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Politics & Society

Strange Allies Unite forMarch in Moscow

P.03

Refl ections

Norton Dodge: Art Collector, Philanthropist and Russophile

P.05

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

A product by RUSSIA BEYOND

THE HEADLINES

NEWS IN BRIEF

A 520-day experiment simulating a flight to Mars and back, which involved Chinese, French, Italian and Russian astronauts, ended success-fully outside Moscow earlier this month. The crew remained isolated for 17 months, breath-ing artificial air, rarely bathing and eating most-ly freeze-dried food inside the space. “We’ll have to wait many years before mankind can land on Mars,” concluded French partici-pant Romain Charles. “But...this planet is now much closer to Earth than it seemed before.” Also this month, another unmanned Russian probe failed to reach Mars’ moon and is ex-pected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The U.S.-Russia Business Council welcomed this month’s announcement that the working group on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Orga-nization (WTO) in Geneva had reached a final agreement on the terms of accession after 18 years of negotiations that were at times aggres-sive but also frequently stalled. “We are elated that Russia’s accession is in its final stage and look forward to reviewing the details of this his-toric agreement,” said U.S.R.B.C. President Ed-ward Verona. Observers agree that joining the organization will enhance business ties between the United States and Russia. (For Konstantin von Eggert’s opinion, “Slouching Toward WTO,” please see page 4.)

Cabin Fever is 520 Days

in a Simulator

U.S.-Russian Business

Council Hopes For WTO

A recent report from the Zircon Research Group found that the share of Russians identifying them-selves as middle class decreased last year, drop-ping from 54 percent to 47 percent as of March 1. Russia’s economic woes were exacerbated by the Kremlin’s decision to hike social taxes at the start of this year, which cut into personal incomes. In February, survey respondents said the minimum amount of money needed to have a “normal” life was 24,000 rubles ($800) per month.

Middle Class Walloped by

Crisis, Study Finds

Soccer What could a great soccer team do for the Caucasus?

In December 2010, the Russian photographer Yuri Kozyrev ar-rived in Yemen and found the country on the brink of collapse. He landed in Sana’a, the capi-tal, without a “fixer,” the locals that reporters use as assistants and interpreters. Wandering the streets, unable to understand the language, Kozyrev said he worked “on the constant verge of failure.”

He was a strange and suspi-cious-looking tourist. Yet his im-ages — groups of gloomy men chewing khat at dusk, veiled women swimming and a sad

Photographer Walks the Revolution RoadPhotography Chronicling lives in the midst of upheaval and devastation

tographer these days, but ‘I am on Tahrir Square’ is a different story from the story about the people of Egypt on Tahrir Square, which requires much more responsibility.”

Roaming the world non-stop, Kozyrev is well-known as a an intuitive witness to human sto-ries and events. Just days before the Arab Spring, he was shoot-ing a story about people escap-ing big cities of Russia to live in Siberian settlements. His ever-lit cigarette, big lively eyes, tact-ful and sensitive stories — told over cups of tea — traveled from home to home, leaving mem-ories with the friends he makes on his trips. It is this sensitivity, as well as pure skill, that come through in his work. It is work that also puts him in almost con-stant danger.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Tarlan Bakhishev, 14, has waited six hours with his friends to get a ticket to see his local soccer team, Anzhi Makhachkala. The teenagers are bubbling with ex-citement as they watch a train-ing session. Somewhere out on the pitch is a Cameroonian who just put Makhachkala, the Dag-estani capital, on the European football map.

In one corner of the stadium, a few dozen fans perform their evening salah, the Muslim prayer, and thousands more an-ticipate the arrival of their lat-est star — striker Samuel Eto’o, formerly of Inter Milan.

Eto’o has signed with a club that one year ago couldn’t at-tract top Russian talent, let alone the world’s best players. But this two-time European Cup cham-pion joined the Russian football club this fall on a three-year con-tract for a reported $30 million a year in wages.

It’s nothing unusual for a lowly club to go from nowhere to attracting the best in Euro-pean soccer in an instant. Rus-sian oligarch Roman Abramov-ich transformed English club Chelsea after buying them in 2003. Manchester City is bask-ing in the cash of the Abhu Dhabi United Group — and their recent thrashing of cross-town rival Manchester United.

Anzhi, it turns out, is more than a club with a stack of cash.

The club is in Makhachkala, which is in Russia’s Northern Caucasus. The region is the site of an intense and long-running conflict between authorities and Islamic extremists, which has seen almost daily attacks. On the day Eto’o walked out onto the home ground for the first time, five people died in a se-ries of attacks.

That was hardly an extraor-

GALINA MASTEROVA SPECIAL TO RN

ANNA NEMTSOVASPECIAL TO RN

A high-flying soccer player

with a $30-million price tag

brings pleasure and a kick of

hope to Dagestan’s capital

city.

Fearless and fiercely

talented, Russian

photographer Yuri Kozyrev

recently swept two

international awards for his

coverage of the Arab Spring.

“The profession is about your opportunity to

allow people to have a voice,” Kozyrev said.

and currently sits in the Rus-sian upper house. “Kerimov doesn’t give interviews, he speaks to Dagestani people through the football club,” said Enver Kisriyev, head of the Cau-casus section at an academic think tank in Moscow.

Forbes magazine estimated that Kerimov is worth nearly $8 billion made through clev-er investments in the 1990s. He now owns one of the coun-try’s biggest gold producers, but has managed to remain out of the limelight except for when he crashed his Ferrari Enzo into a tree in Nice in 2006.

Samuel

Eto’o, who

recently joi-

ed the Rus-

sian team in

the North

Caucasus,

has just

been nomi-

nated Afri-

can Player of

the Year.

dinary day for the republic. Hun-dreds of policeman are killed each year in the republic of 2.6 million people.

That is why the players and their families are not living in the city, instead flying down for each game from Moscow. Yet Eto’o has dismissed any securi-ty concerns.

“Plenty of people will be look-ing out for my security, and if I took this decision it’s because I don’t consider that my life or that of my family are in any dan-ger,” he wrote on his Web site. “I’ll travel there on the day of the match or the eve of the match and then I’ll go back to Moscow.”

After he was presented to fans, Eto’o — a smooth media operator who is adept at say-ing very little — avoided ques-tions about the dangers of Dag-estan.

However, a few days before the opening press conference in September, the entire hock-ey club Lokomotiv Yaroslavl was killed when a Yak-42 crashed. Eto’o led a moment of silence for those who had died.

Journalists who were flown down in a Yak-42 asked Eto’o at the time if he was worried about traveling to games in Russia.

“When we sit in a plane, I al-ways give my life up to God. It

doesn’t matter whether it is a Cameroonian, Spanish or Ital-ian airline,” he said.

Club general director German Chistyakov insisted the city was safe, but did admit that he had a different image of the repub-lic before he first arrived. “I thought that there is practical-ly a war going on here, that tracer bullets fly and you have to crawl when you move about,” he told Russian news agency Ria Novosti.

The money for Eto’o and the other players all comes from one man, Suleiman Kerimov, a Dagestani, and one of the more reclusive oligarchs even though he has been a Duma minister

A Kick Where It Helps

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

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U.S. Court Decision Jeopar-dizes Adoption Treaty

Tango Dances its Way Into Russia

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man carrying a giant fish on his shoulders — foreshadow the ar-rival of civil war that soon fol-lowed in Yemen.

The following February, Kozyrev’s editors at TIME Mag-azine, where he is a contract photographer, told the photo-journalist to move quickly to Cairo to document demonstra-tions on Tahrir Square. By March, he had been in Libya for nearly two months follow-ing the rebels who eventually toppled Moammar Gadhafi. Kozyrev has become one of the most faithful chroniclers of the turmoil in the Middle East. His reportage, later published in a book, “The Arab Spring - On Revolution Road,” captured the ferment of the last year in Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt and Libya.

This October, Kozyrev swept the awards at this year’s presti-

gious Bayeux Calvados Awards, including the War Photographer and Public Choice awards at a ceremony in Bayeux, France. This September, the Russian photographer was presented with the prestigious Visa d’or News award at the annual Visa pour l’image photography fes-tival in Perpignan, France. There are several exhibits of Kozyrev’s work this season in Europe, in-cluding upcoming shows in Cro-atia, France and Britain. Anoth-er new catalog, documenting the Iraq war, will be published next year.

“Awards and gallery shows mean nothing,” Kozyrev said in a recent interview in Moscow. “The profession is about your opportunity to allow people to have a voice. You take a photo, you name the person, you doc-ument the historic events of our time. Everybody can be a pho-

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NEXT ISSUEFact or Fiction: The Many Myths of MoscowDecember 14Is Russia’s capital a dangerous place to live? Are hotels all that expensive?

BUSINESSIN BRIEF

Arkady Dvorkovich, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic adviser, offered the European Union a $10 bil-lion contribution to the re-gion’s bailout package.Experts and pundits questioned Russia’s motives for the deal. Some said the offer showed Russia’s comprehension of the interconnected global econo-my as well as good faith in the European Union. Others criti-cized the move as a token ges-ture ($10 billion would barely cover the next payment to Greece) from a country that has also suffered in the global economic crisis. The Russian government has spent much of its reserve cash in recent years shoring up its own economy and may need to do so again, should oil pric-es fall. So, even if the E.U. should accept Moscow’s offer, it would likely be a one-time deal.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay United Televi-sion Holding $300 million for a 49 percent stake in Russia’s 7TV channel. Disney had been attempting to purchase part of a Russian channel since 2008.The company launched a cable channel in Russia last year, but cable does not have the reach of broadcast TV. The new deal will give Disney access to 75 percent of viewers in Russia’s 54 biggest cities.“We expect a family channel combining the best Disney programming with original Russian TV shows will be of great interest to the audience,” said Alisher Usmanov of Unit-ed Television in a statement.

Russia Off ers

Bailout Assist

Disney Channel

Enters Russia

GLOBALRUSSIA BUSINESS CALENDAR

FOURTH BAKU

INTERNATIONAL C.I.S.

BANKING CONFERENCE

NOVEMBER 30 – DECEMBER 3BAKU, AZERBAIJANThe theme of this year’s con-ference will be “Financial markets in the C.I.S.: Stable development in the face of global uncertainty.” The In-vestment Angel awards will also be presented at this year’s event.

http://www.confer.fbc-cis.ru ›

FOURTH ANNUAL

CONFERENCE:

DOING BUSINESS WITH

RUSSIA

DECEMBER 5WASHINGTON, DCConference presentations on energy and natural resourc-es, high technology, mergers and acquisitions, economic development and public sup-port for investments. Russian officials, members of Russian Trade Mission, executives from U.S. corporations and representatives of the De-partments of Commerce and State will be in attendance.

http://www.eurasiacenter.org ›

THIRD INTERNATIONAL

FORUM OF NUCLEAR

INDUSTRY SUPPLIERS

“ATOMEX-2011”

DECEMBER 6-8MOSCOW, RUSSIAThe Forum will frame an in-ternational exhibition and conference. The Forum pro-gram includes a walkdown of displays by representatives of customers, technical spe-cialists and designers of ma-jor organizations.

http://www.atomeks.ru/en ›

FIND MORE

IN THE GLOBAL CALENDAR at www.rbth.ru

An avid shooter, Alexei Sorokin skipped this year’s ultimate com-petition for rifle fans in North Lawrence, Ohio.

His two custom-made fire-arms, crafted by an American gunsmith and stored by his American coach, didn’t get a chance to fire at the Super Shoot in May.

Keeping him in Russia, how-ever, was the same powerful passion — Sorokin was putting the finishing touches on the country’s only private factory that designs and produces its own brand of hunting, sport-ing and sniper rifles.

Sales of Orsis firearms began in August.

“We haven’t had break-throughs like this since the Ka-lashnikov assault rifle,” said Igor Korotchenko, director of the Center for Analysis of World Arms Trade, enthusiastic about the new weapon’s prospects.

Busy deluging the world with Kalashnikovs, the country left its own market bare to an on-slaught of Western brands that sought to please more sophis-ticated customers looking for hunting, sporting or counter-terrorist firearms.

The idea, Sorokin said, was to compete with imports from Austria, Britain, Finland and Germany by offering “higher quality at a reasonable price.” He quit his job as an executive at an engineering company and began looking for inves-tors.

“By virtue of my contacts in the firearms community, I came to know a person who cared about this subject,” Sorokin said in an interview. “He brought together a group of investors.”

Sorokin called the person during the interview, to ask per-mission to disclose his identity — and the answer was no. One of the investors — Mikhail Abyzov, chairman of the Ru-Com holding company —

Business The country’s only private factory designs and produces its own rifles

Lone Private Gun Maker Targets Locals Besides the notorious

Kalashnikov, Russia’s gun

market is flooded with

firearm imports from Austria,

Britain, Finland and Germany.

ANATOLY MEDETSKYTHE MOSCOW TIMES

" These rifles are cre-ated from my notion of what a firearm must

be. Our design is laconic. Reli-ability is in simplicity. To make a high-precision design that is simple is a good goal for a gunsmith, and it’s exciting in and of itself.”

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Alexei Sorokin CEO OF PROMTEKHNOLOGII COMPANY, PRODUCER OF ORSIS RIFLES

came to light when the com-pany showed off the rifles at the Sochi Investment Forum in September.

On a tour of the exhibition, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fiddled with one of the rifles for a while as he listened to Abyzov’s commentary. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has come to see the factory in Mos-cow. More exciting to the gen-eral public was the presence of former spy Anna Chapman

as she handled and caressed the rifles at the forum.

With the capacity to produce 6,000 rifles a year, the enter-prise is not a titan of the indus-try where — according to Aaron Karp, a consultant of the Swiss-based Small Arms Survey — annual output of 50,000 is common. But it’s a refreshing attempt by entrepreneurs to fill a niche that has always been

firmly and indisputably in state hands.

The investors coughed up $30 million to arrange for a building in eastern Moscow, buy Western equipment, de-sign the rifles and train the staff, Sorokin said. He hired recent graduates from the Special En-gineering Department at Mos-cow’s Nikolai Bauman State Technical University to work as designers.

Working over the drawing table, the designers kept in mind Sorokin’s admiration of the bolt system created by U.S.-based Remington Arms Com-pany and his annoyance with the large amount of small parts — “as many as inside an alarm clock” — in firearms from Aus-tria’s Steyr Mannlicher, he said.

“These rifles are created from my notion of what a firearm must be,” Sorokin said. “Reli-ability is in simplicity.

“To make a high-precision design that is simple is a good goal for a gunsmith, and it’s exciting in and of itself.”

The established Russian man-ufacturers have been too hes-itant to move beyond Soviet

technology, said Vadim Kozyulin, director of the conventional weapons program at PIR Cen-ter, a think tank.

Sorokin declines to name specific companies he sees as his com-petitors in the hunt-ing and sports shooting markets, saying only that they operate in the same and more expensive price segment. That would mean such manufactur-ers as Steyr Mannlicher, Finland’s Sako, U.S.-based Remington and Germany’s Blaser Jagd-waffen.

One of the least ex-pensive of Germany’s Bla-ser rifles, the R93, sells for 107,800 rubles ($3,560) at Kolchuga, an authorized Moscow dealer of many West-ern brands.

Promtekhnologii, as Sorokin’s company is cal led, charges 84,000 ($2,700) rubles for its least expensive model, simply named Orsis Hunter.

Several Russian state-owned com-panies also make ri- fles for civilian use — such as Saiga, a lookalike of the Kalashnikov as-sault rifle, from the Kalashnik-ov manufacturer Izhmash — but they target the lower-end market. Irina Suslova, director of the Artemida gun store in Moscow, said here, too, Russia was quickly losing out to rifles made in Turkey.

“This comes at a very good time,” she said about the new Russian rifle maker. “If we don’t start doing something now, we will lose the whole market to foreign manufacturers.”

The civilian market, at best, consumes 60,000 rifles annu-ally, with sales worth from $80 million to $100 million, Sorokin said.

In the defense and security realm, the Orsis T-5000 model can replace weapons that are now in use by special forces, Sorokin said. The company is in contact with the Defense

Ministry about potential con-tracts, he said.

Military and security snipers employ the Russian-made Dra-gunov rifle as well as guns made by Sako, Steyr Mannli-cher or Britain’s Accuracy In-ternational, Korotchenko said.

A Defense Ministry spokes-man said he couldn’t comment when reached by phone. Niko-lai Makarov, chief of the armed forces General Staff, said in Sep-tember that the army would train more snipers and look to substitute the Dragunov rifle with a more up-to-date preci-sion firearm.

At 160,000 rubles ($5,135)a piece, the Orsis option is quite expensive, but still has a chance, Kozyulin said. Military expert Anatoly Tsyganok said test-firing showed Orsis to be

in the same league as its for-eign-made rivals.

The company posted a con-spicuous note on its web site in February that the current back-log could cause customers to wait as long as eight months to one year for their orders.

Smal l enterpr ises l ike Promtekhnologii appear around the world at times, although the global gun market mostly remains the domain of old fa-vorites, said Karp of the Small Arms Survey.

Wearing a safety jacket dur-ing the interview, Sorokin looked as if he had been mo-mentarily plucked from the middle of the bustle of the day’s business at the factory near the Ploshchad Ilicha metro station. “The old industry had lost its way,” he said. “This created a window of opportunity.”

the highest Soviet ranking of athletes, “master of sport,” six years later. He gave up sport shooting in 1992, but remained influential enough to still hold the title of president of the Russian National Federation of Precision Shooting.Sorokin quit his job as an ex-ecutive at an engineering company and began looking for investors. He succeeded in finding funders and soon founded the first private gun manufacturer in 2009, and this summer was putting the fin-ishing touches on the coun-try’s only private factory that designs and produces its own brand of hunting, sporting and sniper rifles.The idea, Sorokin said, was to compete with imports from Austria, Britain, Finland and Germany by offering “higher quality at a reasonable price.”

Alexei Sorokin first took up professional shooting in 1983. He was known for sweeping the prize categories at various shooting competitions during his stint in the armed forces, and ultimately, he qualified for

Anna Chapman at the stand of Orsis rifles at the 10th Sochi In-

vestment Forum.

Busy deluging the world with Kalash-nikov rifles, Russia left its market open to Western brands.

Finance Today, more middle-class Russians rethink their futures according to the size of their mortgage

Economically, Russia’s new

middle class is both freer and

more burdened — privileged

and squeezed — than their

parents.

Paying My Mortgage is My Future

ANDREY MOLODYKH,FILIPP CHAPKOVSKYRUSSKIY REPORTER

Just 20 years ago, most Russians owned their apartments, even if it was the size of a postage stamp, and had no mortgage, a legacy of communism. Their money was kept under the mat-tress.

Today, there is a middle class with new potential, and big-ger burdens. They have more opportunities for ownership and they are beginning to experience the pressures that large debts bring — a pres-sure that has reached a boil-ing point in the United States.

Vladimir Frolov, 28, and his wife Nastya, 22, are both na-tives of villages located near Tomsk, and they have a young son, Sergei.

Vladimir’s starting salary at the Tomsk Electrome-chanical Plant was rough-ly $400 a month, which was not much, even for Tomsk. But in addition to the salary, the company of-fered the promising young en-

chanical Plant makes, among other things, giant turbines that siphon smoke from subways. Six of these turbines are cur-rently in use in the Moscow Metro.

“Theoretically, the contracts in the plant could be reduced or disappear at any time. If the higher-ups start making some kind of rubbish, then there are immediate consequences for our working conditions and our wages,” Vladimir said.

To have any sense of secu-rity, Vladimir thinks he needs at least $1,300 a month, but to receive higher wages, pro-

going campaign to raise the birthrate, but there is no infra-structure to support more chil-dren. Many preschool buildings from the Soviet era have been leased as office space, and strict regulations for registering child-care facilities prevent the cre-ation of private kindergartens.

When Sergei is finally in pre-school, Nastya would like to get a job in social services. She would like to earn $650 a month, but would settle for $490.

Nastya dreams of a vacation in Sevastopol, where she has relatives. She said she would like to travel more outside of Russia to a place like Egypt.

What would happen if Vladi-mir had an accident at the plant? Would the loan be pay-able? “We do not have to worry about that,” he said. “If some-thing happened, the insurance company would pay my loan. To be perfectly honest, I am incredibly lucky. Millions of Rus-sians are probably jealous of me.”

Read full article atwww.rbth.ru/13755

The Frolovs received their loan through Vladimir’s work. If he is fired or quits, past interest is due immediately.

NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN

AGE: 41

HIS STORY

Originally published inRusskiy Reporter

Which Financial Services

do You Use?

SOURCE: ZIRCON FINANCIAL GROUP

SOURCE: ROSSTAT, GERMAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN RUSSIA

The average

monthly wage in...

Moscow

Other major Russian cities

$1,000

St. Petersburg

$1,350

$2,000

gineer a company loan with no interest for 25 years, which he used to purchase a one-bed-room apartment in a building on the river. But there is a catch-22: If Vladimir is fired or quits, his interest would be due immediately, which is typically in the double digits in Russia.

Vladimir is literally bound to the company for 25 years, and his family’s future seems pre-determined.

Vladimir, however, said he finds the conditions fair: “It makes sense from the perspec-tive of my employer. Otherwise, lots of people would try to get their hands on inexpensive loans through the company. Maybe we are dependent. But that’s a small price to pay for our own apartment.”

After paying the mortgage each month, the Frolovs have roughly $670 to spend. Vladi-mir is the sole earner, because Nastya has started classes for a second degree and also takes

care of Sergei. Food costs are somewhere around $200 a month.

“Everything else has to be split between child,

clothes, culture and every-thing else,” Vladimir said.

He does not sound overly confident when it comes to his future. The Tomsk Electrome-

ductivity must increase, which in turn can only happen if the equipment in Vladimir’s plant is modernized. “If there was a switch to industry produced by locals, that would be half the battle.”

Vladimir wants to help the plant produce innovative, Rus-sian products. If the plant is successful, it will help Vladimir achieve his other dreams — a house and two more chil-dren.

Nastya hopes for a second child, but she is more pragmat-ic about the realities. The gov-ernment may be pushing its on-

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

He was seriously injured and needed months of recovery. His passenger, Russian TV host Tina Kandelaki, was luckier but still suffered burns.

Judging by the reception for Eto’o, the club can do no wrong in Dagestan. Close to 8,000 packed into the stadium just to

Kozyrev’s colleague at the NOOR photo agency, Stanley Greene, said, “Yuri has raised the bar on the reporting of con-flicts; he made all of us rethink how we cover stories. He is a poetic war photographer. His images are full of lyrics and po-etry that I had not seen before. … Yuri could become one of the greatest war photogra-phers.”

Portrait of the Photographer as a Young Man Kozyrev’s photographs have depth and a surprising sense of composition, especially consid-ering the conditions he works under. His first teacher, Valiko Arutyunov, was a member of an underground community of photographers in the Soviet Union described in Vasily Aksyonov’s novel, “Say Cheese,” about Soviet dissidents.

Arutyunov mentored Kozyrev. Then, Kozyrev was chronicling

people in small apartments and portraying the creative hum of dissident life in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. “That was a happy time, when my wife, Re-gina, a talented designer, and I enjoyed our life in the bubble

of wonderful underground art-ists,” Kozyrev recalled.

But after the Soviet Union col-lapsed, Kozyrev moved away from his circle and started pho-tographing a succession of post-Soviet conflicts in Armenia, Mol-dova, Tajikistan and Georgia. Since then, he has not stopped moving from conflict to con-flict. At that time, he said, he was lucky to meet another men-tor, Yevgeny Khaldey, a former Red Army photographer who was famous for his iconic image of a Russian soldier raising a So-viet flag above the Reichstag in Berlin, signifying the defeat of Nazi Germany.

“Khaldey gave me the most important knowledge about our profession,” Kozyrev said. “No university can teach you the im-portance of returning to the same places again and again and documenting the history — to me, that is why we are doing this.”

Kozyrev has been a photo-journalist now for more than 20 years. He has covered every

major conflict in the former So-viet Union, including two Chechen wars. He document-ed the fall of the Taliban 10 years ago, and then lived in Baghdad for nearly eight years before moving back to Moscow in 2009.

Journalists who covered the second Chechen war remem-ber Yusup Magomadov, a 13-year-old boy heavily wound-ed in a bombardment of his home village of Novy-Sharoi. Both of Yusup’s legs had to be amputated. Yuri Kozyrev, along with a Dutch writer, Wierd Duk, brought the boy and his moth-er to Moscow for treatment. Photographs published in a Dutch magazine helped raise money for prostheses. “It was the first and only time I saw tears in Yuri’s eyes, when he was photographing Chechens say-ing goodbye to Yusup,” Duk said. “They were afraid that Rus-sians would kill the boy.”

A freelance Danish photog-rapher, Mari Bastashevski, de-scribed Kozyrev’s work ethic during their reporting together in the Libyan desert last spring: “He’s under fire until 9 p.m. and then editing until midnight. And it is like that every day.”

The prize-winning photog-rapher is also now mentoring younger photographers. Among his students are Maria Morina, Olga Kravets and Ok-sana Yushko, who are working together on a documentary project called “Nine Cities,” which returns to a forgotten Chechnya. Kravets said: “Apart from being a great photogra-pher, he has a great eye for the work of others.”

Kozyrev is known as a pho-tojournalist willing to cover the front lines. His photos have ap-peared in a number of publica-tions, including Newsweek Magazine, Russia Beyond the Headlines. Covering the anti-government protests in Arab countries for TIME Magazine was among his most danger-ous assignments. In Libya, he was shot at and police beat him. He was detained in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

He has lost colleagues, includ-ing his friends Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, two photographers killed in April while on assignment in Misra-ta, Libya. One might wonder why the 48-year-old would want to go on risking his life. The chief photo editor of the Moscow-based Russian Report-er magazine, Andrei Polikanov, is a longtime friend. He said that it is Kozyrev’s “unconditional, fantastic self-sacrifice and faith-fulness to journalism” that keeps him motivated to cover con-flicts, and keeps him walking on the Revolution Road.

Kozyrev Walks the Revolution Road

HIS STORY

Yury Kozyrev was born in 1963 in Moscow. Has graduated from the school of journalism at Moscow State University.In 1986, he began his career as a news photographer, eventu-ally specializing in war cover-age and conflicts in the former Soviet Union. In a recent in-terview on Russian television, Kozyrev said, “At a certain mo-ment in my life I switched over to news. And that was a break-

through for me. It’s a unique feeling when you are there when history is happening.”He covered both Chechen wars, then Afghanistan and Iraq. Kozyrev lived in Bagh-dad between 2003 and 2009, were he worked as a con-tract photographer for TIME Magazine. He has traveled all over Iraq, photographing the many prisms of the conflict. Since the beginning of 2011, he has been following the Arab Spring, traveling in Egypt, Bah-rain, Libya and Yemen.Yuri Kozyrev has received nu-merous honors, including sev-eral World Press Photo Awards.

NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN

AGE: 48

STUDIED: JOURNALISM

“He’s under fire until 9 p.m. and then editing until midnight...every day,” Bastashevski said.

A Libyan rebel fighter stands on the barrel of a destroyed tank. Ajdabiyah, Libya, March 23, 2011.

The annual Russia March has for some time been a fringe event and a rallying point for the disenfranchised, the alien-ated and the perverse — skin-heads in black masks, Ortho-dox fundamentalists with icons and neo-Nazis carrying the flag of the SS Division Totenkopf.

This motley crew marched through a distant corner of Mos-cow earlier this month chant-ing anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti-Chechen and anti-Ameri-can slogans, amid other sundry prejudices.

And this year, they were joined by — of all people — a few liberal democrats.

While most Russian liberals remain revolted by the Russia March, Alexey Navalny, a prom-inent opponent of the Kremlin, decided to join in. He explained his participation to some bewil-dered supporters as an attempt to make common cause with nationalists to broaden the co-alition of those disillusioned with the Kremlin’s monopoly on power.

“I am certain that more or less any large nationalist orga-nization, if allowed to develop legally, would have leaders that would ultimately evolve to be no more radical than any right-wing European politicians,” Na-valny said. He said the “Russia March talks about existing prob-lems, and all historical allusions to Nazi Germany are irrelevant in Russia.”

Nationalism Moscow marches

A few other liberals echoed that sentiment. “We trust in moderate nationalists,” said Vladimir Milov, the leader of the Democratic Choice party. Along with Navalny, Milov and some other opposition figures such as Eugene Roizman and Boris Nadezhdin of the Right Cause said they want to collaborate with nationalists to “solve the real problems in Russia.”

The liberal flirtation with na-tionalism is extraordinary, but it is a measure of the stasis in Rus-sian politics at a moment when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the former president, is about to become president again, suc-ceeding his protégé who will re-place him as prime minister.

“Give Russia back to the Rus-sians” was a typical slogan as 7,000 protesters, some carry-ing Czarist-era flags, marched through a bleak suburb of Mos-cow under the watchful eye of columns of police. And the march, normally dominated by young people, had a noticeable complement of the middle-aged.

The SOVA Centre for Infor-mation and Analysis, which spe-cializes in monitoring xenopho-bia in Russia, reported that the participants shouted slogans in-citing ethnic hatred, which is a punishable offense.

Navalny explained his partic-ipation as a reaction to “power and usurpation.”

Navalny’s participation in the rally has divided his former al-lies. Ludmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said that that Navalny should be prosecuted for violating the constitution. Evgenia Albats, ed-itor in chief of New Times, an opposition magazine, said Na-valny “may be the first real pol-itician in post-Soviet Russia who practices real, not speculative, politics and deals with real peo-ple.”

Strange Allies March Together in MoscowWhat does it say about the

social fabric when opposition

members join the

nationalists’ march?

VLADIMIR RUVINSKYRUSSIA NOW

A Kick Where it Helps

Read full articlerbth.ru/13732

See slideshow atwww.rbth.ru/13703

See slideshow atwww.rbth.ru/13572 “Give Russia back to

the Russians” was a typical slogan as 7,000 protesters, marched in Moscow.

see a training session, and more than a dozen children ran onto the playing field to try to reach and touch Eto’o. At one point, a local Cameroonian student, who is studying medicine in Makhachkala, also ran out and dove to kiss Eto’o’s feet.

Dagestan is one of the poor-est republics in Russia with at least 40 percent unemploy-

ment. Club officials and Kisri-yev said that Kerimov’s aim is to give young people another way out, away from the route to extremism. As part of the project, the club will set up seven different football centers for youths in Dagestan, bring in quality football trainers and build a new stadium.

“People are laughing, being

ironic [about the project], but you have to understand the so-cial aspect,” Kisriyev said. “I’m not saying it is a panacea and that it will get rid of Dagestan’s many problems, but it will cre-ate some kind of positive move-ment.”

Kerimov tried to take control of the club for at least three years, Kisriyev said, but it was only possible when a new and proactive Dagestan president, Magomedsalam Magomedov, came in.

Relations between the club and the president remain close — support of a high ranking official helps soothe the prob-lems in an often dysfunctional republic.

“You just need to ring him,” said Chistyakov about Magome-dov. “Even if it is not such a se-rious question like the selling of water at the stadium. He always listens and tried to help when [activists] and the police do not understand each other.”

Few took the club seriously at first, even after they bought Roberto Carlos, the former Bra-zilan international who won the World Cup in 2002, in August. He’s 38 and the assumption was that he wanted one last pay day.

But the arrival of Eto’o has changed all that.

He is in the prime of his ca-reer, and his arrival could at-tract other great players. The club sacked its Russian man-ager and has been linked to the world’s top coaches, such as Jose Mourinho of Real Ma-drid, and top players.

“There has never been any-thing like this in Russian foot-ball,” said Bogdanov, the foot-ball editor at daily newspaper Sport Express. “Anything is pos-sible if the investors are patient and invest in infrastructure.”

The club, which is in 8th

place, entered its winter break on Nov. 6, before the second part of the season, which will see them fighting to win a place in European competi-tion.

“It would be great to sign Christiano Ronaldo,” Carlos told Spanish television, refer-ring to the Real Madrid striker

and one of the best-paid play-ers in the world. Carlos said that he had been trying to per-suade other stars to join him at Anzhi. “Our aim is to get Anzhi on the same level as Real [Madrid] and Barcelona.”

Anzhi's big acquisitions: expensive but promising

Balázs Dzsudzsák Mbark Boussoufa

One of Hungary’s most tal-ented players, Dzsudzsak had a great career at PSV Eind-hoven, so his decision to sign for Anzhi came as a surprise even to the executives of the Dutch club. Dzsudzsak could have moved to any top league. According to various sources, PSV got between $12 million to $19 million for the player's transfer. Dzsudzsak is currently undergoing treatment — so far he has played few matches in Russia because of an injury.

Boussoufa played for Ajax and Chelsea and was several times named the best Belgian play-er. He almost signed for Terek Grozny, but the Chechen club failed to meet his salary de-mands. According to unofficial sources, Anzhi paid Anderlecht about $13 million for the Moroc-can national team player and pays Boussoufa $3.3 mlllion a year. Boussoufa has become one of Anzhi’s core players and has already scored four goals in the Russian Premier League.

Jucilei da Silva

The 23-year-old midfielder played more than 100 match-es for the Corinthians and even made it to the Brazilian national team. Anzhi paid about $13 million for him, according to esti-mates. Russian experts charge in the press that the player is worth only half of this. But the Brazilian player is still young, and, if things go well, Anzhi will be able to sell him to a European club at a significant premium.

NATIONALITY: BRAZILIAN

AGE: 23

POSITION: MIDFIELDER

NATIONALITY: DUTCH

AGE: 27

POSITION: MIDFIELDER

NATIONALITY: HUNGARIAN

AGE: 24

POSITION: MIDFIELDER“There has never been anything

like this in Russian football.”

$30 milliona year is the estimated salary of Samuel Eto’o in the Anzhi club. The three-year contract was signed this fall.

IN FIGURES

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Opinion

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SLOUCHING TOWARD WTO

THE ORPHAN FACTORY

SAVING THE RESET FROM ATTACK

The 18-year marathon seems to be over. Bar-ring some extraordinary, last-minute scandal, the

World Trade Organization (WTO) will accept Russia as a member in December. Last-min-ute imbroglios are not uncom-mon, however, when it comes to getting into the WTO.

Accession has looked good before. The most recent stum-bling block was Georgia, which was the last WTO member to object to Moscow joining the free trade alliance. The former Soviet republic insisted on some form of Georgia-sanctioned cus-toms controls on the borders between Russia and Abkhazia, as well as Russia and South Os-setia. The two regions unequiv-ocally broke away from Geor-

gia in August 2008 as a result of the Georgian-Russian war. Since then, Moscow has recog-nized them as sovereign states, while most of the world con-siders them to be parts of the Georgian state.

President Barack Obama and the European Union leaders be-lieve that WTO membership will ultimately open Russia up to the world and ease difficulties that American and European busi-nesses are experiencing there. So the E.U. leaned heavily on the Georgian government, es-sentially forcing the country to accept a Swiss-brokered com-promise. There will be some no-tional customs system in place on the Russian-Abkhaz and Rus-sian-South Ossetian frontiers, which no one believes to be anything but a fig leaf covering the recognition of Russia’s pro-tectorate over the two break-away republics.

So is it a political victory for the Kremlin? Yes. Is it enthusi-astic about the WTO member-ship? Probably not. It would have been a disaster for Russia’s reputation if the country refused to join after nearly two decades of tough negotiations. And it would have left the country badly isolated from the world marketplace.

However, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, almost sure to be president again, has long been suspicious of the WTO membership, because it limits the Kremlin’s total control of the Russian economy. Now the Kremlin can write its own rules

In Russia, there is a wide-spread trend of separating children from parents, much more so than in other coun-

tries. The rights of troubled par-ents are signed away with rel-ative ease. Their children are known as social orphans.

There are fewer children today than there were 10 years ago because of a shrinking pop-ulation generally. In 1998, there were 22 million high school graduates in the country; in 2010, there were 12.8 million, a drop of 42 percent in 12 years.

Yet there are more than 100,000 new orphans in Rus-sia every year (more than 300 a day). About one quarter of these children are swelling the populations of orphanages, while the rest are being placed in the care of close relatives.

In 2009, the permanent population of child-care insti-tutions was more than 300,000. Almost 100,000 of them had no parents, while the rest had been voluntarily “surrendered” by their parents to the state because the children had health problems or because the fam-ily was poor or dysfunctional. The list of family problems in-

cludes drug addiction and al-coholism but is topped by pov-erty, which in Russia affects children above all.

The underlying cause of this “orphan factory” is the appall-ing state of the social services available to a family in distress. Hundreds of thousands of fam-ilies with disabled children have the worst of it: Nobody helps them, and there is no support. Rather, officials press them to put their child in a state-run boarding school.

Russia traditionally has gigan-tic boarding schools with hun-dreds of children. Russians reg-

ularly read shocking reports about children’s rights viola-tions in these closed warehous-es. Significant legislative efforts and other initiatives based on the best Russian and world practices have been put for-ward many times and received support at the top political level in the country. Somehow, this help has not yet reached our children.

Yet the billions of budget dol-lars annually funneled into sup-porting children’s boarding schools make this orphan fac-tory system incredibly stable.

Another problem is segrega-tion in the educational realm. Children with special educa-tional needs (for reasons of poor health, poor knowledge of Russian) cannot cope with the basic curriculum, cannot study together with other chil-dren and are likely to be trans-ferred to special (correctional) classes and boarding schools. The final link in this chain of educational isolation is chil-dren’s homes for mentally handicapped children (DDIs), which are not educational in-stitutions at all. The widespread practice is over-diagnosis of mental disability, which “buries alive” many children, who are simply excluded from the life.

Some cases have been re-ported of children with official-

Konstantin

von EggertSPECIAL TO RN

ly hopeless diagnoses being taken out of DDIs by families. After some time and with en-couragement, they were per-fectly able to study in an ordi-nary school with ordinary children.

In January 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev approved the national educa-tion initiative “Our New School,” which puts an end to the above-mentioned tradition-al segregation in education. For more than a year now, the nation has been discussing the new draft law called “On Ed-ucation,” which is designed to implement the presidential initiative. The legislative pro-cess reached a stalemate, how-ever, because educational con-servatives have been vocal against it.

The measures to solve these problems are obvious and should be a priority: The coun-try desperately needs social housing and food assistance for the poor involving the produc-tion of staple food items. So-cial services in Russia must be oriented toward helping fami-lies with children at their place of residence, if possible, with-out taking the child away from the parents. Yet so far, all at-tempts to implement the so-badly needed reforms inevita-bly run up against a wall of corruption and monopoly.

Konstantin von Eggert is a com-mentator and host for radio Kommersant FM, Russia’s first 24-hour news station. He was a diplomatic correspondent for Iz-vestia and later BBC Russian Service Moscow Bureau editor-in-chief. He was also once vice president of ExxonMobil Russia.

Boris Altshuler is the chairman of the board of the regional NGO Right of the Child and a member of the Civic Chamber of the Rus-sian Federation.

In Russia, children with special needs are not allowed to study together with other children.

The orphan factories exist because of the appalling state of social services.

Boris

Altshuler SPECIAL TO RN

for foreign investors and re-write them when needed. The acces-sion would introduce an inde-pendent framework of rules, regulations and dispute resolu-tion schemes, which are diffi-cult if not outright impossible to change or bypass. This will weaken the government’s firm hold on the economy. Putin is in no rush as he prepares to as-sume presidency once again. That is the reason for prolonged transitional periods for some of the Russian industries, allowing them to lower tariffs and open up the market for competition over the next 5-10 years. This is especially relevant for the en-ergy industry, as Gazprom will be allowed to continue selling gas on the domestic market at reduced prices — one of the key elements of keeping social stability (and voting patterns) in favor of Putin’s team.

Russia is joining the WTO under fairly lenient terms, and this may disappoint some po-tential investors.

However, looking ahead a de-cade or so, Brussels and Wash-ington may be right about the long-term benefits for foreign investors in Russia, who from now on will have more ammu-nition to defend their positions once they have a stake in Rus-sia. Also, many of the Russian companies abroad found it dif-ficult to invest in Europe and America because of protection-ist hurdles. Now they can ap-peal to the WTO rules. Al-though, I think, that with state

behemoths like Gazprom, a lot of suspicion would still linger as to their real intentions. But, funny as it may seem, Russian businesses will also be able to take their own government to task — for example, if it tries to dictate their choice of foreign partners.

It will be a long and messy story, no doubt, but it is to the Russian government’s credit that having spent so much time and effort trying to keep Russia aloof and separate from the rest of the world, on WTO it has cho-sen to tread a different path be-yond its nativist instincts.

Barack Obama and the E.U. leaders believe that WTO membership will open up Russia.

It is to the Russian government’s credit that it has chosen a path beyond nativism.

Opinion

Everyone is trying to guess how Russia’s foreign pol-icy might change after Prime Minister Vladimir

Putin takes over as president. Most expect Putin’s Russia to re-sume its anti-Western policy. In this respect, it is symbolic that Putin’s first visit in his new ca-pacity as president-in-waiting was to China, and that, in his first keynote article, he offered to create a Eurasian Union of ex-Soviet nations.

The question of how the “Western” and “Eastern” com-bine in Putin’s vision is much more subtle and complex in na-ture.

In the eyes of many observ-ers, “Putin-2” (of the second term, from 2004-2008) com-pletely overshadowed “Putin-1” (of the first term, 2000-2004) with his strongly pro-Western agenda: from close cooperation and prospects for European in-tegration to concessions to the United States (the closure of mil-itary bases in Cuba and Viet-nam, position on Central Asia) and advances to Tokyo on set-tling the Kuril Islands dispute.

The result, however, was dis-appointing. Who should be held responsible for those failures is a question open to debate. In retrospect, one can hardly blame Putin for not trying to bring Russia into the Western orbit during his first term. The disappointing result helped re-brand Putin-2 as the author of the anti-American speech in Mu-nich.

The U.S. presidential elec-tion is still a year away, but the fight for the White House is in full swing.

In this fight, anything goes, and the Republicans are deter-mined to take away every chance President Barack Obama has of winning. Obama has performed better in international affairs than in the economy, and the reset in relations with Russia is among the brightest feathers in his cap. Many Republicans believe that the reset has to be compromised at all costs, even if the United States’ own interests suffer as a consequence.

One would think that U.S. Rep.

Fyodor Lukyanov is chief editor of Russia in Global Affairs maga-zine.

Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Mos-cow.

RUSSIAN COMPASS SWINGS EAST

rope, China is now Russia’s major neighbor, wielding a strong influence and likely to wield an even stronger one.

Putin is not one of those who is fascinated by China, and he is fully aware of the risks inher-ent in the rapid and very im-pressive growth of the Asian neighbor. But he also under-stands that Russia will have to seek ways for peaceful and friendly coexistence with Bei-jing; there is not another growth and development engine in Asia that could rival China. And, of course, if Russia wants to up-grade its Far East region, it can hardly do so without China.

Lofty phrases about modern-ization and technological alli-ance with China — a new topic apparently inspired by Putin’s visit — mean, in practical terms,

institutionalization of the exist-ing model: Russian raw mate-rials in exchange for Chinese products.

Instead of dreaming about Silicon Valleys, Russia should go ahead with real modernization, focusing on efficient use of raw materials and market diversifi-cation, in terms of both geog-raphy and product range.

In other words, it is not the United States and Japan that should be chosen as models, but rather Australia and Canada — as highly developed nations whose growth is based on plen-tiful natural resources. In this sense, China is vital, with its steadily growing consumption and significant surplus of cash.

Putin has made no secret about his view of hydrocarbons as Russia’s main resource and guarantor of political weight throughout the 21st century. However, in contrast with Eu-rope, where Russia has been pur-suing a pipeline diplomacy and policy, it is only just beginning to feel its way in Asia.

One such overture is Mos-cow’s recent proposal that Pyongyang becomes Russia’s main partner in constructing a trans-Korean gas pipeline, in ex-change for a rethink on the nu-clear program and a peaceful settlement. Yet Russia’s ability to promote its goals in this way is rather limited: whereas in Eu-rope, Moscow has a solid foot-ing, it is only just beginning to gain political weight in Asia. But there is no other way.

Putin’s visit to China, in his new capacity as future presi-dent, turns a new page. His next term’s agenda will be dominat-ed by efforts to develop a model of peaceful coexistence with Bei-jing — one that should work for decades to come.

At the same time, Russia was also building ties with Asia, es-pecially China and India, creat-ing regional structures of vary-ing cohesion, f rom the Shanghai Co-operation Orga-nization to the BRIC alliance.

Moscow was making it clear to the United States (in terms of military and political activi-ties) and Europe (in terms of energy) that it had alternatives. On certain subjects, the West listened carefully and expressed concern; on others, it would simply brush Moscow’s claims aside.

There is still a tendency to see Russia’s Asian policy as a means for putting pressure on Europe. Yet this has become ir-relevant for one simple reason: whatever Moscow’s relations with the United States and Eu-

Fyodor

Lukyanov GAZETA.RU

Edward

LozanskyTHE MOSCOW TIMES

THE THIRD ANGLE

It is not the U.S. and Japan that should be chosen as models, but rather Australia and Canada.

The foreign policy message of Putin’s second term was: “So you don’t want to treat us like equals? Then I’ll make you …” And he did.

What was the role of the east — especially China — in Rus-sia’s foreign policy of the 2000s? The early Putin, despite his multi-faceted approach, was largely pro-Western — in the sense that Moscow’s foreign policy was focused on ties with the United States and Europe.

Fifty-five percent of those polled held an overall positive view of the United States, up from 46 percent in 2009, but down from 59 percent last year. Those more likely to hold favorable impressions of the United States included residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia’s two largest cities), young and mid-dle-aged people and the well educated.

2.5 Years After the ResetATTITUDES TOWARD THE UNITED STATES HAVE GRADUALLY — IF ONLY

SLIGHTLY — IMPROVED SINCE PRESIDENTS DMITRY MEDVEDEV AND

BARACK OBAMA DECLARED A RESET TO RELATIONS IN EARLY 2009.

THE POLLS

John Boehner (R-OH), speaker of the House of Representatives, has little time to waste. Congress is fiercely debating the impend-ing dramatic budget cuts, at-tempts to reduce unemployment and lessen the national debt, which is nearing $15 trillion. The Occupy Wall Street protest move-ment is on the rise, and several cities have already experienced clashes with the police.

Nonetheless, Boehner dropped his pressing agenda and went to the Heritage Foundation last week to announce that the reset is a total failure for the United States and benefits Russia alone. I suspect that Boehner’s appear-ance was due in part to the ex-ceedingly active Georgian lobby, who could be found among the audience. The theme of Russian

aggression against Georgia was expressed not just in Boehner’s speech but in others as well.

The leitmotif of all the speech-es at Heritage was that the reset is doing harm both to the econ-omy and to U.S. security, and therefore should be discontin-ued.

Every U.S. company trading with Russia — and there are hun-dreds, including top companies in the Forbes 500 list — believe precisely the opposite — that the reset should be continued. They also strongly support Russia’s ac-cession to the World Trade Or-ganization and advocate the re-peal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which they believe would be in their corporate in-terests and in the interests of the country as a whole.

As for security, the fact that Russia provides transport corri-dors for the delivery of military and other supplies to the troops of the United States and NATO along the northern route to Af-ghanistan makes the reset indis-pensable.

It is a known fact that taking those supplies along the south-ern route via the territory of so-called U.S. ally Pakistan has fre-quently ended in transport convoys blown up and even oc-casionally casualties among U.S. servicemen. It is hardly a secret that, although the strikes were delivered by the Taliban, they acted with direct support from Pakistani secret services.

Michael McFaul, nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to Russia, said in no uncertain terms

at a Senate hearing on Oct. 12 that the reset was based strictly on those positions that benefit the United States and that the Obama administration had never given away gifts to Russia.

So who is more concerned about U.S. interests — support-ers or opponents of the reset? Opinion is divided even in the Republican party itself. Reset bashing has come up against some resistance not only from leading Russia experts but from some Republicans. Let’s hope these voices of support are rep-resented in Congress so that the reset can continue to improve our relationship.

Originally published on

SOURCE: WCIOM

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WWW.RBTH.RU ReflectionsMOST READ From Punk Rocker to Holy Fool

rbth.ru/13725

ABSURDISTAN, PELEVIN-STYLE

READ RUSSIA

In this surreal story by the Russian master of postmod-ern science fiction, Victor Pelevin, young Lena is em-

ployed to stand naked for hours at a time and sing — when they are not indulging the excessive fantasies of oligarchs. She and her fellow “caryatids” are dec-orative pillars in an elite under-ground nightclub. The girls are injected with a classified serum, ‘Mantis-B,’ which enables them to stand totally still for up to two days. Lena’s encounters with a giant, telepathic praying mantis, while under the influ-ence of the serum, radically alter her perspective on the outside world, revealing an alternative universe of wordless clarity.

In true postmodern style, Pelevin intersperses these drug-induced episodes with other voices. There are the pseudo-pretentious extracts from Coun-terculture magazine that Lena reads in the minibus back to Moscow. She also meets con-cept artists, girls dressed as mer-maids, important clients in bath-robes, guards in suits, and the sinister, ironic-slogan-toting Uncle Pete.

Pelevin has been perplexing and delighting readers with his unique brand of polyphonic sci-fi comedy for more than two decades now. His first novel, Omon Ra, published in 1992, portrays a protagonist attempt-

ing to escape the Soviet night-mare by becoming a cosmo-naut, only to find himself part of a farcical, mock-heroic moon landing during which he drives his lunar bike along a derelict underground tunnel.

While the political landscape may seem to have altered seis-mically around him, Pelevin has had no trouble shifting his sa-tirical focus from the absurdi-ties of the communist regime to the iniquitous consumerism of post-Soviet Russia. Pelevin’s most recent book, Pineapple Water for a Beautiful Lady, has just been short-listed for the Nose literary prize.

There are interesting parallels between the different worlds of Pelevin’s novels: both Omon and Lena are victims of the sys-tems they live under, duped by the authorities and kept, liter-ally and metaphorically, in the dark. The building of a secret entertainment complex for the top politicians and businessmen living in Rublyovka, Moscow’s most prestigious village, echoes the real-life construction of Sta-lin’s wartime bunker, where a whole sports’ stadium was con-structed above ground to dis-tract attention. Pelevin’s fantas-tical nightclub is built a thousand feet underground to double as “a bomb shelter for the nation-al elite in case of war or terror-ist attacks.”

A hired “ideologist” tells the assembled sex workers that “en-emies” are trying to brainwash them with a sense of econom-ic injustice by printing photo-graphs of oligarchs like Abram-ovich and Prokhorov and describing their freakish whims. A brilliant, miniature gem, this novella introduces the absurd-ist Pelevin perfectly.

Phoebe

TaplinSPECIAL TO RN

THE KITCHEN DEBATE

EXPAT FILES

HRH (my “Handsome Russian Husband”) and I go through a quaint ritual each

Sunday night in Moscow: I cook something nice, and we settle down to watch Vesti Ne-delyia, Channel 2’s weekly news round-up program. To my way of thinking, there isn’t a lot of news in it, unless you count a national costume fes-tival cum reindeer race in the Republic of Komi as news, which I don’t, and if pressed, neither does HRH. If you had to rely on this crowd for real news, you’d be in big trouble. I get most of my news via pod-casts, which I download and listen to while I’m cooking.

“I feel we should move our money,” I said to HRH during a commercial break, as we tucked into a stir-fry, assembled during a love fest between Ra-chel Maddow and Michael Moore, which had brought me up to speed on the Occupy Wall Street developments.

“Move it where?” asked HRH, who associates moving money with armored vehicles and a couple of dropouts from the Russian army with buzz cuts and ear pieces.

“It’s an Occupy Wall Street thing,” I explained, “yesterday, they encouraged everyone to move their money from big banks to smaller local savings and banks or credit unions. I think we should do it.”

“Why would we want to do that?” asked HRH. “We are VIP clients at our bank. I don’t want to move.”

“We need to stand in solidar-ity with the 99 percent,” I ex-plained patiently. “The ones who aren’t VIP clients at their bank.”

“Why?” asked HRH, “I like

being the 1 percent. Don’t you?”

“Dar-ling,” I said patiently, “the 99 percent are the good guys. It’s the Wall Street fat cats who are the bad guys. The pro-testers are trying to introduce a financial transaction tax to level the playing field.”

“Fantastic,” said HRH, raised in the best Marxist-Leninist tra-dition. “We had that political system — Communism. Didn’t work out too well. You can’t think a financial transaction tax is a good idea.”

“What do I look like to you — the short stop of the Citi-group softball team?” I retort-ed. “It’s a teeny tiny tax — like 1 percent of 1 cent on every dollar for these gazillion dollar transactions: Mergers & Acqui-sitions and stuff like that.”

“And where would the money go?” asked HRH.

He had me there. Rachel and Michael were for it, as was Obama, so it must be a good thing.

“It’s…well, it’s designed to ul-timately benefit the global…you know, poor,” I argued meekly. “Listen, Bill Gates and the Pope are in favor of it.”

“Bill Gates can afford it,” said HRH, “and I thought you said the Pope was a male chauvin-ist.”

Vesti Nedelya resumed in the nick of time, with an update on Boris Berezovsky’s attempt to sue Russia’s richest oligarch, Roman Abramovich, for $5 billion over some oil shares. HRH grimaced, feeling as many Russians do that this is too much dirty laundry hanging on Britain’s clothesline. “How does this transaction tax work again?” he asked.

Jennifer

EremeevaSPECIAL TO RN

Jennifer Eremeeva is a a freelance writer and longtime resident of Moscow. She is the curator of the culinary blog, www.moscovore.com, and the humor blog www.russialite.com.

It was dumb luck that he lived just south of Washington, about an hour’s drive from where I lived, depending on

traffic. In 2001, I began to write him letters. No response. I be-came annoyed, and he got more letters. No response. By 2004, I realized that he didn’t open his own mail. I then called and got the most peculiar an-swering machine recording of his voice: “You’ve reached Nor-ton and Nancy Dodge, please leave a message. If you’re ask-ing for money or selling some-thing, please use the mail.” Beeeeep. I immediately knew that we were meant to be friends.

“Professor Dodge, my name is …” No response. No call back.

By 2005, it was time to get creative.

Having a mom who worked in the press helped. A colleague at Voice of America assigned a TV crew to film a segment about Norton at his home, Cremona Farm. I volunteered to be an unnecessary, unpaid “produc-tion assistant” for the day. We arrived in a van, and armed with a tripod, I popped out, and spoke in rapid-fire succes-sion…

“Professor Dodge, my name is Mark Kelner and I’ve been writing you these letters and leaving you these messages and I work in a gallery and I’m doing this museum show in D.C. and the work is right up your alley and would you come?”

“I’d be happy to,” he replied, in a typical gesture of generos-ity and earnestness, unusually uncommon for busy people, to say nothing of living legends. I had read his books. Been to see

dressed in his signature color-ful tie. I’d visit the farm often and do research in the library. That he happened to be famous quickly became an afterthought. I started collecting baseball cards at seven. As a kid, he col-lected rocks and bottle caps. We met concerning fine art, but our relationship was much more about asking questions and an-swering them with more ques-tions. And we could keep it up for hours.

If Norton would call, I’d know to budget at least an hour to answer as he could easily go off on tangents, all the while for-getting why he called in the first place. If he left a voicemail, it was usually four minutes long and he’d be cut off mid-sen-

Mark Kelner is a Washington, D.C.-based art dealer and collec-tor of Russian art.

LIGHTS FROM THE UNDERGROUND

THE NORTON I KNEW

THE LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY

Russian artist Oleg Vassiliev gives memo-ry a voice. Often he begins with a person-

al memory — of his family, a home, a road, even a field. Then he recreates the vision, one that echoes all the more as he experiments with light and space.

Vassiliev, who was born in Moscow in 1931, represents a generation of Russian artists who rejected the narrowly de-fined, state-sponsored Socialist Realism of the U.S.S.R. and cre-ated their own work, under-ground.

“Although his painting and drawings start with the specif-ic and the personal, Vassiliev is able to turn those events and images into something univer-sal,” said Natalia Kolodzei, head of the Kolodzei Art Foundation, which has offered longtime support for Russian artists in an era of great upheaval and has amassed a collection of 7,000 works.

Kolodzei said that Vassiliev invites “the viewer to explore the landscape of memory.”

Some of his works appear political as well as personal. In 1980, Vassiliev created an em-blematic cover for Ogonyk magazine that also became a well-known painting. The work portrays a speaker at a Polit-buro meeting, but Vassiliev ob-

scures the face with a color-suffused intersection of light beams. The effect is startling, and somehow beautiful. But it also evokes the Stalinist-era ex-orcism of politicians from pho-tographs. They were erased once they fell out of favor, were imprisoned or purged. Ogo-nyk was shown in the “Russia!” exhibit at the Guggenheim Mu-seum in 2005.

A retrospective of Vassiliev’s body of work is currently un-

derway at The Museum of Rus-sian Art (TMORA) in Minne-apolis. The museum is a rare space in the center of America devoted to Russian art; the show features new Vassiliev pieces, including recent etch-ings, as well as those created during the height of the Cold War.

“Many of the works for this exhibition are being shown in the United States for the first time, and more than a few are being exhibited for the first time anywhere,” said Kolodzei, who is also lending works for the show.

Brief History of the Underground ArtistThe Russian Noncomformists, as they are called, lived secret artistic lives in their tiny apart-ments. Occasionally, they had underground shows. Even more rare were visits by for-eigners — like the eminent and fearless collector Norton Dodge. Formal exhibitions were mostly out of the ques-tion.

The young Vassiliev did man-age to show his work at the Bluebird Café in Moscow in 1968, the same café where his contemporaries Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid honed their ironic yet passionate par-odies of Socialist Realism, cre-ating a genre that grew up and became known as Sots Art.

Vassiliev attended art school in Moscow. Like his friend Ilya Kabakov, he put food on the table with his work as a chil-

dren’s book illustrator. Only when he immigrated did he make his living as an artist. In recent years, he has sold works for as high as a million dollars at auction.

Dozens of artists went into voluntary exile in the 1970s and 1980s, but not all of them fared as well as Vassiliev. There was a heady time when inter-est in Russia was high, but the passion, for many, also waned. Many of the artists experienced a shock of culture, language and identity.

In the book, “Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks,” Natalia Kolodzei wrote that “after he moved to the United States, Vassiliev found that his urge to capture what was close and im-portant to him became stron-ger, the further he was from his friends and memories.”

Vassiliev kept creating, and weathered the crises of iden-tity and vision while others did not. He also stayed true to his rather distinct vision. “The river of time carries me further and further,” he wrote, “and vivid moments immersed in golden light remain on the banks.”

The past is never dead, as William Faulkner said (and Vassiliev painted). Thanks to art, memory survives. Only history will tell how much artists like Vassiliev contributed to the opening and collapse of the system that repressed them.

tence by default. My questions soon became more personal. He was deeply emotional when talking about art and meeting artists, savvy in his praise, al-ways learning. He taught me forever to be a student. He was generous beyond bounds in support of all artists, under the most impossible of circumstanc-es. Above all, Norton was as much of an artist as those he collected.

Collecting was his creative act.

While others would see the enormity of his collection, he would concern himself with the gaps — in geography, dates and media. It was never-ending, and for me, it became infectious. In him, I found a mentor and a

best friend. It was the most nat-ural thing to discover paintings in or out of his collection and get his take on them, which usu-ally would blow my mind. Often times, I’d keep him posted as to who’s doing what these days, or update him on current events in the world of Russian art.

Most exciting to me was the crossover effect of artists he collected from the 1960s to the 1980s, artists who are now considered staples of interna-tional contemporary art — Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev, among other names. Most ex-citing to him were the recent acquisitions of some obscure Georgian, Armenian, Azerbai-jani artists no one’s ever heard of but are now a part of the broader and ever-expanding Dodge Collection.

A few days before he passed, I had called with good news.

“Norton, you won’t believe what happened! I’ve been asked to give a talk about Rus-sian art at St. Mary’s College. I met a guy at some art party. He had a beagle. I liked his bea-gle. So we got to talking. He teaches a class. Knew about you and the collection. Said he got interested in art after seeing some of your pieces there. He was deeply moved I knew what he was talking about.”

Norton got the point way be-fore I ever made one, having been a Trustee there since 1968 and lecturing for years until 1988, his endowments still sup-port academic excellence in both students and faculty.

“You need to grow out a wal-rus-style mustache, as I had one, so as to continue the tradition,” he said.

Norton embraced humor with grace. He abhorred sports. Was the ultimate backseat driv-er. And was the easiest person to love—fully, unconditionally and, like him, wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve.

Vassiliev, born in Moscow in 1931, wrote, “The river of time carries me further and further.”

Above all, Norton was as much of an artist as those he collected. Collecting was his creative act.

Nora

FitzGerald SPECIAL TO RN

Mark

Kelner SPECIAL TO RN

his namesake collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum on many occasions. So, yes, I modestly stalked him, but with the best of intentions. The result was the genesis of a deep friendship, de-spite a 47-year age difference, that lasted until the final days of his life.

If he had a doctor’s appoint-ment downtown, we’d meet up for lunch following it. If I had an opening, he’d be there,

Nora FitzGerald was the Moscow correspondent for ARTnews and is a guest editor for RN.

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an economist studying women in the labor force. But his focus shifted, and he spent much of his time with artists, often at apartment exhibitions.

He also started buying art and smuggling the works out. He found he was quite good at it,

rolling them up inside posters and rugs. Dodge died on Nov. 5 at the age of 84. Many of the more than 20,000 works by 1,000 artists Dodge purchased and smuggled out are accessi-ble to the public, because he and his wife, Nancy Dodge, do-

nated the entire collection to Rutgers University. The art from 1956-1986 — from the time of Khruschchev’s Thaw to Gor-bachev’s Glasnost — are cata-loged as part of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. The uni-versity now has a program to

study unofficial art of the Sovi-et Union because of this trea-sure. Some of it was easy to get out of the U.S.S.R. At times, the Ministry of Culture was only too happy to stamp the art, now worth six to seven figures, as “worthless.”

For five decades, Norton Dodge collected Russia’s unofficial artists, creating the largest collection of

Russian Noncomformist art. At the height of the Cold War, be-ginning in 1955, Dodge visited the Soviet Union frequently as

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“Both the Mariinsky and Bolshoi operate as if they are repertoire theaters, and that’s pretty hard to do nowadays,” American music critic George Loomis pointed out. Most opera companies today collect guest artists. “The Bolshoi is doing Rosenklavier soon, and I don’t think that’s an opera they have singers for.”

The direction of the newly resplendent Bolshoi is still un-clear. The theater’s schedule for the next three months indicate that for now they are rotating the few productions that they have.

Rumors that Gergiev could or should take over the Bolshoi persist. Loomis remarked that the idea of Gergiev eventually wresting both theaters under his control “in a kind of reunit-ing of the old imperial theaters” never seems to go away.

But the master is already stretched: The Gergiev who aroused North America to a frenzy of admiration is not the Gergiev that Russian audiences groan about because he is late for his own performance or the orchestra is under-rehearsed. He may be called a superconduc-tor, but he is not superman.

Valery Gergiev and the Marri-insky Theatre have come a long way since they brought Tchai-kovsky and Mussorgsky to the United States for the first time in 1992. For the past two de-cades, Gergiev has been aggres-sively exporting Russian music and musicians to the West. Ger-giev and his orchestra recently completed a three-week tour of North America, performing 18 concerts across the conti-nent.

Gergiev emerged in the early ‘90s after the fall of the Soviet Union as a charismatic and en-ergetic leader among the chaos.

In the 1990s, state support

Culture Valery Gergiev emerged in the early 1990s as a charismatic leader rising above chaos

Russian conductor Valery

Gergiev and his Mariinsky

Theater Orchestra have been

agressively exporting little-

known music and the best

musicians.

Gergiev Vision for Mariinsky Overshadows Bolshoi Opening

AYANO HODOUCHISPECIAL TO RN

Travel A magnificent European city opens expansively onto the ancient Baltic Sea

Peter the Great wanted foreign-ers arriving on cargo and pas-senger ships from all over the world to be struck immediate-ly by the city’s grandeur and beauty, which is why the wa-terfront is the city’s magnificent face. It is the most romantic wa-terfront on the Baltic Sea. Taking a boat out at twi-light, the sense of sea-meets-sky openness is so powerful and in such contrast to the yellow lights of the cityscape. It evokes a sense of wonder.

Often referred to as “Venice of the north,” St. Petersburg consists of a network of canals surrounding 101 islands.

“A ride along the rivers and canals is a must for every visi-tor to St. Petersburg,” said Yana Khrustovskaya, head of a local travel agency. “Our tourists are amazed by the harmonious view of the city from the water.”

At night, the interplay of light and shadow emphasizes St. Pe-tersburg’s impressive architec-ture. If you take a boat to the middle of the Neva River at about 2 a.m., you can watch the world-famous sight of the drawbridges being raised to allow the passage of the huge liners that cruise here every summer night.

Bookworm’s Day DreamFyodor Dostoyevsky is insepa-rably linked with St. Petersburg. In fact, the city celebrated his 190th annivesary this month. Literary scholars say that St. Pe-tersburg figures in about two-thirds of Dostoyevsky’s writing — both as the setting and also as a protagonist. The homes of his characters and places as-sociated with the writer’s life can be found on maps and many travel firms offer Dos-toyevsky-themed tours.

“The writer lived here for 28 years and moved apartments 20 times, which is why so many addresses are linked to his name,” said Valery Fridman, di-rector of the Mir travel agen-cy.

Inside St. Petersburg’s Soul Russia’s Northern Capital

celebrated legendary writer

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 190th

anniversary on November 11.

JULIA PETROVA,PAULINE NARYCHKINA ANDMARINA GARINASPECIAL TO RN

The Dostoyevsky tour begins at his memorial apartment on Kuznechny Pereulok, where he worked on his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

Mikhailovsky Castle once housed the engineering school where Dostoyevsky was en-rolled in 1838. The castle itself was built at the behest of Em-peror Paul, son of Catherine the Great, as a shelter where conspirators could not get at him. Ironically, he was mur-dered at the castle in 1801.

Semyonovsky Platz is where Dostoyevsky was almost

hanged. After he became ac-quainted with revolutionaries and joined their secret society, he was arrested on a tip-off, incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress and sentenced to death along with other mem-bers. On Dec. 22, 1849, he was brought, along with 20 other convicts, to Semyonovsky Platz, which was the place of public executions.

“I have told tourists this story countless times, and each time it sends a chill down my spine,” said Elena Yakovchenko, a guide with the Mir travel agen-cy.

“Three pillars were put up on the square and the conspirators were to be hanged. While wait-ing his turn, a messenger ar-rived with a new sentence: death by hanging was commut-ed to four years’ hard labor.”

After serving his term, Dos-toyevsky lived in Moscow for a while before returning to St. Petersburg and settling on Stol-yarny Pereulok, where he wrote his most famous novel, Crime and Punishment.

Romance From Up HighA tour of St. Petersburg’s roof-tops offers magnificent views of the landscape and the mon-uments.

At least four roofs can be reached on a three-hour excur-sion in the historic heart of the city; tourists get a different per-spective from each one.

From the six-storey building

Palkin: A Taste

of the Old City

First opened in 1785, Palkin restaurant’s patrons included Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Chek-hov, Mendeleyev and Tchaik-ovsky. Gourmets can enjoy food that was served to the impe-rial court, with dishes such as stewed rabbit in sour cream and crayfish tails with avacado and caviar, plus a choice of 120 wines from France, Italy and Chile. Since its 2002 restoration by the Hermitage museum, the restaurant boasts shining chan-deliers, frescoes on the walls and snow-white tablecloths. Live music and regular cultural events are all part of the expe-rience.“This is not our first evening at Palkin’s ... we simply want a re-peat of the experience we usu-ally enjoy here,” said Russian director and screenwriter Val-ery Todorovsky.

A view of the Palace Square: St. Pe-

tersburg, formerly Leningrad, is called

the “Venice of the North.”

Since the 19th century, foreign celebrities, acclaimed artists, bankers and merchants stayed at the Europe Hotel in the heart of St. Petersburg.

The building at the intersec-tion of Mikhailovskaya and It-alyanskaya Streets is a landmark in itself. In the early 19th cen-tury, there were two guest hous-es — the Rogov house and the Klee house. The hotel and inn were co-owned with the French merchant Coulon and bore the French name “La Russie.” After a devastating fire, the hotel was bought and rebuilt by the Swiss

St. Petersburg’s Europe

Hotel, close to the famous

Nevsky Prospekt, is steeped

in historical atmosphere and

aristocratic charm.

architect Ludwig Fontana and opened in 1875 under the name Hotel Europa.

The hotel overlooks the city’s best known architectural en-semble: Ploshchad Iskusstv (Arts Square). Within 20 minutes’ walk of the hotel is the glori-ous Winter Palace, the long-time home of the State Her-

m i t a g e M u s e u m , a n internationally renowned venue with more artifacts than you can see in a lifetime. (But worth trying for its Rembrandts, Car-avaggios and Da Vincis.) Many other landmarks are within easy walking distance: The Church of Savior on Spilled Blood, where Emperor Alexander II

was assassinated, and the Kazan Cathedral built to commemo-rate the victory over Napoleon. The hotel is quiet, but in the midst of the bustling cultural center: The people you meet on Mikhailovskaya Street are either hurrying to a play, an opera or concert at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, the Mu-sical Comedy Theatre or the Shostakovich State Philharmon-ic. Nearby, one can also find a contemporary exhibition at the Russian Museum, or simply stroll in the gardens. It is cus-tomary to have a drink at the legendary Stray Dog café, the haunt of early 20th-century in-tellectuals after the Revolution: a glittering if doomed crowd of Acmeists, Symbolists and art-ists, including Anna Akhmato-va, Osip Mandelshtam and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Historic Hotel at City’s Heart

ALEXANDRA KHAZINARUSSIA NOW

on the quay of the Fontanka river, opposite the Circus, you overlook a junction where, in the evening, the winding pro-jections of the car headlights undulate and interweave with the river boat lights, a synchro-nized dance that qualifies as a hypnotic performance.

Near Mokhovaya Street, the landscape is quite different. On the horizon, the illuminated cu-polas of the great cathedrals — Kazan, Saint Isaac’s, Our Sav-ior on Spilled Blood — as well as the spire of The Admiralty are all aligned, the cathedrals like golden balls set along the tops of the roofs.

Dmitri, a guide, said that his favorite area panorama of the city can be viewed from above the historic heart: Nevsky pros-pect, the Fontanka river, the Griboedov canal, Sennaya Square, Vasilievsky Island and, above all, the Petrogradskaya area, which has infinite poten-tial and offers hours of roam-ing without touching the ground.

One can find the drama and history of the city through the eyes of Dostoyevsky alone.

for the arts dwindled and the-aters floundered, losing some of their best talent as those who could, left the country to make a living. Moscow’s Bolshoi The-atre had been protected under the Soviet regime. The coun-try’s best talents were ushered towards Moscow. The Bolshoi was powerless to stop the exo-dus once the regime fell. Drained of both cash and tal-ent, the once-famed Bolshoi took a backseat to the Mariin-sky Theatre under Gergiev.

Gergiev wanted to turn the Mariinsky into an internation-ally renowned brand, and he started by releasing a few re-cordings with Philips — Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in 1991 and an opera, Mussorg-sky’s Khovanshchina, the next year. Several more opera record-ings followed, all of them un-familiar in the West.

It was as much a renaissance of forgotten Russian operas as a renaissance of the Mariinsky

Theatre itself. Rimsky-Korsakov’s jewels such as “Sadko” and “The Maid of Pskov” showcased the traditional genre, while Gergiev pushed the envelope with dar-ing productions of obscure Prokofiev operas such as “The Fiery Angel” and “The Gam-

bler.” The company’s tours abroad were met with rave re-views.

Aspiring singers headed to St. Petersburg rather than to Mos-cow, which was losing its posi-tion. Some of the biggest names in the business today came out

of the Mariinsky. Olga Borodi-na, while still a student, was re-cruited to sing Khovanschina’s leading female role Marta, and Anna Netrebko also got her start there.

The Bolshoi made tentative efforts to follow the Mariinsky’s path, but met with little suc-cess. A disastrous production of “The Gambler” forced the newly appointed music director to re-sign the day after its premier in 2001 — starting a notoriously revolving door. This season, a daring Bolshoi staging of the fairytale “Ruslan and Lyudmilla” provoked the audience into shouts of “Shame!” and “Out of the Bolshoi!” from the audi-ence.

However, both theaters now face the same challenge — the restored Bolshoi has added 1,750 seats to Moscow, and Mariinsky Theatre’s second stage is expected to add a sim-ilar number.

So far, Gergiev does not seem overly concerned. “I’m not wor-ried about the future of classi-cal music,” he said. “Some peo-ple are ready to hear the power of music. We don’t have to worry about 6 billion people not being madly in love with clas-sical music. Maybe there are just 100 million [who love it]. We just have to do it well.”

Rumors that Gergiev could direct the Bolshoi persist.

Read more atwww.rbth.ru/13790

Since 1992, the company and Gergiev have been aggressively exporting music.

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