotels in the mountains, Karsanov replied: “We have a huge diaspora abroad and in Russia ... A lot of successful businessmen from Ossetia live in other parts of Rus-sia and want to invest in real estate here.”

Rostilsav Khortiev, 50, a na-tive Ossetian businessman, re-turned three years ago to open a hotel complex southwest of Vladikavkaz. “I invested about 80 million rubles, and overall I’m statisfied with the project, but the federal government still hasn’t built all the infrastructure that was promised to me,” he said. “It will only become prof-itable once an important road is in place. I currently employ about 35 locals running the hotel, cottages and skiing and

fishing packages that we offer. Tourists come from all over Rus-sia ...The local government helps a lot by not interfering with what I am doing. This is very rare in Russia. I haven’t paid a penny in bribes.”

“The Sochi Winter Games in 2014 will help,” Karsanov added. “Not only will they show southern Russia in a more pos-itive light, but more Russians will become interested in skiing ... This will bring more tourists here.”

But even the president of the North Caucasus does not con-nect peace directly with tour-ism. In other words, officials re-alize they can’t fight terror with development, but they can build the place up with hope. “The younger generation, which grew up during the most diffi-cult of times, has proven itself remarkably adept at adjusting to new realities, utilizing its tal-ents and maintaining honorable values,” Mamsurov said. “This youth will lead us to a prosper-ous future ... I hope that by 2030, Ossetians will live in one of the most prosperous, open, stable and dynamic territories of Russia.”

Tourism Where Terror Struck

Oleg Karsanov sees huge tourism potential for North Ossetia.

Zaira, a widowed mother of two, prays at home.

Zaira, a petite woman living in Makhachkala, the bustling capital of the Russian Repub-lic of Dagestan, recently gave birth to a boy. But many think of her as a potential killer, not a mother. On a recent trip to a grocery store, she said, cus-tomers pointed and said, “Here comes the martyr.”

The young woman said she prefers to stay “locked between the four walls” of her apart-ment rather than confront the accusing looks of strangers in this largely Muslim region of southern Russia.

What has turned into a night-mare for Zaira began last spring after two women blew them-selves up on the Moscow sub-way, killing 40 and wounding more than 100 passengers.

Like Zaira, their former hus-bands were slain insurgents from Dagestan who had bat-tled Russian forces. Because a number of suicide bombers tar-geting Moscow have been the wives of dead rebels, they have been dubbed “black widows.” Newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published the photo-graphs of 22 actual and po-tential “black widows,” with personal information.

The first portrait on the list

Those labeled “black widows” find it impossible to go on with their lives.

was of one of the Moscow Metro bombers. The headline said: “One thousand widows and sisters of Dagestan guer-rillas help terrorists.”

Zaira’s picture was among the 22, an unmistakable accu-sation that she was a potential suicide bomber. She lost her job and had to take her older son out of public school.

“How reckless of them to put me on that list!” said Zaira. “If I wanted to commit a terror-ist attack, I would have not lived openly in Dagestan’s cap-ital. I would not have enrolled my son in school.”

Russia’s security agencies tend to label all fundamental-ist Muslims—called Wahhabis by the police, even though they do not always accept that term themselves—as terrorist suspects. And the police have engaged in sometimes brutal tactics in an attempt to sup-press a violent insurgency, ac-cording to human rights ac-tivists.

“Your house gets burned, and you and your family may “disappear” or be murdered,” said Tatyana Lokshina, of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch. “Brutal methods and the lack of tolerance for religious views push youth into the underground.”

But police insist they are fighting a deadly enemy across the Caucasus. Recently they ar-rested Fatima Yevloyeva, 22, a

sister of Magomed Yevloyev, the suspected suicide bomber who recently struck at Domod-edovo airport, killing 36 peo-ple in the arrivals area.

Investigators said Yevloyeva had traces of explosives on her hands. Fatima’s husband, a sus-pected insurgent, was killed last summer.

Last year, 68 people died and 195 were injured in 112 attacks in Dagestan. Human Rights Watch reported 20 ab-ductions and 8 murders of fun-damentalist Muslims by the police in Dagestan in the last six months of 2010.

According to Ivan Sydoruk, deputy prosecutor general, there were twice the number of terrorist attacks in 2010 than in 2009 in the entire North Caucasus.

“The development of civil society institutions that would protect human rights is the so-lution to Dagestan’s partisan war,” Lokshina said.

Gennady Gudkov, a mem-ber of parliament and the se-curity committee, complained that parliament has no control over the National Anti-Terror-ism Committee, the agency charged with leading the cam-paign against terrorism.

“We deputies are not al-lowed to investigate the Com-mittee’s work,” he said. “So it is a big secret what methods they are using to fight terror-ism. We have no idea.”

In Dagestan, Marked as a Terrorist

ANNA NEMTSOVASPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

“There aren’t that many Ossetians in the world. We’re all family,” Oleg Karsanov said.

“There’s good potential here. For us, a guest is sacred,” Suslan Elkanov said.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

for city planning, but there is no visual plan for development, he said.

“I would just like to see the city that I live in,” wrote Kho-lina, who said the change in the city becomes apparent when a Moscow resident gives directions. “Turn left after Toy-ota, there you will see L’Oreal, and after Pepsi turn right … for the house where Sony is.”

The senses are also bombarded by huge video screens and rows of banners that cross over streets, creating a tunnel of ads for traffic just underneath.

“Advertisements have con-quered civilization,” Albina Kho-lina wrote in a Russian literary journal. She compared the ban-ners to “knickers drying on a balcony.”

And many of the ads are il-legal. Last January, the city took down 33 of the “pirate” ads, but the lack of concrete action against those who put them up has fueled more suspicion of city corruption.

Maxim Tkachev, the head of News Outdoor, one of the big-gest players on the market, said he and other companies have the “feeling that the city is not interested in transparency and

order” in outdoor advertising.“The flagrant breaking of fed-

eral law, Moscow rules and se-lective application of them has created the visual chaos that we see now,” Tkachev wrote in a comment sent to Russia Now.

He pointed to the fact that one of the ads that appeared to be illegal was situated exact-ly opposite the Moscow City offices. News Outdoor said that a crackdown on illegal ads would cut advertising by 20 per-cent on its own.

The previous city official in charge of supervising outdoor advertising was arrested and charged with corruption. His case is still ongoing, but he has been replaced under the new mayor.

One expert who follows the market was optimistic about the city’s plans under Sergei Soby-anin, the new mayor. ̀ ”The first

step has already happened around the Kremlin and the No-vodevichy cemetery,” said An-drei Beryozkin, head of Espar-Analitik, which analyzes outdoor advertising in the city.

But it is an ongoing battle. Last summer, even the ground was covered with ads as com-panies used graffiti-style tactics to cover sidewalks. Legislation has been proposed in the State Duma, the lower house of par-liament, to impose large fines to stop the pavement ads.

Apartment Dwellers in the Dark

Officially, two thirds of an apartment building’s residents must give permission before ad-vertising can drape their home, and the money made from rent-ing out a facade is supposed to go to building repairs.

When residents of a building

on the elite street Kutuzovsky Prospekt found their light blocked by an Infiniti car ad, they were not compensated.

“Our flats are in semidarkness during the day and a bright electric light flows in the win-dow at night,” residents wrote in a letter to President Dmitry Medvedev last year, which claimed that the advertisers were paying $1 million a year.

Residents in that building—where Soviet leader Leonid Br-ezhnev lived in the 1970s with-out any neon light disturbing his sleep—succeeded in getting the ad removed.

But pity any flat owners near Smolenskaya Square, where the Golden Ring hotel turns its 23- floor facade into a hyperactive neon light show every night. “It’s tacky, annoying and it can’t be good for the environment,” said Masha, a resident.

The city vowed that future funds from ads will go toward repairs and restoration of the buildings they are hung on.

“The problem is not just the ads,” Mikhailov said. “It’s the fact that the city does not have a concept for how the city should look.”

There is an official city artist, an official architect and com-mittees ostensibly responsible

Can the new city administration rein in the visual chaos?

million is the value of Russia’s outdoor advertising, up 18% from 2009.

$837IN FIGURES

HEALTH-CARE REALITIESHOW CAN RUSSIA ADAPT TO ITS DEMO-

GRAPHIC CRISIS?

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04 Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru

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Sagbo also acquired an “Obama” catchphrase, but these nicknames are only rele-vant in the sense that these men also represent a changing real-ity.

Sagbo has lived in Russia for more than 20 years; he is mar-ried to a local woman, he is

recently, a reader of my blog, “Brave New Rus-sia,” wrote me an email asking what life

was like on the ground for a black person in Russia, and if there was any truth to some of the stories about rampant rac-ism she had heard in the Unit-ed States. Her son had studied Russian and was very interest-ed in visiting Russia, but she was concerned about these is-sues. I knew that the issue was important; after all, it is nor-mally the first question that pops into people’s head when they hear that I work in Russia. But usually they ask something else. This particular question is generally left unspoken, or rath-er unasked. I know people are thinking about it, and I know people want to ask me, but they rarely do so. It might be the reserved nature of my English friends and colleagues, but I think it goes beyond that. It is viewed as bad form to come out and ask it directly. Fortu-nately, I am generally upfront about such things and usually address the topic myself; Once this Pandora’s box has been opened, a whole host of other topics come up.

One of these is the story of Jean Gregoire Sagbo, the Afri-can councilman in Novozavi-dovo who became the first

well-liked, he is a naturalized cit-izen and he has done a lot for the community with his own money. He is Russian. Why does the color of his skin make his election so strange? Because old stereotypes about Russia are not in line with the current reality. I feel honored that I am able to

dispel these views with stories from my own experiences.

In my experience, Russians are some of the most welcom-ing and accepting people around. As a black person in Russia, I have not only gone about my business unaffected, I have been embraced, wel-comed and treated exception-ally well—even on par with being a celebrity in the smaller towns. Many people do not know this, but African students have been coming to study in Russia for decades. In fact, there is one in Chistopol, where I live. One day, I was speaking to one of the directors in the local Vostok watch factory and he af-fectionately told me how he sold watches to this gentleman, who was training to be a doctor, and how he has been accepted.

Of course there are incidents of racism in Russia. I can say with certainty that they do occur, although I have not ex-perienced any myself. I have ex-perienced only one racist en-counter, and that was when I was at university in York, in the north of England. There are pockets of racism everywhere, and I believe that Russia should be given the chance to be viewed on an equal plane.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pressed the reset button between the United States and Russia some time ago, and this was a bril-liant gesture. People outside of

Russia should also press the reset button in their minds when they think of Russia in terms of cul-tural acceptance. Russia is doing its part. With the Sochi Winter Olympics, the recent Formula One deal, and now the 2018 World Cup, Russia is making sure it takes advantage of as many opportunities as possible to show the outside world its level of modernity and open-mind-edness.

Whatever your color or creed, I believe Russia holds as much promise as any other country. I believe there will be more peo-ple like Sagbo to come, and in case you think this is not pos-sible, consider how many peo-ple of color are in the British parliament.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin touched on stereotypes about Russia in his speech in Zurich after his country won the right to host the 2018 World Cup. He said something to the effect that there are still a large num-ber of Soviet-era stereotypes prevalent in the minds of peo-ple in the West, and once these people have the opportunity to visit Russia, they will see Russia for what it is: A welcoming coun-try that is continually modern-izing.

I have worked with Russian companies since 2006 and I have lived in Chistopol, near Kazan, since 2008. All I can do is speak for myself and comment on what I see from a cultural perspective, and I not only see change, but I realize that it was there long before I arrived.

Despite growing fears of extreme nationalism due to recent riots, Russians generally have become more tolerant, a recent FOM (Russia’s Public Opinion Foun-dation) survey concluded. The number of Russians who did not feel hostility increased from 65 to 76 percent between 2002 and 2011, while those who did de-creased from 32 to 10 percent.

russians fewer feeL hostiLity toward different nationaLities

the poLLs

KNOW ANY GOOD LOBBYISTS?

BeWAre Of BOOKS

There is a new mood of fiscal austerity that has set in on Capitol Hill fol-lowing last year’s con-

gressional elections. A small army of freshman Republicans inspired by the Tea Party, sleep-ing on their air mattresses in their offices, descended on Washington, D.C., with one overriding goal in mind: to re-duce the U.S. national debt (cur-rently approaching $15 trillion) by mercilessly cutting govern-ment spending. To them, the money the United States spends outside its borders seemed one of the most obvious targets.

As a result, Congress is now planning to reduce by at least $16 billion the amount of money the United States allo-cates for foreign aid. The $70 million in annual spending that goes to support NGOs and

many years ago, when the acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yev-tushenko said: “A

poet in Russia is more than a poet,” he was not so subtly ap-plauding himself for the strong social message of his verse. His observation was very true all the same. Due to a lack of inspiring public leaders in Russia, poets and writers had historically taken their place. For many years, re-citing verses by heart from Push-kin’s “Eugene Onegin,” Tvard-ovsky’s World War II epic “Vasily Tyorkin” or verses by Al-exander Nekrasov or Alexander Blok had been the undisputed hallmark of a proper education and an integral part of cultural identity for all educated peo-ple—regardless of whether or not their profession had any-thing to do with literature.

Alas, this may all soon be-come part of the collective Rus-sian memory.

Today, Russia is widely debat-ing revised standards for nation-al education, under which lit-erature is no longer a high school requirement. Back in 2008, the Russian Ministry of

Education abolished literature as part of the compulsory high school graduation examination, saying it was too hard to for-malize and quantify it for the recently introduced multiple-choice test.

Why are education officials keen to downgrade the study of literature to an elective?

The authors of the proposal to kick the literature habit argue that young people have no time to read all those books! Appar-ently, Russia’s youth do not need to waste their time on Dos-toyevsky anyway if they intend to specialize in chemistry or mathematics. Many of the tomes in the conventional read-ing list are too big and not suit-ed for nurturing engineering tal-ent. Even Anton Chekhov’s more compact writing takes some time to digest. So young Russians clearly need help to focus on what really matters. Let them have the right to pass through their high school years without the hassle of having to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chek-hov or Gorky. At least that is the prevalent thinking.

When I was in high school, the first signs of bibliophobia began to show in the form of book summaries that could aptly condense four formidable

volumes of “War and Peace” into a manageable 15 pages. But at that time, students hid these study aids away and read furtively to avoid sneers and em-barrassment. Ten years later, no-body bothers to hide their ig-norance. Cliff Notes have become the norm, while those “wasting time” trying to read and understand the great works of classic literature are the odd ones out.

The proponents of new edu-cation standards have their ar-guments well prepared: How can a 16- or 17-year-old glean meaning from Tolstoy’s prose? Why force teenagers to do something they are not yet ca-pable of? Let those young peo-ple grow up and mature first, and then, perhaps, they will feel the urge to read the classics.

They won’t want to. With very few exceptions, people en-tering adulthood do not spend

their limited time on activities they were not exposed to in their more malleable years. Childhood and adolescence are the times when a person is not yet molded to fit a particular specialization and follow a cho-sen path, which inevitably cuts out everything that does not contribute to career develop-ment.

Today, Russian bureaucrats want to put young people on

their career tracks as early as possible, using hypocritical and flawed arguments. The ability of a young mind to understand and enjoy Tolstoy can be ques-tioned only by those who fail to grasp his message even well into middle age. People who love and appreciate classic read-ing know that each age tends to rediscover familiar authors and see new meanings in their work.

Now we commonly hear the

eugene ivanovspecial To

russia now

human rights organizations in Russia is suddenly looking very vulnerable.

While sending shock waves through Russia’s human rights community, this turn of events is likely to cause quite a few folks in Moscow to nod in ap-proval. They will interpret the decision to cut the “democracy promotion” assistance to Rus-sia as a sign of a “new realism” in Washington, proof of Amer-ica’s diminished interest in Rus-sian domestic affairs. (It may even give a new life to the once-popular argument in Russia that the Republicans are “better” than Democrats for U.S.-Russia relations, a notion that was so violently shattered by the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.)

In fact, the idea that the new composition of the U.S. Con-gress will make it less attentive, and, by virtue of this, less hos-tile, to Russia has little ground in reality. True, the new Repub-

lican members of Congress are as ignorant and inexperienced in international affairs as they are passionate for “small gov-ernment.” The problem is that when it comes to foreign poli-cy decisions, including Russia-related ones, they are not going to abstain. Instead, they will del-egate the decision-making to the “old guard” of congressio-nal veterans, many of whom received their foreign policy training during the heyday of the Cold War.

Take, for example, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the new chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ros-Lehtinen doesn’t even try to hide her dis-dain for the Obama adminis-tration’s policy of “reset” with Russia. She opposed the ratifi-cation of the New START trea-ty and called the civil nuclear cooperation agreement be-tween Russia and the United States (the “123 Agreement”) a mistake. Granted, Ros-Lehtin-

en’s position doesn’t allow her to affect U.S. policy toward Rus-sia directly, yet by virtue of her ability to hold committee hear-ings (usually featuring rabid crit-ics of the Kremlin as invited guests), she does have the po-tential to seriously poison the newly acquired positive tone in U.S.-Russia relations.

In the Senate, Ros-Lehtinen finds her mate in U.S. Senator John McCain, who is rapidly be-coming a restless advocate of a tough approach vis-à-vis Rus-sia. Barely a month goes by without McCain making yet an-other anti-Russian statement. Back in December, he gave a speech in which he questioned the very utility of dealing “with the current Russian govern-ment.” (McCain obviously voted against the ratification of New START.) Just a few weeks ago, McCain used his address at the annual Munich Security Conference to blast Russia for what he called “the illegal oc-

incantation that the world has changed and we live in a digi-tal age where classic literature has become simply obsolete. But what such statements re-ally imply is that “classic litera-ture is too complex and makes people more sophisticated, while we do not need a sophis-ticated public with hard-to-pre-dict motivations.” History shows that the fear of reading always stems from the fear of thinking. Perhaps that is why 15 years ago, along with book summa-ries, Russian bookstores were flooded with volumes of ready-made school essays. A concise rendering of a literary work reads easily and quickly, but it does not prompt any ideas.

London book fairRussia Now’s book coverage

on these pages is inspired by this year’s London Book Fair, the nexus of meet and greet for nov-elists, non-fiction writers, agents and publishers. This April, con-temporary Russian literature will be a focus of the fair. Fifty lead-ing Russian publishers will par-ticipate. The fair will also put a bigger spotlight on Russia’s new, lesser known authors. For more, see “A New Wave of Authors” at www.rbth.ru.

Eugene Ivanov is a Massa-chusetts-based political com-mentator.

Jonathan Fianu is director of the CIS Division for Blue Sky Laboratories Ltd, a U.K.-based start-up incubator.

BLAcK AND fOreIGN IN ruSSIA

due to a lack of inspiring public leaders in russia, poets and writers had taken their place.

as a black person in russia, i have not only gone about my business unaffected, i have been embraced.

Today, russian bureaucrats want to put young people on their career tracks as early as possible.

elected black politician in Rus-sia this summer. His story echoes another that recently came to my attention—that of Peter Bossman, a Ghanian doctor who became the mayor of the small seaside town of Piran, Slo-venia. Bossman has been called the “Obama of Piran,” and

cupation of internationally rec-ognized sovereign territory of Georgia.”

What complicates the efforts of the Obama administration to defend its Russia policy from Ros-Lehtinen, McCain and the like is the lack of an effective pro-Russian lobby in the United States. So far, the Russian gov-ernment has shown no interest in hiring professional lobbyists to represent its interests in Washington, a practice routine-ly employed by about 100 for-eign countries from around the

world. Too bad. Russia finally needs to realize that many past and present issues complicat-ing its relations with the United States—the difficulty with the ratification of New START; the opposition to the 123 Agree-ment; the Jackson-Vanik amend-ment; the negative image of Russia in the American mass me-dia—don’t arise by accident. Instead, they are purposely cre-ated by the powerful anti-Rus-sian interests in the United States. The best way to neutral-ize these harmful activities is to

have its own functioning pro-Russian lobby.

By recently calling to end American financial aid to Israel, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Repub-lican from Kentucky, might have committed the deadliest, per-haps even fatal, mistake of his young political career. Ros-Lehtinen and McCain have no reason to worry—regardless of what they do against Russia.

tatiana shabaevaspecial To

russia now

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05Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru reflectionsmost read Discussions with Yevgeny Shestakov: Freedom of the Internet

http://bit.ly/gQ8ggi

Addicted to RussiA

bibliophile

Russia has never received especially rave reviews from those intrepid travelers who jour-

neyed here from the West. Their memoirs are rife with epithets like “wild and barbaric,” or “mysterious and strange,” “a bizarre country,” this “utterly unknown society.”

“People in the West know as-tonishingly little about Russia,” wrote Sweden’s Lennart Dahl-gren, who worked for close to a decade in Russia as the head of IKEA.

Dahlgren, too, published a memoir: “Despite Absurdity: How I Conquered Russia While It Conquered Me.” Its value is in its efffort to explain why one would do better not to ap-proach Russia with any myths or standard expectations.

Like most of IKEA’s manag-ers, Dahlgren began with a dis-tinctly negative attitude toward Russia. Business was not smooth sailing. IKEA managed to launch stores in Russia only on its third attempt. The first try was de-railed by the collapse of the So-viet Union, the second try by the war between the Russian government and Parliament. The third time around, just as construction was about to begin on the first IKEA store in Russia, the ruble collapsed. You would think that a person had better not do business with a country like ours. Western logic, how-ever, doesn’t work in Russia. But the old saying does: “Nothing ventured, no champagne.”

Almost half of his book is de-voted to the long-running tug-of-war between IKEA and local authorities in the Moscow re-gion. The company was sup-

posed to build a bridge over the Leningrad Highway so that customers could get there more easily. First they received per-mission to build the bridge, then that permission was rescinded. Soon traffic on the Leningrad Highway was backed up and the on-again, off-again bridge was back on again, but in the wrong direction. Dahlgren does imply that the problem could have been solved with bribes.

IKEA did not give up, and here is the result: Thirteen gigantic malls opened in 10 cities, along with an enormous distribution center and three manufacturing complexes in operation. “Where else could you achieve such im-pressive results over such a short period?” exclaims Dahlgren. In-cidentally, it was in Russia that IKEA tested its new business model. In Russia, IKEA began opening not just furniture stores, but enormous shopping and en-tertainment complexes. Their success exceeded all expecta-tions: The first megacomplex be-came the most visited in the world, with 50 million visitors.

Having lived in Russia for a decade, Dahlgren found an ex-planation for Russia’s negative image in the West: “I noticed fairly quickly that many West-ern businessmen in Russia lead a merry life full of affairs with Russian beauties and wild drink-ing sprees ... There is a huge temptation to live as one pleas-es, and then to attribute any failures to the ‘horrors of Rus-sian reality’: the mafia, corrup-tion, pressure, threats,” Dahl-gren wrote.

“I know for a fact that I will always miss that crazy space full of love, without fully under-standing why,” Dahlgren wrote. “Russia is a drug and I’m ad-dicted to it.” Now that’s love —Swedish style!

svetlana smetanina

Special to RN

A ReluctAnt Pony MoM

eXpat files

cordelia is distracted dur-ing our weekly bowl of garlic soup. “Are Rus-sian schools off this

week?”“Not that I know of,” I con-

firm.“I played tennis in the morn-

ing rather than the afternoon, and the entire club was taken up by Russian children being screamed at by Russian tennis coaches. Shouldn’t they be in school?”

“They probably are,” I hy-pothesize. “Except the parents have paid off the school so they can skip history and foreign lan-guages, which no one in to-day’s Russia needs, so they can put in five solid hours to be-come tennis prodigies.”

“How barbaric,” Cordelia says.

“Nonsense,” I insert, “this is a global phenomenon: Bullying kids to succeed—like that luna-tic woman Amy Chua.”

“Who?”“Cordelia, are you the only

person in the galaxy who hasn’t heard of the book, ‘Battle Hymon of the Tiger Moth-er’?”

“God, I hope so,” she said.The liberal uber moms, while

publicly horrified by Chua’s best-selling book, wonder if threat-ening to auction off the stuffed animal collection to exact mas-tery of a complex piano piece might just be the way to go. They’re wrong.

My 13-year-old daughter, Vel-vet, is an exceptional equestri-enne. She’s always coming home with blue ribbons. The Olympics have been mentioned as a realistic goal.

Everyone wants to know how I, who seldom take on anything that I can’t do in my pajamas, managed to produce an ath-letic prodigy for one of the

world’s most elite sports. No one believes me when I just shrug my shoulders and say, “Honestly, I did nothing.”

Velvet is a typical product of successful “indifferent parent-ing.”

This is the way I was raised, by two 1960s WASPs. They took great care never to expose my sister and me to anything in which we could win a medal of any kind. “Field hockey,” my mother said pursing her lips. “Why don’t you go out for Big Chorus?” I assume we did our homework at some point, be-cause one day we were both packing our trunks for prep schools, from which we both matr iculated to the Ivy League.

Primed by parental assurance that the fusion of Glee Club, AP Latin, most improved JV Soccer player and a backstage solo in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was ex-actly the skill set that prepared one for The Real World, I was ready to be a model of indiffer-ent parenting when Velvet start-ed to display a single-minded determination to excel.

When she wanted Breyer horses, I gave her an American Girl Doll. I countered her plans to spend 12 to 14 hours bail-ing hay with a two-week Shake-speare camp.

I refused to buy a horse. I made it clear that I was never, ever going to haul anything be-hind my Subaru. I developed an extreme allergy to horsehair and hay, producing notes from doctors to prove it.

This is what the Russian Bear Mamas don’t get. Fire the 18 tutors and put your manicured feet up. Don’t push your kids toward anything. Push against everything. Really.

Jennifer eremeevaSpecial to

RuSSia Now

Jennifer Eremeeva is a long-time resident of Moscow; she blogs at www.rbth.ru/blogs and www.dividingmytime.typepad.com. She is currently working on her first book.

Russia, a country fre-quently defined by its epic novels, has wit-nessed a recent prolif-

ic surge in nonfiction. A few lit-erary and journalistic giants have taken to writing in a visual, doc-umentary-like style. With titles like “Verbatim,” “Our Era” and “The Word n Route,” writers tell stories, sometimes off the cuff, of the Russia that’s true for them.

Perhaps the most touching link between the authors of re-cent non-fiction books is the connection between journalist Leonid Parfyonov and Liliana Lungina, who died in 1998. Lungina, a translator, bore wit-ness to Lubyanka, Stalin and the Thaw. Before her death, she told the story of her remarkable and spirited life, one in which she gave safe haven to many per-secuted writers who had been abandoned by friends and col-leagues. Her story became a documentary and then a book called “Verbatim.”

However, for 11 years, there was no interest in her story until Boris Akunin and Leonid Par-fyonov got involved and pushed the project. The resulting doc-umentary series based on her recollections was so popular in 2009 that it became a book, “Verbatim,” which has resonat-ed deeply with readers this past year.

parfyonov’s russiaOne of Russia’s best-known

television journalists, Parfyonov is a master of the documentary series, weaving insightful histo-ry with closely glimpsed cultur-al trivia and, often enough, hi-larious commentary. For the past few months, he has also become known as an open crit-ic of state control over his craft. He has also been working on a five-volume series, titled “Our Era,” an encyclopedic explora-tion of the last five decades in Russia.

Parfyonov became an inter-national sensation late last year when he accepted a national prize on Russian television and said that “national television in-formation services have become part of the government. Jour-nalistic topics, like all life, have been irrevocably divided into those that can be shown on TV and those that cannot. … This

isn’t information anymore, this is PR or anti-PR by the authori-ties.”

Russian pundits called his speech a renewed perestroika manifesto.

The author is now at work on the fifth volume of his opus, “Our Era,” an all-encompassing guide to the Soviet Union and modern Russia. Each volume covers a decade of Russian his-tory.

Parfyonov does not lack pas-sion, his audience has discov-ered, and he has a ravenous appetite for his subject. Though he is also known to wander from Gagarin’s space flight to the as-sassination of President John Kennedy, from the Warsaw Pact troops being sent to Czecho-slovakia, to the Vietnam War. Parfyonov writes about the 1980 Olympic Games in Mos-cow, Russians hooked on the soap opera Santa Barbara in the early 1990s, nationwide Ponzi schemes and the craze for im-ported chocolate bars.

As with any decent encyclo-pedia, “Our Era” is illustrated with high-quality, vivid and rel-evant photographs, which help the emerging Russian reader with the content.

they might be giantsIn a year especially prolific

in nonfiction, the top national literary award in 2010, The Big Book prize, went to Pavel Ba-sinsky’s emotionally profound biography of Leo Tolstoy, ded-icated to the 100th anniver-sary of the legendary author’s death. The immediate and sus-tained public interest in “Flight From Paradise” is all the more remarkable considering the lack of any officially sponsored high-profile events. Basinsky received high critical praise for his work, which will be pub-lished in English.

The Limbus Press Literary Agency in St. Petersburg pub-lished a thought-provoking col-lection, offering a refreshingly new look at the life and work of literary giants. Poet and crit-ic Dmitry Bykov wrote the sec-tion on Maxim Gorky, novelist Lyudmila Petrushevskaya wrote about poet Alexander Pushkin and artist and novelist Maxim Kantor wrote about satirist Mikhail Bulgakov. The list goes on with another 40 authors. For-tunately, the upcoming English translations of these articles are likely to be selective. Thus re-vised, the book may prove to

Tatiana Shabaeva is a Mos-cow-based journalist and translator.

Pavel Palazhchenko was a personal translator to ex-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.

WRitinG VeRBAtiM

GoRBAcheV At hoMe And ABRoAd

tatiana shabaevaSpecial to

RuSSia Now

pavelpalazhchenko

Special to RN

it has become commonplace to claim that Mikhail Gor-bachev, who turned 80 this month, is highly regarded

throughout the world but is still not appreciated in Russia. When people ask him what he thinks about this, he says that he feels no resentment and, moreover, can understand people since the transition to democracy has been a difficult experience for millions of Russians. Gorbachev also does not deny his share of responsibility in the whole pro-cess and acknowledges the mis-takes and failures of the pere-stroika period.

I have known Gorbachev for many years now. I suggest that the reasons for the gap in how Gorbachev is perceived in the country and the rest of the world cannot be explained with-out taking into account certain aspects of the Russian national character and the country’s his-tory.

When Gorbachev came to power, everybody wanted change. But the overwhelming majority of people were not quite sure what kind of change they wanted. The Russian peo-ple’s traditional hopes for “a kind master” and “a good czar” prevailed at the time. Virtually any decisive or drastic actions taken by the country’s new lead-ership would appear to the peo-ple as the beginning of change.

It is not true that Gorbachev “did not have a choice.” A kind of “shadow ideology,” which

combined elements of Russian nationalism with imperial geo-politics, had become popular among the party leaders at the time. An even more obvious op-tion would have been to “strengthen discipline” and “put the house in order,” which would have gradually led to the Soviet regime morphing into a Ceausescu-like one.

Gorbachev wanted perestroi-ka; he wanted to empower mil-lions of people. He tried to im-plement this plan within the existing system, but two or three years later came to the idea of democratization. He was able to push this through a new Politburo, but one, as it soon turned out, that was still unpre-pared for the painful changes, surprises and instability that are inevitable when real reforms begin.

Having been granted more and more freedom, the people continued not to rely so much on themselves as on a miracle, a “strong hand” and a “deci-sive leader,” which explains Boris Yeltsin’s rise in populari-ty.

In the heat of celebration, the new leaders found it easy to pre-maturely split up the Soviet Union, even though no institu-tions of democratic policy, civil society or market economy had yet been formed in any of the republics. Twenty years later, it is clear that this premature dis-solution of the union did not accelerate, but actually slowed down the formation of such in-stitutions. This led to the emer-gence of regimes that wield un-contested power and only imitate democracy. Few people

are willing to admit this, how-ever. For the people of many former Soviet republics, the hardships of the previous two decades have been offset by feelings of national pride, result-ing from their newly found in-dependence.

This, however, is not the case

in Russia, for it is the only for-mer Soviet republic where most people view the disintegration of the union as the loss of a great country that was theirs.

Gorbachev is criticized for not using his power to suppress sep-aratism. Others claim the Sovi-et Union could have been pre-served if Gorbachev had transferred power to Yeltsin fol-lowing the attempted coup in August 1991 (I heard this from one of Yeltsin’s former associ-ates).

People are now using the rights and freedoms they ac-quired during the perestroika

years. The freedom to engage in private business, practice re-ligion, travel abroad and, to the degree allowed by the author-ities, speak out and assemble. Still, one hears criticism: In the words of Alexander Solzhenit-syn, “Gorbachev’s glasnost ru-ined everything.”

Solzhenitsyn was not alone in failing to notice the contra-dictions between the impatient demands of the early 1990s and the blame Gorbachev received after leaving power. Even Gor-bachev’s stepping down saved the country from even more se-vere upheaval. (Recall that the leading roles in Russian history were played not by Alexander II, the czar who freed the peas-ants, but rather by Ivan the Ter-rible, Peter the Great and Jo-seph Stalin.)

National character changes slowly. But we cannot even ad-dress the problem if we do not recognize it. The disparity in how Gorbachev is perceived in Russia and in most other coun-tries is undoubtedly a prob-lem—not Gorbachev’s problem but Russia’s. Closing the gap with the rest of the world in the assessment of this man’s role in history would be a huge step in Russia’s integration with the global community.

But it cannot happen by it-self. Russia needs another at-tempt at building real democ-racy. The leader who takes this step will have a difficult time, but his task will be much easier than the one faced by Gor-bachev, who initiated these re-forms. Today, we are searching for the path to democracy along with dozens of other countries and hundreds of millions of peo-ple. And having traveled this path, we will be able to prop-erly appreciate the person who gave us this chance.

be even a more entertaining and focused read.

the enchanted pilgrimPeter Vail emigrated from the

Soviet Union in 1977. He lived and worked as a journalist in the United States and then in the Czech Republic. He was a passionate globetrotter even at a time when the U.S.S.R. was still secluded behind the iron curtain. When it collapsed, Rus-sians eagerly flocked to foreign lands that had been tantalizing but inaccessible for about sev-enty years. While some were content with shopping trips and sea resorts, many sought more sophisticated discoveries, which is where Vail comes in.

His travel columns and books published in Russia and swiftly gained enormous popularity, breathing the balmy air of far-away lands. Vail gave people the impression he had seen all the cities and provinces in the world, and could talk about them with esoteric aplomb. Peter Vail died in late 2009. In 2010, Moscow-based Astrel Publishing House came out with “The Word en Route.” In his last work, Vail takes the reader on a post-Soviet jour-ney with the same exceptional

talent for being genuinely sur-prised, kindly ironic and sincere-ly involved.

safe havenLungina’s “Verbatim,” pub-

lished by Astrel Publishing House, is among the most pow-erful of these works. Lungina, the mother of beloved Russian director Pavel Lungin (“Taxi Blues” and “The Island”), was a widely famous and popular fiction translator who intro-duced Soviet readers to the masterpieces of Astrid Lindgren, Heinrich Böll, Boris Vian, Hen-rik Ibsen and many others. She befriended many leading So-viet writers and foreign authors whose works she translated. Her friends fell victim one by one to the terror and were crushed or killed in Soviet dic-tator Joseph Stalin’s camps. She began to know fear, but she believed it was her duty to over-come it. Her house became a safe haven for the persecuted and the penniless, and she be-came a guardian and witness to their fate.

Gorbachev began reform, but Russia needs another effort at developing a real democracy.

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Anniversary Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, remains an inspiration to young people half a century after he completed his mission

Gagarin Opened the Heavens

Fifty years ago this April 12, with a rousing cry of “Let’s Go!” (Poekhali), cosmonaut Yuri Ga-garin raced skyward on a So-viet rocket to become the first human in space.

Launching in the Vostok spacecraft from Kazakhstan at 9:06 a.m. that sunny day in 1961, the 27-year-old son of a carpenter circled the Earth once on a 108-minute space flight before parachuting safely to the ground in the Saratov region of the U.S.S.R.

Driven by the Soviet Union’s quest to assert technical supe-riority over the United States, Gagarin’s flight became one of the 20th century’s most signif-icant achievements. This short but epic foray into the heavens inspired millions of people around the globe and fired up a Cold War race between the superpowers that was not ex-plicitly geared toward mutual destruction.

“Not one psychologist, not one politician could predict what effect Gagarin’s flight would have on the world,” Alex-ei Leonov, another member of the original 20-man squad of Soviet cosmonauts, told Russian Now. “This was the finest com-petition the human race ever staged; who could build the best space craft, the best manned rocket … No one suf-fered from this. On the con-trary, people were busy perfect-ing this equipment rather than creating weapons.”

For more than two decades,

the sides pitched their finest en-gineering minds against each other. The American moon land-ing in July 1969 eclipsed all other achievements, but it was the Soviet Union that generally led the race in the preceding years and often afterward.

Space exploration has be-come increasingly cooperative since the end of the Cold War, especially with the ongoing as-sembly of the 18-country Inter-national Space Station (ISS). But on April 12, Russians everywhere honor the space-faring legacy embodied by Gagarin.

The young pilot tragically died in an aircraft crash in 1968 while in training for a second space mission, and his remains are interred near Lenin’s tomb on Red Square. But even in a day of megastars, he retains his iconic status: In a recent survey, 35 percent of Russians named Gagarin as their prime role model, “an ordinary person of this world but also the finest of our nation, our first envoy into space, a star of a man,” as Le-onov described him.

Now, as in the past, Russia’s new resolve to explore space comes right from the top.

“Space will always remain a priority of ours,” President Dmit-ry Medvedev told the ISS crew in a radio link-up on last year’s April 12 Cosmonautics Day. “This is not just somebody’s in-terpretation, it’s our official state position.”

In pure financing, Russia’s $3 billion annual space budget can-not compete with NASA’s al-most $19 billion. But more funding has been allocated to space in recent years as oil and gas revenues also surged. Rus-sia is a world leader in the com-mercial satellite launch market, which further helps to propel its space industry. And while the

U.S. agency had its manned moon and Mars mission hopes trimmed by the Obama admin-istration, Russia keeps those long-term plans on the draw-ing board, hoping to establish a moon base by 2030 and stage

a Mars mission shortly after, ac-cording to Anatoly Perminov, Roskosmos space agency chief.

“And then the life’s dream of Sergei Korolyov will be fulfilled,” Perminov said in a recent inter-view, referring to the former in-mate of Stalin’s labor camps who became the Soviet pro-gram’s chief designer and driv-ing force until his death in 1966.

Meanwhile, both countries are keeping an eye on China

and India as they pursue their own cosmic ambitions. The Chi-nese made a third launch of their Shenzhou VII spacecraft and also their first spacewalk in 2008, while India is planning a manned flight by 2014.

It is all a far cry from the heady days of the Vostok-1 mis-sion, when no one knew if the young Gagarin would even make it home alive.

Either in jubilation or to cover his nervousness while orbiting the planet at 17,000 miles per

NIKOLAI ALENOVRUSSIA NOW

A half century after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, firing up a Cold War race, Russia accelerates its own exploration and cooperation.

The young pilot died in an aircraft crash while training for another mission in 1968.

The Russian Federal Space Program’s budget in 2011.

The year Russia’s first inter-planetary space mission since the failed Mars 96 probe.

$3 billion

2011

IN FIGURES

Former PepsiCo head Donald Kendall is the first foreigner to be awarded Russia’s Order of Honor for his philanthropic efforts.

A colorful, tough-minded U.S. businessman and beloved phi-lanthropist, Donald Kendall is now the first foreigner to be awarded the Russian Order of Honor for his support of the arts in Russia. The ceremony, timed to coincide with Kendall’s 90th birthday, took place at the Rus-sian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; the medal was awarded by Sergei Kislyak, Russian am-bassador to the United States.

Kendall received the medal for his efforts in support of Rus-sian music and the Mariinsky Theatre, which has experienced a resurgence as of late under conducter Valery Gergiev, pro-ducing some of the finest mu-sical events in recent years.

Many luminaries attended the event. Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker described Kendall as “vigorous, tough and mean.” Baker, who used to hunt with Kendall in Wyoming, also describd Kendall as thrifty. “Look, he is wearing the same tuxedo he had when he start-ed working with Russia,” Baker said.

During the height of the Cold War, Kendall, then the head of the PepsiCo corporation, began doing business in the Soviet

Russia Honors American Patron

PETER CHEREMUSHKININTERFAX

Russia’s Mir space station orbitted the earth from 1986 to 2001.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin gets a kiss from his daughters. Gagarin on a momentous trip.

hour, he whistled a popular So-viet patriotic song over the radio, the first two lines of which are, “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky.” Within a few hours, word of his feat had sped across the globe, and a new era had begun.

However, the competitive vigor of both programs began to tail off in the 1970s after a series of U.S. moon landings. The hot space race effectively ended in July 1975 when U.S. and Soviet crews docked their Apollo and Soyuz capsules in orbit.

Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow and Washington pooled re-sources in missions to Russia’s Mir space station, which after 15 years of operation was scut-tled and fell into the Pacific Ocean in 2001. Meanwhile, as-sembly of the ISS began in 1998, and the permanently manned complex now compris-es 14 pressurized modules.

More than 500 men and women from 38 countries have

flown in space, but with the ISS alone expected to cost more than $100 billion over 15 years, space exploration remains a hugely expensive and also dan-gerous activity.

After 30 years of service and 135 launches, NASA’s shuttle fleet made its final run to the ISS last month. When the shut-tles are fully retired later this year, the station will be depen-dent on smaller Russian craft to ferry crews and supplies until a new U.S. space taxi is pro-duced. Shifting the transport burden boosts the role, pres-tige and income of the Russian space agency, which suffered so acutely from underfunding in the 1990s that it had to film commercials on Mir and later send tourists to the ISS to raise money.

As Russia forges ahead with partners, the vision for space exploration comes into focus.

“The future lies in coopera-tion,” Roskosmos head, Permi-nov, told Radio Golos. “Space exploration of the future means automated industrial facilities for mining and processing min-erals on the satellites of our solar system; it means electric power stations that feed the space in-dustry as well as the Earth. Con-sequently, industrial production will be transferred from Earth, and our unique planet’s bio-sphere will be cleansed and re-stored.”

Half a century after he be-held the spectacle of our pre-cious and fragile world from above, Gagarin would surely have applauded such a lofty goal.

“Orbiting Earth in the space-ship, I saw how beautiful our planet is,” he said after touch-ing down. “People, let us pre-serve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”

Charity How can we help each other? Philanthropy Former PepsiCo head bolstered Mariinsky

A wave of volunteer movements in Russia, initiated by the young and the virtually connected, is taking everyone by surprise.

Marina Litvinovich, 36, a popu-lar opposition blogger, was surf-ing on her computer this sum-mer when the wildfires swept through forests in the parched countryside. She noticed two types of comments accumulat-ing on different Internet sites.

“On one they were saying ‘We are burning, we are burning,’ and on another, ‘How can we help? How can we help? The two needed to come together and that’s what we did,” she said.

“I wrote a blog about how villages and houses were burn-ing and that the emergency ser-vices ministry and the fire ser-vices were not coping.”

The response was phenom-enal. Within a few days, Litvi-novich and a number of other volunteers had set up a Web site; they used a computer program, Usahidi, that had been used in Haiti after the earthquake there to allocate aid where it was most needed.

Hundreds of volunteers of-fered their help.

Volunteerism is clearly on the rise in Russia, where a young, In-ternet-savvy generation of home-grown activists is emerging. These volunteers represent a new mid-dle class interested in fighting so-cial problems and willing to react swiftly to those in need. Grass-roots organizations, started by Russians, are replacing the West-ern-funded model. And the co-ordinated fight against the fires marked a new sophistication in the culture of philanthropy.

During the fires, “there was a big wave of volunteering, peo-ple helped collect goods and then got in their cars and fought the fires,” said Maria Chertok, director of CAF Russia, a non-governmental charity aid orga-nization.

Other charities such as Milos-erdie, a Russian Orthodox char-ity whose name translates as “Kind Hearts,” also joined in.

Unlike in the West, where peo-ple of all ages actively volunteer,

the members of the volunteer movement in Russia are gener-ally young. “Most are under 40 and have blogs on livejournal, they are not members of a party, not of any organizations,” Litvi-novich said.

A blogger volunteering in a convalescent home drew atten-tion to terrible conditions there. Local officials were sent to check the home, and the publicity brought in new volunteers.

But the movement is both spontaneous and chaotic; Rus-sia’s Public Chamber, an advi-sory committee to the Duma, met recently to discuss more co-ordination among state services and volunteers.

There is little precedent for charity in Russia: Before the rev-olution, there was a form of vol-unteerism, but it was wiped out when the Bolsheviks came to power.

But there are responsibilities with this new trend, including a great need for training. Podari Zhizn (Gift of Life), based in Mos-cow, helps children suffering from cancer and other serious diseases. It is also introducing a training program to help volun-teers improve their skills with sick children.

Anastasia Severina, 23, has a passion for volunteering. “When you are in that sphere, you meet good, nice people who are easy to get along with,” she said. Sev-erina said she had tried to work in business and for the state but felt herself drawn back to char-ity work and volunteering.

Her most recent good deed was a call out for a husband and wife with seven children in Ryazan who appealed to her for help. Severina wrote about their most pressing needs on her blog, and food and clothes were sent to the family imme-diately. “I can tell people about them and we can try and help them cope.”

Volunteers Organize After Recent Tragedies

Volunteers put out a fire near the village of Kovrigino.

Donald Kendall at the Russian Embassy.

GALINA MASTEROVASPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

Union. The company began to produce Pepsi Cola in Nov-orossiysk, a city in southern Rus-sia. Alexei Kosygin, then the head of the Soviet government, granted Kendall the right to sell Stolichnaya vodka in the Unit-ed States.

In 1959, Kendall treated Ni-kita Khrushchev to a Pepsi Cola at the American National Exhi-bition in Moscow, under the skeptical glance of Marshal Kli-ment Voroshilov. Legend has it that the Pepsi Khrushchev had was not cold enough.

“In Russia, PepsiCo is a Rus-sian company,” the ambassa-dor said in an effort to explain Kendall’s enormous success. The company currently has nine plants in Russia.

In recent years, Kendall has focused his efforts on charity.

He founded the White Nights Foundation of America to sup-port Russian music and the Mariinsky Theatre.

Valery Gergiev, artistic direc-tor of the Mariinsky, addressed Kendall in a video message, call-ing him “the symbol of Amer-ica.” It was thanks to Kendall’s support that the new Concert Hall at the Mariinsky Theatre was built, Gergiev empha-sized.

Other guests were Henry Kissinger, former U.S. secretary of state; U.S. Librarian of Con-gress James Billington; Dan Rus-sell, deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for relations with Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus; as well as the chief executives of several American companies operating in Rus-sia.

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“The high profit expectations are often coupled with suspicious attitudes towards the Russian legal system, which, together with political factors, often outweigh the perceived benefits of invest-ing in Russia’s rapidly developing economy.”

“What I can’t shake is the image of Prince William as the Winkelvoss twins, with Putin in the Zuckerberg role during the negotiations.”

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