2013 10 au all

A product by RUSSIA BEYOND

THE HEADLINES

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A product by RUSSIA BEYOND

THE HEADLINES

Distributed withDistributed with

www.rbth.ru

A special supplement produced and publ ished by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia) , which takes sole responsibi l i ty for the contents.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

P 3

An in-depth look at Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov

Spotlight on Lavrov

P 14

The politics of rock music in the USSR

Rocking the union

ECO-TOURISTS HEAR THE CALL OF THE WILD IN RUSSIA'S FAR EAST

PAGES 12-13

KAMCHATKA CALLING

For each majority politician, For each Siberian winter, For each of you

there is an opposition leader. there is a tropical Moscow summer. there is a Russia of your choice.RBTH for iPad

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Russia may build its own space station after 2020rbth.ru/30566News

Aussie film takes prize in Moscow

Defence focuses on robotics

Rodionova takes Perth honours

Little sympathy for Greenpeace protest

FILM

TENNIS

ARMS

ACTIVISM

RUIN – an Australian film shot in Cambodia with local Khmer-speaking actors – was among the prizewinners at Moscow’s 2Morrow Interna-tional Film Festival earlier this month.

The romantic road movie tells the story of two social outcasts: Sang Malen (a pros-titute) and Rous Mony (a fac-tory worker).

The fi lm, directed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson and Michael

ARINA Rodionova, a Rus-sian-born Australian tennis player, won the Perth Tennis International ITF tournament at the beginning of October.

In the fi nal of the tourna-ment in Western Australia, Arina beat Irina Falconi, from the US, 7-5 6-4, winning her seventh ITF singles title.

Later this month, she plans to take part in the William Loud Bendigo Women’s International Tennis Tourna-ment, which she has won pre-viously.

Rodionova, 23, who began playing tennis aged three under the guidance of her father, is currently ranked 231 in the world.

She made her professional debut in 2004 at an ITF event in a small town near Moscow.

A love of tennis must run in the family. Arina’s older sister, Anastasia, who lives with her and their parents in Melbourne, also represented Australia in tennis at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

OPINION polls suggest that the majority of Russians sup-port the actions of authori-ties against Greenpeace pro-testers from the Arctic

Sunrise, who, on September 18, attempted to board the Gazprom oil-drilling plat-form Prirazlomnaya.

Polls by the Centre for the

Ruin was shot in Cambodia

Ukrainian boxer Vladimir Klitschko beat Russia's reigning cham-pion Alexander Povetkin at Moscow's Olympic Stadium ear-lier this month. All three judges scored the fight 119-104, giving Klitschko victory in all but one round. Klitschko, 37, defended his IBF, IBO, WBO and WBA championships.

FIGHT OF THE YEAR VLADIMIR KLITSCHKO BEATS ALEXANDER POVETKIN

PICTURES AND NUMBERS

Vladimir Klitschko will recei-ve $US17 million for his vic-tory and Alexander Povetkin will get $US6 million, in this lucrative heavy-weight com-petition.

This was Klitschko's 61st vic-tory in his career, while it was Povetkin's first defeat after 26 consecutive wins. Povetkin started his career in 2005 in Germany.

17 61

ONLY AT RBTH.RU

Every member of RBTH's team has their own view of news and events in Russia

Alexey Mikheev discusses unusual Russian words with double meanings

RBTH.RU/A_WEEK_IN_RUSSIA_BY_RBTH

RBTH.RU/DOUBLE_AGENTS

Cody, also won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Coming in fi rst at the Mos-cow festival was Kazakh fi lm Harmony Lessons, which ex-amines gang violence, school bullying and police torture. The fi lm is a debut for Ka-zakh director Emir Baigazin.

The 2Morrow festival is dedicated to showcasing and encouraging independent fi lms from around the world.

COMBAT robots will be part of the state armament pro-gram of 2016-2025, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmit-ry Rogozin told Interfax-AVN.

“A variety of robotic pro-jects, airborne, ground-based, underwater and others, will be a specific feature of the prospective armament pro-gram,” Rogozin said.

Robots were a focal point of the Russia Arms Expo, in Nizhny Tagil Rogozin said.

“One of them, for example, was designed to extinguish fi res inside burning arsenals, and another was made for pa-trolling missions. Any special-ist can tell you that we can build any remote-controlled vehicle with relevant mecha-nisms if we can build a re-mote-controlled fi re engine,” he said.

“One of our tasks, for ex-ample, which is being set in the new state armament pro-gram, is to save the lives of our soldiers and officers and to keep them away from dan-gerous war zones,” he said.

Study of Public Opinion (VTSIOM) revealed that up to 60 per cent of respondents said Russia’s response was “adequate”, 15 per cent said it was “inadequate” and 11 per cent claimed it was “too soft”.

Aleksandr Skaridov, Dean of the Department of Mari-time Law at the Admiral Ma-karov University of Sea and River Fleet, emphasised that the incident took place in wa-ters that are under Russian jurisdiction.

A foreign ship can legally enter the territorial waters of the Russian Federation only in the case of innocent pas-sage or if it is headed for a Russian port.

So, if the Arctic Sunrise en-tered Russia’s territorial wa-ters for other reasons, it vio-lated the Russian law “on the state border of the Russian Federation”.

“What's more, we want every Russian soldier to do the job of fi ve. And this can be done only if he is not just a soldier but an operator of a weapons system. He will be

positioned at a distance, out-side of the enemy’s firing range, and be able to destroy not just one but fi ve [enemy soldiers],” Rogozin said.

“The third objective is

cross-media armament sys-tems...and now modern weapons can better operate in various media: on water, under water, in the air and so on,” he said.

Arina Rodionova is ranked

world No.231 in singles.

Robots will be used to

replace soldiers in

combat contexts.

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A PRODUCT BY ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA (RUSSIA), DISTRIBUTED WITH THE AGE

03RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES

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Syrian crisis: between unilateralism and collective effort rbth.ru/30097 Feature

The September 14 agreement

about the destruction of

Syria's chemical weapons has

turned international attention

to Russia’s Foreign Minister.

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s For-eign Minister since 2004, played a key role brokering the Syria agreement, and some commentators have gone so far as to say it will come to be known as the pin-nacle of his diplomatic ca-reer.

Lavrov’s friends describe him as someone who likes to sing, play the guitar, and drink whisky. Unlike many members of the Russian elite, he spends his holidays in the wilderness rather than at ex-otic foreign resorts. Lavrov likes rafting, football, skiing and spear fi shing. He’s also the president of the Canoe Slalom Federation.

“Mr Lavrov is fit and sporty,” his former classmate, journalist and retired intel-ligence officer Yuri Kobaladze said. “He has a good appe-tite, but is always in good shape. It probably helps that

YULIA PETROVSKAYA SPECIAL TO RBTH

Statesman ready to stand ground on foreign affairs

PERSONAL PROFILE

SERGEY LAVROV

RUSSIA'S

FOREIGN MINISTER

SINCE 2004

he likes to split logs and chop wood. Even at the Russian ambassadorial country resi-dence in New York, he would often ask the gardeners to leave a few round logs for him to split.”

In the US, Lavrov has had not only to chop wood but also to cross swords at the United Nations Security Council.

He had served as Russia’s permanent envoy to the UNSC for just as long as he has now spent serving as the Russian Foreign Minister.

Did Lavrov foresee his lon-gevity in the diplomatic arena? It seems unlikely; after all, up until now the only peo-ple who have managed to make successful predictions about appointments in the Russian government are the very people who make the ap-pointments.

Back in 2006 I was present at a conversation discussing plans for the following year, during which Lavrov said with a smile: “That’s if I am still a minister by then.”

What, then, has Lavrov’s career path looked like so far? His official CV says that he

was born in 1950; his ethnic-ity – Russian. However, Lav-rov’s father was actually an ethnic Armenian living in Tbilisi. During a meeting with students in Armenia in 2005, Lavrov had this to say on the matter: “Actually, I have some Georgian roots, because my father was from Tbilisi; but I do have Armenian blood."

After fi nishing high school, Lavrov entered the Oriental faculty of the Moscow State Institute of International Af-fairs. In addition to his major, Sinhalese, he also studied English and French. After graduating in 1972 he became an intern at the Soviet em-bassy in Sri Lanka.

Lavrov’s diplomatic career has not been atypical. From 1976 to 1981 he served at the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s De-partment for International Organisations.

From 1981 to 1988 he was the fi rst secretary, adviser and senior adviser at the Soviet mission to the United Na-tions. And from 1988 to 1990 he was deputy head of the Department for Internation-al Economic Relations at the Russian Foreign Ministry. In

1992, he was appointed dep-uty foreign minister under then foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev. Two years later he left for a posting to New York as the permanent Russian envoy to the UN. This ap-pointment was a turning point in his career.

During his years with the UN, Lavrov took part in dis-cussions on the confl icts in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, the Middle East and Afghan-istan and in meetings about the war against terrorism. Lavrov was fi rst slated to re-place Kozyrev in December

1995 – but the Kremlin ap-pointed Yevgeny Primakov instead. And, in 1998, Prima-kov was succeeded by Igor Ivanov. Lavrov’s turn came in 2004, and since then he has covered considerable ground in his term. He has, for in-stance, defended Russia’s missile defence system against criticism from the US; he also signed a new agree-ment about Russia’s border with China; he discussed a peace treaty with Japan – in an effort to end a long-stand-ing territorial dispute be-tween the countries; and he

has been closely involved in negotiations about Iran’s nu-clear program. Lavrov is also known for explaining to the world Russia’s position on its military operation against Georgia, which many feared would spiral into a confl ict with the US, and he later led negotiations in the subse-

quent Caucasus peace settlement.

In the Middle E a s t h e i s known for his

w o r k i n strengthening Rus-sia’s position – a task which has

been complicated by revolutions and armed

confl icts. Lavrov is known for his de-

cisive temperament, but also for his temper. In 2008, Brit-ain’s Daily Telegraph wrote that he had become angry during a phone conversation with former British foreign secretary David Miliband. The paper claimed that Lav-rov’s language was so colour-ful that it was difficult for officials to draft a memo about the contents of the con-versation. Some internation-al diplomats have labelled Lavrov "Mr No”. And former US secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice have said Lavrov could be in-furiating.

Predictably, differences with the US have been at the forefront of Lavrov’s pro-nouncements and of Russia’s recent foreign policies in gen-eral. Lavrov will never say anything that runs counter to the official Russian posi-tion. “Regardless of what a great guy Lavrov might be personally, he is a minister and an official representative of Russia’s national policy,” says Sergey Markedonov, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Internation-al Studies in Washington. “That policy must always be co-ordinated with the head of state...and Lavrov’s stance reflects the position of the Russian government.”

83-year-old Primakov, who served as Russian prime minis-ter (1998–99) and chief of for-eign intelligence (1991-96), was Putin's adviser and ally. He became famous for his decision to cancel a visit to the USA in 1999, after he was told that NA-TO started the bombing in the former Yugoslavia.

Former foreign minister (1998-2004) and secretary of Russia's Security Council (2004-2007), Ivanov retired from politics in 2007. Now he chairs the in-vestment strategy committee at Russia’s largest oil producer, Lukoil, and holds a doctorate in history and an honorary PhD in philosophy and philology.

Russia's first foreign minister under former president Boris Yeltsin (1991-96), Kozyrev was criticised for his alleged failure to support the Bosnian Serbs. He was one of the politicians who personified the Kremlin that emerged after the collapse of the USSR at the end of the Cold War.

FORMER FOREIGN MINISTERS

Yevgeny Primakov

Igor Ivanov

Andrey Kozyrev

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Kamaz drivers sweep the podium at Dakarrbth.ru/22291Business

3 1 With an annual rev-enue of $US4 bil-

lion, Kamaz, the larg-est truck producer in the region of the for-mer Soviet Union, sells 46,000 trucks every year to domestic and international buyers.

2 A deal with Daim-ler allowed Kamaz

to modernise its fleet, with its trucks now in-corporating Cummins engines and car parts from ZF Friedrich-shafen AG and Knorr-Bremze.

3 The company plans to increase

its total sales of Kamaz brand trucks to 80,000 a year, a quarter of which it plans to ex-port. Annual earnings from these sales will be about $US12 billion.

FACTS

ABOUT

KAMAZ

FEDOR KIKTASPECIAL TO RBTH

During the dark days of

Russia's post-Soviet

economic depression, a

Soviet truck company

surprised many by scoring an

international victory.

Russia's most successful truck-maker goes global

Kamaz survived the difficult transition from the USSR's command economy and is now thriving in Russia's free market

It was 1996, and Kamaz, Rus-sia’s best-known heavy-truck manufacturer, stormed the prestigious Dakar rally, beat-ing both Mercedes and Ford. It then won the following year, and the year after that.

Soon Kamaz became the Lance Armstrong of Dakar (without the doping charges), taking fi rst place 11 times after 1996 – a world record.

And again t h i s y e a r , Kamaz’s “fl ying trucks” – a nickname they earned for their 160km/h leaps through the air – took first, second and third place at the rally.

Kamaz is a rare animal in Russia: a Soviet brand that sur-vived the transition from a command economy to the free market and is now thriv-ing on the international stage.

“Kamaz is Russia’s most-successful homegrown auto-mobile story,” said Oleg Dat-skiv, general director of Russia’s leading online car store auto-dealer.ru.

In 2008, Daimler bought a 10 per cent share of Kamaz (estimated at $US250 mil-lion) as Kamaz began export-ing to new markets in Latin America and Asia.

And the company has suc-cessfully positioned itself as a maker of more economical versions of classic four-wheelers in emerging econ-omies.

“The Kamaz brand is well known, not only in [the re-gions of the] former USSR, but in other dynamically growing markets, like India and Turkey,” said Nord Cap-ital analyst Roman Tkachuk. “They have considerable po-tential to increase their mar-ket share in those countries, which they can do if this in-vestment and technology from Daimler allows them to compete in quality against top heavy-truck producers.”

The 2008 economic crisis had the knock-on effect of boosting the truck-maker’s share of the domestic mar-ket (the largest in Europe) to a peak of 38.4 per cent from 28.1 per cent, as local fi rms switched to cheaper trucks in an effort to cut costs.

Kamaz’s “flying trucks” have had unprecedented success at the annual Dakar off-road rally.

This year, they took first, second and third place in the truck category.

According to Kamaz, Rus-sia’s market for trucks in its own 14-to-40-tonne segment grew by 17.1 per cent in 2012 to 117,000 units. Last year the company also exported 7400 trucks, mostly to countries that used to belong to the USSR, where it is the mar-ket leader.

As Russian consumer pref-erences evolved from price to quality, Kamaz announced an ambitious $US2 billion mod-ernisation program, in con-junction with Daimler, to de-velop a new line of pricier, upmarket trucks, scheduled to hit dealerships in 2015 or 2016. Kamaz will also launch production of Daimler cab-ins and, eventually, engines.

“In the future, [Daimler and Kamaz] plan to manu-facture axles in Russia through a joint venture,” Daimler announced recently.

Kamaz has been operat-ing shared factories with Mercedes-Benz Trucks Vostok (MBTV) and Fuso Kamaz Trucks Rus (FKTR) since 2010, producing thou-sands of Mercedes-Benz Ac-tros, Axor, and Atego and Fuso Canter vehicles . “Through our technological expertise and skill, we're helping Kamaz expand its strong position in the Rus-sian market,” said Daimler’s Stefan E. Buchner.

Kamaz plans to increase total sales of its own trucks to 80,000 a year, with a quar-ter of them tagged for export within the next seven years.

“Kamaz will have every chance to offer American-quality trucks in a few years at a substantially cheaper price,” said Sergei Udalov, executive director of the Av-tostat research agency.

ANDREI SHKOLINSPECIAL TO RBTH

The manufacturing of car

parts in Russia is booming, as

global auto-giants invest in

Russia’s growing market.

Local car production shifts up a gear

Yet the situation is set to change in ways that will make tactics like this obsolete. In-ternational car makers are bringing technology and manufacturing capabilities to Russia, attracted by its $US70 billion market and the country’s recent admission to the World Trade Organisation.

“The current goal is to lo-calise the full cycle of auto-mobile production – from windshields to engines – en-tirely to Russia, and import the relevant technologies,” said Kirill Tachennikov, a Moscow-based UBS analyst.

When Ford became the fi rst international giant to set up a plant in Russia 11 years ago, it was making 25,000 cars a

Every morning a giant cargo ship arrives in Kaliningrad harbour (Russia’s tiny enclave on the Baltic Sea), carrying hundreds of BMWs assem-bled in the US.

The cars’ engines, mirrors, bumpers and wheels have been removed in Germany, and in Kaliningrad, the parts are put back on and the cars can then be stamped “made in Russia” and sold as non-imported goods, in Europe’s largest automobile market.

year almost entirely out of as-sembly kits. According to its agreement with the Russian government, however, by 2018 the Ford factory will be mak-ing 600,000 vehicles a year – and sourcing 60 per cent of parts locally.

Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan followed Ford and are bound by similar agreements: 30 per cent of their Russian-made cars will be equipped with Russian engines by 2018.

The car assemblers in Ka-liningrad are not too worried: by 2020, the parts they are assembling for BMWs are likely to be locally made, and the finished products may even be destined for markets outside Russia.

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Russia's economics minister says focus is shifting to the Asia-Pacific regionrbth.asia/48911

Politics

YAROSLAVA KIRYUKHINARBTH

At this month’s APEC

summit, held on October

7- 8 in Bali, Russia worked

to promote its already-

established priorities in

the region.

APEC summit consolidates priorities Russia turns its focus to the Asia-Pacific, aiming for greater economic integration in the region

These priorities included trade and investment liber-alisation and greater region-al economic integration. But which of Russia’s initiatives can be considered successful, and what has Russia – a country with 60 per cent of its territory in the Asia-Pa-cifi c region – achieved dur-ing the year that it has pre-sided over the APEC forum, for the fi rst time since its ac-cession to it in 1998?

Some noteworthy agenda items included the APEC Model Chapter on Transpar-ency for RTAs/FTAs (region-al/free trade agreements), which were designed to in-crease the transparency of foreign investors, and the APEC List of Environmen-tal Goods.

The list, comprising 54 en-vironmentally friendly goods that will receive tariff reduc-tions of up to 5 per cent by 2015, became the fi rst tariff-cutting agreement in APEC in more than 15 years, said Arrow Augerot, deputy assis-tant US trade representative for APEC affairs.

Another positive outcome has been the Policy Partner-ship on Food Security, which was created under Russian leadership, following several years of discussion. This ini-tiative requires Russia to pro-vide assistance to people in Asia.

Trade and food security were not the only issues cov-ered. Science has also been a priority. Last year, the Pol-icy Partnership on Science, Technology and Innovation was established at APEC.

And this year Dr Carissa Klein of Australia became the winner of the APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Re-search and Education (AS-PIRE) for her research on sus-tainable ocean development.

However, good beginnings don’t necessarily make for good endings.

Another of Russia’s prior-ities – regional transport and logistical potential develop-ment – did not gain signifi -cant support from APEC members.

At this year’s summit Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin once again called for more investment in infrastructure in Russia’s far east and Si-beria.

He admitted that Russia was struggling to fi nance the task itself, despite pouring billions of dollars into last year’s APEC summit in Vlad-ivostok just for appearances.

The Trans-Siberian Rail-

Why Russian

SMEs go to Asia

Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief econ-omist at Deutsche Bank Rus-sia, says that the strong pres-ence of Russian corporations in the Asia-Pacific region can be explained by the fact that the small-and-medium enterprises sector in Russia is in early de-velopment. Russia still has problems with administrative barriers as well as an unfavourable investment climate. Lissovolik says that the way the system operates and the econ-omy is set up in Russia make it more favourable for large com-panies to do well. In contrast, Lissovolik says that Australia has a strong SME sec-tor, thanks, in part, to efficient public policies, which have re-duced infrastructure barriers for smaller businesses and made it easier for them to succeed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the recent Bali APEC summit. Russia has been a member of the APEC forum since 1998.

Russian Vladivostok hosted the APEC summit last year.

way, for instance, needs bil-lions of dollars of investment to increase its traffic capac-ity and fulfi l Putin’s dream of it becoming a key artery, linking Europe and the Asia-Pacifi c region, giving a pow-erful boost to the develop-

ment of Siberia and the Russian far east.

This year, Russia became a full member of the APEC Business Travel Card system.

Specifi cally set up to facil-itate visa procedures, the sys-tem allows a greater number of business people to travel faster and more easily with-in the Asia-Pacific region. There are more than 120,000 active ABTC cardholders.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised this move, in his article called “To-wards peace, stability and sustainable economic devel-opment in the APR”, which

expressed hope for the ex-pansion of trade and Russia’s economic cooperation with other APEC member econo-mies.

Lavrov also stressed that ties with ASEAN states (in-cluding Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the US) are de-veloping on a strong and mu-tually benefi cial basis.

According to Lavrov, Rus-sia is gradually stepping up trade and economic cooper-ation with all its APEC part-ners.

Russian trade with APEC member economies has been on the rise since 2002: in 2011, it accounted for 24 per cent of Russia’s foreign-trade turnover against 16 per just cent nine years earlier.

Russian officials have an-nounced even more ambitious goals. The fi rst deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov, said that Russia wants its trade volume with APEC states to exceed that of trade with the European Union within the next 10 years.

The EU currently accounts for about half of Russia’s for-eign trade, valued at about $US320 billion.

Russian trade with APEC-member economies has been on the rise since 2002.

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How October 1993 led to Vladimir Putinrbth.ru/30489Society

Journalists caught in coup's firing line Flashpoint Media covering Russia's constitutional crisis of 1993 became embroiled in the events unfolding around them

GREGORY NEKHOROSHEVSPECIAL TO RBTH

Gregory Nekhoroshev,

Moscow correspondent for

the BBC (1988-1995),

describes his experiences in

Russia's White House during

the 1993 coup.

When special forces units began firing on the crowds around Moscow's Ostankino television centre, many journalists, photographers and camera operators were also among the protesters.

In late September 1993 (20 years ago last month), I was sitting on the floor, leaning against a corridor in Russia’s White House, waiting for fate to take its course. Fifty-odd feet from me, at either end of the corridor, young men, in camouflage and holding

Kalashnikovs, were standing at makeshift military posts.

They were soldiers from Al-exander Barkashov’s Russkoe Natsionalnoe Yedinstvo (Rus-sian National Unity) – an ul-tra-nationalist paramilitary movement of the time.

I had been captured by them

at around 2am when I was leaving the White House to go to the BBC bureau to hand in a report about the fourth day of the confrontation between the Supreme Council of the Russian Soviet Federative So-cialist Republic (RSFSR) and Boris Yeltsin. Mobile phones were rare then, and landlines in the Supreme Council had been cut off. To hand in my stories, I had to leave the building every few hours and go to the nearest phone booth or bureau to quickly send in-formation to the London of-fi ce.

There were no problems for the fi rst four days. But on the evening of the 25th, hundreds of RNU armed fighters ap-peared in the corridors of par-liament and began to enforce new rules.

“Hey! A BBC correspond-ent,” said one of them, look-ing over the accreditation is-sued to me by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We’ll have to shoot him. You’re an enemy and, moreover, a dangerous one.”

No one listened to my ex-planations. I was searched, they seized my bag, voice re-corder and documents, and ordered me to sit against the wall within sight of the two soldiers. I sat there for more than an hour, under the dim light of the emergency bulbs since the electricity had been turned off.

At about four in the morn-

3, the main action moved to the Ostankino television cen-tre, which armed supporters of the Supreme Council tried to capture. More than a hun-dred journalists were in the crowd of attackers. Special forces units immediately began fi ring from the roof of the television centre. I remem-ber how I saw, about 200 me-tres away from me, how Reu-t e r s s t r i n g e r Z u r a b Kodalashvili and AFP corre-spondent Stephen Bentura tried to help AFP correspond-ent Pierre Celerier to his feet. I tried to make my way to them, but couldn’t get through the crowd. Then I learned that Celerier had been wounded – a bullet went under his body armour and into his back. Among the dead were Rory Peck, German stringer from ARD, and Yvan Skopan, cam-eraman for France’s TF1 tel-evision station. Peck was a so-ciable guy, everyone knew him. He travelled to almost all the “hot spots”of the former So-viet Union with his camera.

After a sleepless night, most of the journalists returned to the White House because we had heard there would be an assault at dawn.

And indeed, at six o’clock tanks rolled in and the s h e l l i n g began.

TIMELINE

Chronicles of Russia's 1993 constitutional crisis

March 20 • Russian President Boris Yeltsin gives a televised address, outlining the provisions of a decree intro-duced to end the political crisis.

March 23 • The Constitutional Court, not yet in possession of the decree, declares Yeltsin's actions unconstitutional and advocates for his impeachment.

December 25 • The new Constitution of the Russian Federation is published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta and comes into force nationwide.

ing a soldier came back and said: “Rutskoi told us to let you go in the morning. Lucky! You will live a while longer.” He led me to an office where some soldiers were sleeping on tables among scattered parliamentary papers. I didn’t feel like sleeping. He then asked why I, a Russian, would work for the enemy: the Eng-lish. “The British and Ameri-cans are Russia’s main ene-mies. They have been trying for many years to break the age-old communal way of life in Russia. They are trying to pervert us with porn and per-missiveness. They’re afraid of

rbth.ru/30485

'The British and Americans are Russia's main enemies...they're trying to pervert us...'

Russia’s great Orthodox mis-sion. Do you watch TV? All they show on TV is porn.”

I was scared and didn’t want to argue, so just said that I was a reporter and didn’t pose philosophical questions.

This kind of intimidation of journalists, however, was hap-pening all over. And as the tragic conclusion of events drew closer, aggression to-wards journalists escalated. Both sides saw us not as observers, but as active par-ticipants.

On the evening of October

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Sex in the Soviet Union: myths and moresrbth.ru/30325 Society

growth, of work abroad and of travelling. We used to see career-driven men, but now there are many more career-driven women.”

Nevertheless, the signifi -cance of spending time with your children and develop-ing special bonds with them from birth is paramount, ac-cording to Ekaterina. “If you can, it’s better to devote two to three years to your child, because otherwise the time will pass and you won’t be able to get it back,” she said. “Of course a child can spend some time at their grandpar-ents’ houses, but it would still be better if children spent most of their time

with their parents.”According to

Dolina (the re-tired birth at-tendant), doc-t o r s a r e convinced

that breast-feeding is ex-tremely important

to a child’s immune system and their fu-

ture health. This is another reason why many mothers

Because of government policies, which increasingly promote the national birth rate, Russian maternity leave conditions are among the best in the world. New mothers can take leave for up to three years and still return to their previous jobs.

For two-parent families this may not present fi nan-cial problems, especially if the man earns enough to sup-port the whole family. But women who want and depend on their careers fi nd that in the modern world, with its hectic lifestyles and compet-itiveness, staying at home to raise a child for three years is an unaffordable luxury.

Anastasia, a 27-year-old designer at a glossy maga-zine, is convinced of this. She gave birth at 23 and returned to work just two weeks later, leaving her daughter in the care of a babysitter.

“You lose your skills and contacts,” she said. “It’s im-possible to return to your profession at the same level that you left. Be-sides, when your child grows up, they will blame you for not giving him everything their peers have.”

Socialisation and profes-sional growth are the main reasons young Russians choose their career paths. According to Superjob survey results, 42 per cent of people under 24 dream about suc-cessful careers, in which children are only seen to be a hindrance. Thirty-eight percent of those between the ages 25-34 think that couples should focus on their careers until the birth of a child. However, only 27 per cent of 35-44 year-olds think this way, and among those over 45, only 26 per cent think that work is more im-portant than family.

Elena Bolashova, head re-search scientist in the psy-chology faculty at Moscow State University, agrees that there is a tendency today to put careers before family. “Today people think about their careers in completely different ways,” she said. “This is because there are a lot more possibilities for professional growth than say 30-40 years ago. Today there are possi-bilities of serious financial

Under the Soviet system,

every stage of life was time-

tabled. There was an age for

family and an age for work.

Russian mothers can take

maternity leave for up to

three years and still return to

their previous jobs.

In most parts of Russia, young children go to kindergarden –

this helps support mothers in their return to the workforce.

under 24dream about successful careers

over 45think family is more important

26%

aged 25-34seek a balance between family and work

35 %

42 %

Economics is changing the balance of work and children

Attitudes about when women should have children are changing in Russia, with some putting their careers first

Poll on family

vs career

OLGA GORSHKOVARBTH

The traditional school-

university-work-marriage-

children system gave Soviet

citizens a blueprint to follow

for the course of their lives.

Things are different now.

“In the USSR we always thought that a woman should give birth before she turned 25,” said retired birth atten-dant Militina Dolina, who has 52 years of experience. “If you gave birth after 25 it was said to be late.” No wonder that, with this outlook, the aver-age marriage age in the USSR during the ’70s and ’80s was about 22 years and in 1990 21.9, according to the HSE Institute of Demography.

However, as Russia’s state-controlled economy gave way to a free-market model, peo-ple’s life plans gradually changed. According to online surveys by Russia’s employ-ment website Superjob, in 2013 a third of economically active Russians over the age of 18 believed that raising children was incompatible with building a successful ca-reer. And most adults under 24 prioritised their careers over family.

“I'm against settling down early,” said 25-year-old sales manager Ekaterina. “A man and woman must first find their purpose in life before they’re both ready to start a family.

“As for early marriages – they don’t last! But of course, if you try to become an in-vestment bank manager be-fore you’re 35, and then start thinking about kids, that would also be wrong.

“You should grow as an in-dividual and as a profession-al till say 27 or 28, and after that, start a family”.

This seems a popular view among young, educated, well travelled, urban Russians. However, even among this group there are some who still believe in early marriage.

The average Russian mar-ries at 22 for women and 24 for men - among the young-est in the world, according to 2012 data from the Lev-ada Centre. In comparison, HSE Institute of Demogra-phy data says that the aver-age marriage age in the US is 26, while in Japan it is 29 and in Germany 30.

don’t give their children to babysitters or grandmothers right after birth.

“I breast-fed my older daughter till she was a year and seven months old, and my second daughter till a year and four months,” recalls housewife Anna. “The longer you breast-feed your child, the healthier he or she will be.”

To spend more time with their children, but still bring in income, many young moth-ers fi nd freelance work, start their own businesses or fi nd jobs in which they can alter-nate hours with their spous-es, so the husband and wife can take turns babysitting the child. Some people even lease a room in their apartment to bring in income so the moth-er doesn’t have to work.

But the market sets its own rules. In Moscow and other big cities a family of three must earn at least 60,000 rou-bles (US$2000) a month if they own an apartment, or 100,000 roubles if they rent – and these are only the min-imum amounts to cover basic necessities.

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Will new standards improve educational outcomes? rbth.ru/29885Special

ALINA LOBZINASPECIAL TO RBTH

The education system of the

Soviet Union trained some of

the leading scientific minds

of the 20th century, but

Russia is now facing up to

21st-century challenges.

SCHOOLS ARE FAILING TO KEEP UP

A NEW LAW OVERHAULING RUSSIA'S EDUCATION SYSTEM WAS LAUNCHED LAST MONTH, WITH THE AIM OF

MODERNISING AND STANDARDISING A SYSTEM THAT HAD CHANGED VERY LITTLE SINCE SOVIET TIMES.

EDUCATION REFORM

Russia’s education system has had a variety of challenges since the collapse of the So-viet Union, and weak educa-tional outcomes in some age groups have prompted edu-cational reform in an attempt to deal with some of these challenges.

Svetlana Levkovets, a 49- year-old teacher from St Pe-tersburg, has grown accus-tomed to “competing with mobile phones” in the class-room. Levkovets says she tries to come up with homework that forces her students to work without technology.

“If you give the children assignments where they need to compare facts, the inter-net is of no help,” she said.

But today’s teens have more up their sleeves than just

Russian students were not as capable as students in other countries at solving problems in real-life contexts or at re-flecting on the meaning of written material. And al-though Russia has one of the world’s highest literacy rates, it ranked in the bottom half of 74 countries surveyed in

reading, mathematics and sci-ence. The results were inter-esting because younger Rus-sian students consistently appeared near the top of in-ternational rankings, unlike Russian teenagers.

Research from 2011 put Russian fourth and eighth graders in the top 10 in every educational category in the 57 countries surveyed.

Abankina said the reasons behind the results are clear.

“The abilities to apply knowl-edge, think, conduct research and work on projects are still our weak spots, and we didn’t have these skills in the Sovi-et era either.”

The educational reforms that will make a clean break with the Soviet past have only just been launched, under the new Law on Education, which came into force on September 1. In the new sys-tem, which will be fully im-plemented across the Russian Federation by 2020, high-school students and their par-ents will be allowed to choose some subjects for in-depth study and take other subjects as electives.

There are concerns wheth-er there will be enough qual-ifi ed teachers to deliver the new curriculum.

In 2010, then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced plans to cut the number of teachers, given that the country’s demo-graphic crisis meant that there would be fewer stu-dents. Between 2000 and

2011, nearly 30 per cent of Russia’s schools were closed down, according to the Edu-cation in Numbers statistics book published by Russia’s Higher School of Economics in 2013.

Before the start of the 2013-2014 academic year, Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary inspector, announced that another 733 schools would soon be shut down.

Another solution to this sit-uation has been combining several small schools, with several buildings sharing a single administration.

In the case of St Petersburg School 685, where Svetlana Levkovets teaches chemistry and biology, two schools have been combined into a single building. The new building is located near a busy highway instead of the leafy courtyard where her old school was.

But she remains positive. “It will be interesting to see how the new standard works out,” she said. “If worse comes to worst everything will re-main the same.”

gadgets. In May, answers to Russia’s Unifi ed State Exam, or YeGE, which was intend-ed to revolutionise the coun-try's secondary education sys-tem, were leaked to a social networking site, Vkontakte.ru, Russia’s version of Face-book.

Irina Abankina, director of the Education Development Institute at the Higher School of Economics, believes that the scandal with the YeGE re-fl ects a lack of values in con-temporary Russian society. She thinks at this point edu-cation reform is crucial for Russia and that it is going in the right direction.

According to data from Abankina’s institute, since the YeGE was introduced in 2009, the number of students who moved from one city to an-other for educational reasons increased by 16 per cent. She attributes this to the new exam.

Under the old system, each university had its own indi-vidual entrance exam. As a result, many students went to

college in the same town they grew up in. Students living outside big cities “didn't dare to try” to get into the best ter-tiary institutions, Abankina said.

In another step to stand-ardise education and ensure that the best students are on track for university, starting

this past spring all ninth-graders in Russia had to pass an exam called the State Final Certifi cation, or GIA, to continue on to the last two years of high school. Students who do not pass instead go on to a vocational school.

The Programme for Inter-national Student Assessment, carried out by the Organisa-tion for Economic Coopera-tion and Development in 2009, said that 15-year-old

"The abilities to apply knowledge, think, conduct research and work on projects are still our weak spots."

There are concerns whether there will be enough qualified teachers to deliver the new curriculum.

SERGEY MIKHEEV / RG



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Harvard versus Moscow State University rbth.ru/30289 Special

100per cent is Russia's literacy rate, according to the Global Education Digest 2012, pub-lished by UNESCO. This is high-er than Russia's long-standing rate of 99 per cent.

733schools will be closed in Rus-sia this year because of a slump in the number of school stu-dents, a top Russian official an-nounced in August.

20th in the developed world was the ranking Russia's education sys-tem received in a table pub-lished by the education compa-ny Pearson. The countries that came out on top were Finland, South Korea and Hong Kong.

IN NUMBERS

ANDRII DEGELERSPECIAL TO RBTH

Paper is giving way to

e-books, tablets and laptops

in Russian schools, and more

IT companies are emerging

to offer technologies to

better enable e-learning.

New technologies seek to fix old problems

Innovative new players see opportunities to lift education outcomes

Fifteen years ago computers in Russian schools were used primarily to teach children basic programming and com-mon office applications, but in contemporary Russia, stu-dents are using a range of modern technologies on a daily basis.

Over the past few years, companies specialising in e-learning products have be-come a successful segment of Russia’s IT sector.

Startups and established companies have seen huge potential for innovations sup-ported by government and private venture capital.

In 2012-13 alone, more than $US10 million was in-vested into education tech-nology companies in Russia, according to data from trade publications.

New technologies have found their way into all areas of Russia’s education sector, whether in schools, in private tutoring or in distance-learn-ing contexts. And while this sector is not as developed as in some Western countries, it has many promising players.

About half of the past year’s investment in educa-tion technologies went to the company Dnevnik.ru – a start-up launched in 2009. Dnevnik.ru provides an all-round e-document manage-ment system for nearly 29,000 schools – that is, more than half of Russia’s schools. The system is hosted by the com-pany, and all users need to do is log into their account at the website.

Gavriil Levi says he start-ed the project after he became aware of the lack of commu-nication between his parents and his younger brother’s school. He says Dnevnik.ru has grown from a self-fi-nanced start-up to the big-gest education initiative in the country.

“We connected several schools ‘manually’ at first,” Levi said. “We went to meet principals, parents and teach-ers, presented the product and explained why it could be useful.”

The startup was also boost-ed by a government decree that all Russian schools must introduce e-document fl ow systems by 2014.

Levi recently told the newspaper Vedomosti that he expects Dnevnik.ru to be up and running in 35,000 schools by 2014, while the other

20,000 schools will use rival systems such as NetSchool or Paragraph.

Dnevnik.ru expects to be-come profitable early next year. Levi says: “The basic functions are, and will always be, free while paid features, including text messaging, ac-cess-control and electronic vouchers for school canteens, can make the system even more useful.”

Several other companies aim to help school students with their everyday tasks. The most obvious problem to solve is the fact that children have to carry heavy and bulky textbooks to school each day.

Since December last year, Russia's Federal Institute of Education Development has been running a nationwide e-textbook distribution sys-tem in partnership with the bookshop company Azbuka, which developed a system that converted textbooks for digital use.

Azbuka says that e-books accessible on a tablet or lap-top are cheaper than paper ones, which allows schools to cut costs.

It did not take long for this big market to attract new players. In August, Russia’s IT behemoth Lanit said it would start offering a solu-tion, and it is a safe guess that schools will soon be able to choose from a variety of pro-viders.

But even when large, state-supported companies enter the market, there’s still space for start-ups to make an im-pact.

YaKlass, valued in a recent investment round at $US2 million, claims to have found a solution to a problem that has challenged teachers since internet access became wide-ly available.

“Children today are used

to copying their homework from the internet and teach-ers have no way to prevent it,” says Valery Nikitin, found-er and chief executive of Ya-Klass.

Nikitin’s company offers a system that generates home-work tasks that are unique for every school student, en-suring that they can’t just go online and fi nd ready-made answers.

The idea first came to a mathematics professor. YaK-lass bought the idea and ad-justed it to suit the needs of schools.

It is certainly true that, thanks to the internet, edu-cation has become more ac-cessible and convenient for those who want to learn, while new services bring a variety of subjects and sourc-es that it would simply have been impossible to access 20 years ago.

According to Levi, there have been experiments con-ducted that prove a correla-tion between the level of in-formation technology development in a school and academic progress and school attendance.

On the downside, plagia-rism and general sloppiness are widely believed to be a result of internet use.

Some critics prophesy that many children will soon be unable to write with a pen or pencil, but only type on a keyboard or touch screen.

However, it is clear that many problems that have been caused by new technol-ogies can also be solved using other technologies.

What’s needed most in this area perhaps is passionate and innovative people will-ing to work to improve edu-cational outcomes – and this is something which does not seem to be lacking.

E-learning goes

the distance

Away from schools, distance learning is an emerging trend in Russia. While many Rus-sian students enrol in courses with popular international ser-vices such as Coursera, Udacity and Khan Academy, there are domestic alternatives that are competing with their Western counterparts.One of the best-known exam-ples is LinguaLeo, a web ser-vice that uses popular books and television series to teach English. The company is seen as one of the most successful Russian start-ups in the field of e-learning, especially after se-curing $US3 million investment from Runa Capital last year.Private tuition has also be-come very popular in the past 20 years. One of the biggest players in this field is Erudi-tor Group, a network of on-line marketplaces for finding and booking the most suitable teachers. It was launched in 2006 by a project called Vash Repetitor: Russian for "Your private tutor".

3FACTS

ABOUT

SCHOOLS

1 There are 1457 regular state schools in Moscow attended by 856,000

students from grades 1 to 11. In comparison, Greater Lon-don has 2228 state primary and secondary schools serving 1.2 million students.

2 The average school year in Russia is shorter than most, at 164 days.

State schools in the UK must be open for at least 190 days each year, though many choose to have an even longer aca-demic year.

3 Almost a third of Rus-sian schools were closed between 2000

and 2011 because of a decline in Russia's birth rate. A short baby boom in the early nough-ties, however, resulted in a shortage of spaces last year.

"Children today are used to copying their homework from the internet, and teachers have no way to prevent it," says Valery Nikitin, founder of YaKlass.

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RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES

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Russia: surprising on the upsiderbth.ru/30369Comment

10

– it must be said – the tactics of these activists were sub-stantially different from that employed by the crew of the Arctic Sunrise. And there have, of course, been more heavy-handed – even dire – “defences” against environ-mentalist activism, the most notorious of which was the sinking of Greenpeace’s Rain-bow Warrior by the French intelligence agency, the DGSE, in 1985.

But if there has been disa-greement about the legal or ethical facts here – or their interpretation – there should be less debate about the in-cident in terms of public per-ception. The sight of unarmed activists on their knees, held at gunpoint, detained with-out charge and then charged with an offence that carries a possible 15-year prison sen-tence, might have the effect of drawing attention to what

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NEW MUSIC PIRACY LAWS UNPOPULAR IN RUSSIA

On September 18, Greenpeace activ-ists in the Pechora Sea approached

Russia’s fi rst offshore Arctic oil platform, the Prirazlom-naya. Two activists then at-tempted to scale the rig.

Alerted, the Russian coast guard rammed the rafts that surrounded the Greenpeace vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, fi r-ing warning shots over the boat and shooting the activ-ists with water cannons. Two activists who attempted to scale the platform were im-mediately arrested.

The following day the coast guard returned by helicopter, boarded the Greenpeace ship, detained the remaining 28 ac-tivists and towed the boat to Murmansk. On September 24, numerous media releases left little doubt that the activists would be charged with pira-cy. And by October 3, all of the crew had been so charged.

Much of the international discussion about the incident so far has revolved around legal issues, particularly ques-tions of jurisdiction. Much of it has focused on interpreta-tions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – about the applicability of the charge of piracy and of the legality (or otherwise) of the Russian coast guard’s boarding and seizure of the Greenpeace vessel.

Many, obviously, have con-tested the validity of the pi-racy charges. (To add to the

Over the past 15 years, every developed country has gone through the process

of adopting internet anti-pi-racy laws. And now it is Rus-sia’s turn.

A few amendments were re-cently made to Russia’s ex-panded Anti-Piracy Law, and now rights-holders can fi le in court for the violation of in-tellectual property rights, if they have requested that a fi le-sharing or torrent site remove illegal content and if they can provide proof that they hold exclusive rights to the content.

Music piracy in Russia has

changed over the past 30 years. It started after the col-lapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, as a wild free-market economy emerged in Russia.

At this time, there was an underground industry produc-ing, distributing and selling counterfeited CDs and DVDs.

Now we are dealing with cyberspace pirates, and it is a far more controversial area. Many musicians and music critics do not consider music-sharing or torrent sites as pi-racy. In fact, some musicians use torrent sites as promotion-al tools, to link themselves with the millions of fans who visit the sites daily.

Well-known music critic Artemy Troitsky of Moscow is a supporter of free internet

music sharing and the aboli-tion of Russia’s existing cop-yright laws, which he consid-ers obsolete in the 21st century.

On Russian radio, he asked rhetorically: “Who is getting all the money [from official music sales]? Not the musi-cians – they only get a very small percentage. The money goes to the large corporations who own the rights...

“So I am actually a pirate

in this sense. And if we had a Pirate party, I would join it.”

Andrei Makarevich, whose band Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine) has been popular in Russia since the late ’70s, is, however, a supporter of Rus-sia’s current anti-piracy laws. In the August 2013 issue of the weekly magazine Afi sha, he said: “Every industry needs money to function, and money has left the music business be-cause musicians lost the op-portunity to get paid for their recordings.”

For more than a decade in Russia, music has been free for sharing and downloading online. But amendments to legislation on music piracy means that times are chang-ing.

As Mick Jagger sings, “old habits die hard.”

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MORE DETAILS AT RBTH.RU/ABOUT

confusion, Russia refused to prosecute actual Somali pi-rates who seized a Russian oil rig in 2010 because, it said at the time, international law was too unclear about these matters.)

Whatever their legal or moral status, these actions are not without precedent. In February this year, the US Court of Appeal upheld a con-viction of piracy against an-ti-whaling activists, although

many believe to be an issue of crucial public concern. There is ample indication to suggest that that is precisely what is happening.

Outside Russia, there has been an uncharacteristic out-pouring of support for the ac-tivists, with protests being held in 45 countries. A num-ber of experts on maritime and international law have voiced criticisms both of pro-cedural issues and the ver-

dict, a handful circulating a public statement of concern.

Amnesty International has also registered its dissatisfac-tion with the charges and de-tentions, and the Dutch gov-ernment has signalled its intent to launch arbitration proceedings against Russia under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. There have also been voices of con-cern within Russia (even if they do not represent the ma-jority viewpoint), with pro-tests outside Gazprom’s Mos-cow offices and statements by public fi gures.

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin said of the protesters that it was “com-pletely obvious that they are not pirates”.

It is difficult to speculate on the long-term effects of these events, but it is worth remembering that in his march from Ahmedabad to Dandi in 1930, Ghandi’s de-sire was to be arrested. The same was true of the anti-segregation sit-in partici-pants in Nashville in 1960.

It may not have been the Greenpeace protesters’ intent, but there is ample precedent to suggest that the arrest of unarmed civil disobedients who have galvanised the pub-lic’s attention rarely works in the interests of the arresting powers. Whether that turns out to be the case here re-mains uncertain.

Muscovite Vasily Shumov is a well-known musician, music producer and video and pho-tographic artist.

Dr Chris Fleming is a senior lecturer in Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney

Vasily

ShumovSPECIAL TO RBTH

Dr Chris

FlemingSPECIAL TO RBTH

Many musicians and music critics do not consider music-sharing or torrent sites as piracy.

THE 'PIRATES' OF PRIRAZLOMNAYAS

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How to keep Siberia's largest river cleanrbth.ru/30497 Environment

11

Fauna changes

in tundra

The warming of Russia's tun-dra has seen low-growth plants gradually being dis-placed by taller plants with more developed roots. Several species of mosses and lichens have also become threatened, including the Aloi-na moss (Aloina brevirostris). Satellite imagery data has con-firmed that tall shrubs – which usually thrive in higher tem-peratures – are growing where mosses dominated previously. And according to the latest estimates, about 10 to 15 per cent of the southern parts of the north-western Eurasian tundra, which stretches from Finland to west Siberia, have been taken over by shrubs standing at more than two me-tres tall. Until recently most plants in that area were no taller than a metre. These changes first drew the attention of scientists after no-madic Indigenous shepherds began complaining that the "new trees" were restricting their sight of their deer herds.

The Amur river in Russia's far east sees two flood peaks each year: in spring and in the pe-riod between July and Septem-ber, as a result of monsoonal rains. The Asian monsoon cycle fol-lows a pattern: a typhoon or storm comes off the Pacific Ocean on to the Chinese main-land, where it turns into cy-clones that start moving up towards Russia. This process happens every year, but in 2013 the cycle was a bit different. The cyclones usually move around, but this year they re-

mained over the Amur region, where a high-pressure trough kept the cyclones in one area only. The floods over Amur were also caused by persistent heat from the Pacific Ocean. Precipitation in June was also 3.5 times higher than average in Amur, while in some places it even reached the average an-nual rainfall in just two summer months.Another contributing factor to the floods was a late spring, which did not give water from melted snow enough time to soak into the earth. This in-creased humidity on the Earth's surface, also affecting weather patterns.

COMMENT

Possible reasons behind this summer's Amur floods

Alexander

FrolovCHIEF OF RUSSIA'S

METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE

Flooding a taste of things to come?Global warming in Russia is already affecting the climate and fauna in the far east and far northern areas

Government workers trying to stave off rising flood waters. A man fishing on a flooded river in the Far East this summer.

VSEVOLOD LAZUTINSPECIAL TO RBTH

Recent floods in Russia's far

east have been interpreted as

indicators of climate change,

in an area where temperature

increases are likely to have

far-reaching impacts.

Floods which hit the Amur and Khabarovsk regions this summer caused considerable damage, with tens of thou-sands of residents losing their homes to surging waters.

Roman Vilfand, head of the Russian Hydrometeorologi-cal Centre, believes these fl oods were caused by climat-ic changes which brought about abnormal air circula-tion patterns over Russia’s far east.

This summer, a hot and humid air mass hung over China, while in Yakutia (in north-eastern Siberia) air temperatures stayed relative-ly low. This temperature dis-parity caused a large low-pressure system to form, which triggered high rainfall over Russian far east largest rivers: the Amur, Zeya, Bu-reya, Sungari and the Ussuri. The unusual conditions are being interpreted as further signs of what meteorological data is confi rming: that Rus-sia’s climate is changing.

During the ’90s, Russia’s mean annual temperature in the lower atmosphere in-creased by 0.4 degrees. And according to a long-term cli-mate-change forecast, pub-lished by the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Monitoring of the Environ-ment (Rosgidromet) in 2005, Russia can expect a sharp in-crease in the number of weather disasters across its territories.

Natural disasters will mostly be caused by meteor-ological phenomena related to upward and downward movements of great air mass-es below the level of cumu-lonimbus clouds (these phe-nomena are difficult to predict). Yakutia, east Sibe-ria, the north-eastern areas of the far east and Kamchat-ka, for example, are likely to see more fl oods from higher rainfall. According to a joint study by Princeton Univer-sity and the University of Maryland, Russia’s far east is also likely to see the ad-vent of tropical typhoons and hurricanes as the tropical zone shifts northward.

Alexander Minin, senior re-searcher with Russia’s Insti-tute of Global Climate and Ecology, believes the Earth’s climate changes constantly. “Our climate is forever changing, it’s just that these days, it has become less bal-anced,” he said. “There is in-deed a warming trend, but it is confi ned to individual re-gions and it isn’t distributed equally throughout the year.

“In some areas, we’re ac-

tually observing a cooling process.” Minin argues that climate change is infl uenced by many factors and exacer-bated by activities such as de-forestation and reclamation of natural water reservoirs.

“In some areas of Siberia and the far east, plant growth

cycles have been offset by sev-eral weeks and bird migra-tion cycles have changed. And in the Arctic tundra, some plant species have found themselves on the brink of ex-tinction due to increased tem-peratures.”

He said that in some urban areas, the thawing of perma-frost is affecting pipes and foundations of buildings.

Minin then went on to de-scribe what he saw as the pos-itive consequences of climate change for Russia. “For ex-ample, according to some re-ports, the Arctic ice-cap is shrinking, which is opening up new opportunities for the use of the Northern Sea Route.”

He also mentioned reduced heating costs.

The “positives” of climate change have received consid-erable coverage in Russian media, indicating something about attitudes to the envi-ronment.

In Russia’s transition econ-

scrutiny. Permafrost has been thawing from global warm-ing for some years already, and this has been associated with the release of large amounts of the greenhouse gas methane – which is con-centrated in the Arctic tun-dra.

The international science journal Nature published a report in July called Climate science: vast costs of Arctic change. It said that the re-lease of 50 gigatonnes of methane from melting per-mafrost, over a decade, would have such a signifi cant im-pact on our climate that it would result in fl ooding, sea-level rise, agriculture dam-age and health effects amounting to $60 trillion – roughly the size of the entire global economy last year.

The article’s authors argue that this issue and its likely impacts require urgent glob-al attention, modelling and mitigation.

Climate change is occurring twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth.

omy, it seems that short-term economic gains are still con-sidered significant, even in the face of forecast irrevers-ible ecological damage and impending natural disasters.

Climate change is occur-ring twice as fast in the Arc-tic than anywhere else on Earth. The melting of the Arc-tic ice-cap, which some argue is happening at far faster rates than previously forecast, is likely to cause large in-creases in water fl ows in some Russian rivers.

There is also a small risk that as a result of these changes, there may be pro-found disruption to deep-ocean currents, which carry a significant amount of warmth to Europe.

If this happens, Europe’s climate could cool dramati-cally.

However, it is the thawing of permafrost in Russia’s Arc-tic regions which is attract-ing the most international

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The top seven most unusual getaways in Russiarbth.ru/28481Travel

12

IVAN DEMENTIEVSKY SPECIAL TO RBTH

The Kamchatka Peninsula is

one of the few places in the

world where you can literally

feel the hot breath of the

Earth, coming from the

region's live volcanic activity.

LANDSCAPE FORGED BY EARTH, WIND AND FIRE

A RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER AND BLOGGER DESCRIBES HIS

VISIT TO THE KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, ONE OF THE

MOST REMOTE AND UNEXPLORED AREAS OF RUSSIA.

FIERY FORAYS IN KAMCHATKA

If you are an early riser in Kamchatka, you can be among the fi rst in Russia to greet the dawn. The penin-sula, in Russia’s far east, is a landmass 1250 kilometres long, lying between the Pa-cifi c Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Its volcanic landscapes are among the most dramatic and striking natural wonders of Russia’s vast territories.

The Kamchatka region in-cludes the peninsula, the Commander Islands and Karaginsky Island, and has a population of only 320,000 – more than half of whom live in the capital city, Pe-tropavlovsky-Kamchatsky.

I visited Kamchatka to shoot a documentary about survival. It was raining when I landed in the capital and, with an eight-hour time dif-ference from Moscow, my body was still asleep.

I was soon advised that when visiting Kamchatka it is important to remember to bring hand fl ares – in case you encounter a bear. Locals cautioned that attempting to run from a bear “will not be helpful”.

By evening, with the rain gone and the fog dispersed, sunset revealed the striking outline of volcanoes on a ho-rizon that seemed like the very edge of the Earth.

Mutnovskii and Gorelii volcanoesWe had to drive a few hours along a bumpy gravel road before reaching Mutnovskii

FEARLESS WANDERER

Ivan Dementievsky

Born in Nepal, Dementievsky has always been attracted to offbeat locations. He is also not afraid of heights and has climbed in the Himalayas and explored the ru-ins of ancient civilisations in Syr-ia, Armenia and the Caucasus.

He also visited the former King-dom of Mustang, in north-central Nepal, which was once closely tied to Tibet. Dementievsky started out as a photographer using a medium-format film camera, after being inspired by the beauty of North Karelia – a region in eastern Fin-land. But he later switched to digital cameras because of de-mands for speed and efficiency. Currently working on a major photographic project of Russian landscapes, he also organises wildlife tours for aspiring pho-tographers, showing them some of the most unusual beautiful spots on our planet. For more information about De-mentievksy's tours, see his blog: www.dementievskiy.livejournal.com.

NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN

WORK: PHOTOGRAPHER

AND BLOGGER

(Cloudy) and Gorelii (Burnt) volcanoes.

After a short climb up a canyon, I could suddenly smell something like rotten eggs, as the wind brought with it sulphur dioxide from deep within the volcano’s core. The last 50 metres of the climb got steeper, before we arrived in a fumarolic area – a landscape that I can only describe as looking like hell on Earth.

Under our feet were small bubbling geysers and hot steam whistled out of muddy holes scattered here and there.

Unpredictable winds pe-riodically pushed a dense cloud of toxic fumes in our direction. We didn’t have res-pirators with us – a mistake, so we used our hats to cover our noses and mouths as we breathed.

If you get trapped in a large cloud of toxic fumes, there’s a danger of suffoca-tion, so it’s important to ob-serve the wind direction carefully.

After visiting Mutnovskii, the climb to Gorelii volcano was easier, with excellent visibility, fresh air and sun-shine.

When we reached the edge of the crater, we peered down to see a lake at the bottom; it had chunks of ice fl oating in it. This freshwater lake is adjacent to another lake, which is full of acid. The two are separated by only a small rock wall.

For a photographic experi-ment, we went up again in the evening, hoping to catch the volcano at sunset. But when a cold mist began to fall into a fi ery hole and seemed to pro-duce a whistle and a huge amount of noxious fumes, we quickly left, realising it was not such a good idea.

Klyuchevskaya and the Tolbachik volcanoConquering the moon was an obsession of the Soviet space program in the late ’60s. Con-cluding that the properties of the moon’s surface were sim-ilar to the landscape created by scoria – basaltic lava eject-ed as fragments from volca-noes – Soviet space research-ers, turned their attention to Kamchatka.

Under tight security, in 1969 and 1970 the area of the Tolbachik volcano was used for testing technology for planned lunar expeditions.

But in 1975, there was a big eruption and large cracks appeared across the area. The research had to stop. For more than a year, the area was alive with intense vol-canic activity. Sizzling hot bombs fl ew through the air, reaching distances of up to

two kilometres, and the ve-locity of the gases coming out of the ground at times exceeded the speed of sound.

A column of ash and gas went fi ve or six kilometres into the air, and the ash plume stretched to a distance of 1000 kilometres.

Across an area of more than 400 square kilometres, all vegetation was destroyed, and only now, in some areas, new undergrowth is starting to appear.

In the morning, scouting the road, we found out that a few kilometres away there was a campsite and even a small lake. We set off there on foot.

When we arrived in the af-ternoon and set up camp, we could hear the nearby Kly-uchevskaya volcano rum-bling, at times so loudly and frequently that it sounded

Kamchatka's dramatic landscape is dominated by large volcanic belts with an estimated 160 volcanoes: 29 of them are still active and 19 have been UNESCO World Heritage listed.

The velocity of gases coming out of the ground at times exceeded the speed of sound.

INFOBOX

How to get thereFlying is the easiest way to get to Kamchatka. (From Moscow it is eight to nine hours.) There are also flights from Vladiv-ostok and Khabarovksk and fer-ries and cruise ships leave from Sakhalin and Vladivostok. There is no rail connection with Kam-chatka though, because the large mountain ranges between the peninsula and the mainland prevented railways being laid.

like military exercises were being conducted nearby.

Then we noticed a thin coating of ash on our tents, bowls, mugs and forks. The ash was in everything, our eyes, between our teeth and mixed into our food.

Suddenly, up into the air rushed a huge white column. We wondered if before our eyes we were seeing a new phase of the eruption, and a little later, we could see a lava fl ow coming down the volcano and reaching the glacier.

Dead WoodOn the other side of Tolba-chik is an area called “Dead Wood” – remnants of a forest that was destroyed during the Tolbachik eruption. Dead wood refers to the tops of trees that are trapped under seven metres of ash.

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Travel

13

Kamchatka's remoteness is both a curse and a blessing. Its lack of infrastructure means that the peninsula's natural beauty is

largely undisturbed. It also means it takes time and an adventurous spirit to explore this vast wilderness.

KATERINA MUKHINA SPECIAL TO RBTH

In September and October,

the changing leaves of

autumn draw tourists and

photographers to the

Kamchatka Peninsula in

Russia’s far east.

Tourists hear the call of the wild

Kamchatka peninsula has wildlife sanctuaries and tours on land and sea

It is often sunny and mild this time of year in the far east. Although the weather is wel-coming, it is not easy travel-ling around the peninsula in-dependently, so there are tours with English-speaking guides.

Some tours require cour-age from travellers though, since cunning wolverine and curious bears are not uncom-mon visitors to camp sites.

Brown bears – the symbol of the Kamchatka region – are found throughout the peninsula; they sometimes even venture into the city. They are commonly encoun-tered near rivers or lakes, par-ticularly in the South Kam-chatka Sanctuary, at the bottom tip of the peninsula around Lake Kuril – one of the world’s largest spawning areas for Pacifi c red salmon.

Kamchatka also has abun-dant wildlife in the forests around the Zhupanova River, north-east of Petropavlovs-ky-Kamchatsky. In this area – only accessible by helicop-ter – you can see otter, wol-verine, lynx, sable, mink and reindeer. Rare birds, includ-ing white-winged and white-tailed sea eagles, peregrine

3FACTS

ABOUT

KAMCHATKA

1 In the territory of Kam-chatka, there are 58 spe-cies of mammals, 232

kinds of birds, 93 types of fish and 763 varieties of plants (38 of which are rare).

2 Most flights to Pe-tropavlovsk-Kamchat-sky go from Moscow.

The trip takes a little more than eight hours. Autumn is the tra-ditional time to travel on the peninsula, and the cost of a flight from Moscow in Septem-ber is about $US1600. It is also possible to fly from Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, which is easier for tourists travelling via China or Japan.

3 In the indigenous Ko-ryat language, "Kainy-ran" means "bear's cor-

ner". And the Kainyran cultural centre, on the banks of small Lake Kabalny, 40 kilometres from Kamchatka's capital, gives its visitors the chance to safely see bears in their natural habi-tat. The centre also shows visi-tors how traditional Indigenous people lived in Kamchatka: their homes, transport (dog-pulled sleds), dance and cui-sine. The centre also has spec-tacular views of the Koryaksky and Avachinsky volcanoes.

falcon and merlin also inhab-it these forests.

Another famous helicopter tour is to the Valley of Gey-sers, in Kronotsky Nature Re-

serve. In the valley there are 26 volcanoes, 12 of them ac-tive, and the entire area pul-sates with boiling springs, hot lakes, geysers, mud pots and small volcanoes, spewing thermal mud.

The Kamchatka Kayaking Club in Petropavlovsky-Kamchatsky offers tours of the city’s harbour by kayak or catamaran, where you can see diverse animal and ma-rine life.

Amid the ships and tank-

ers, there are colonies of puf-fi ns, cormorants, guillemots and gulls. The huge seals eas-ily spotted in the harbour wa-ters are the city’s symbol. Steller sea lions live all along the coast of the peninsula, but the largest colonies are on the Aleutian and Kuril Islands.

In September, on kayak and catamaran tours, you can see months-old sea lions making their first independent at-tempts to catch fi sh or squid.

Kamchatka is also famous for its killer whales. There are a large number of them in the Russkaya and Zhirovaya bays, both of which can be reached by boat or catama-ran. Killer whales are natu-rally cautious, and steer clear of large vessels, so many tour-ists then transfer to kayaks to get a closer look at them.

When close to them in this way, it is possible to feel the power, beauty and vastness of the marine world.

Brown bears – the symbol of the Kamchatka region – are found throughout the peninsula.

Bears are even known to wander into the city in Kamchatka.

Here is how to have an enjoyable,

action-packed adventure

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Russian punks: ideology, music and lifestylerbth.ru/28995Music

14

VASILY SHUMOVSPECIAL TO RBTH

Things changed suddenly for

Soviet rock music in the mid-

1980s, when perestroika

meant that previously

banned underground bands

went mainstream.

How bands rocked USSR foundations Perestroika's removal of limitations on cultural expression allowed rock music to flourish for the first time

Perestroika is thought to have started in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR.

From this point on, rock music fl ourished. Some his-torians consider it a key force in the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the everyday con-text of food shortages, lack of freedom and concerns about censorship, human rights and closed borders.

Only a year before Gor-bachev came to power, how-ever, being a rock musician in the USSR had been a risky undertaking.

In 1984 the Soviet govern-ment targeted rock musicians following a speech by then General Secretary Konstan-tin Chernenko, in which some bands were accused of being ideological and moral sabo-teurs of Soviet society.

The Communist Party lead-ership issued blacklists, which were sent to cultural and youth departments across the USSR.

These lists included under-ground bands who were pro-hibited from performing and whose songs were banned from being played in clubs and at public events.

Rock musicians were vic-timised: some were forbidden to use their rehearsal halls, while others were unexpect-edly called up for military service.

It was very dangerous to record and perform protest songs, and musicians could end up in prison as enemies of the Soviet state.

An unlucky few, such as Alexei Romanov, front-man for the band Voskresenie, and Zhanna Aguzarova – a sing-er from the group Bravo – re-ceived jail terms.

By the ’70s and ’80s, it was more common in the Soviet Union not to link jail sen-tences with ideologies but in-stead with illegal business

practices or [internal] pass-port violations.

This intense wave of per-secution stopped, however, as the reforms of the Gorbachev period began.

Rock music was legalised and previously underground

bands could appear on tele-vision or have their music played on the radio.

Favourable media coverage of Soviet rock fl ooded news-papers and magazines, and fans had the chance – for the fi rst time in their lives – to buy official tickets to rock concerts.

One of the first signs of

change was a New Year’s Eve festival called Yolka (A Christmas Tree), which was held in a Moscow culture club located, ironically, under a nuclear energy research in-stitute.

An officially sanctioned music club called the Mos-cow Rock Laboratory was formed to promote musicians who did not belong to state concert organisations.

Then, under the supervision of Moscow’s Communist Party headquarters and leaders of the Young Communists League, the club held a rock festival featuring more than 10 bands that had been black-listed only a year before.

What’s more, the musicians were able to perform with-out any censorship.

News of the festival spread quickly in Moscow, and on the night of the concert, the culture club’s 500 seats were fi lled – and more people were trying to get in through roof windows, basement walkways and fi re stairs.

The crowds were drawn by an assortment of musicians which included Moscow bands Mashina Vremeni and

Brigada S, Leningrad’s Kino, Aquarium and Alisa, and Nautilus Pompilius from Sverdlovsk.

Following the concert, these groups and others became regular guests on late-night Soviet music television, on new post-perestroika pro-grams such as Vision, Musi-cal Ring and Program A.

The exposure was massive. The USSR had just two tel-evision channels both broad-casting from Moscow, to an audience of about 250 mil-lion Soviet citizens.

However, shifting from un-derground to mainstream was not an easy process for some musicians.

The perestroika reform pe-riod posed challenges for un-derground Soviet rock musi-cians and not all of them survived the transition. Some had no desire to interact with mainstream Soviet society.

Most rock musicians then were poor, even by Soviet standards. And because, ac-cording to the Soviet laws, all citizens had to have an of-ficial job, musicians were often had less-than-prestig-ious day jobs.

Some were students in in-stitutes that had nothing to do with music. Student sta-tus also provided them with temporary protection from military service.

But some rock musicians, who just a few years before might have felt lucky to play in a club for 100 people, had turned into stadium rock stars and were suddenly earning big money.

Probably, the most famous perestroika rock song was Peremen (We want changes!) by the band Kino.

At the height of their pop-ularity in 1990, Kino’s 28-year-old front man Vik-tor Tsoy was killed in a head-on collision with a bus in Latvia. It is said he had fall-en asleep at the wheel of his car (which he drove at speeds of up to 130km/h).

Some Kino fans blamed Tsoy’s untimely death on the fact that he had become reckless after leaving his modest Soviet lifestyle and circle of friends in Lenin-grad.

Before perestroika, he had worked night shifts as a stoker in a boiler plant shovelling coal.

Television

played a key

role in giving

previously

underground

rock musi-

cians enor-

mous expo-

sure to an

audience of

250 million

viewers

across the

Soviet Union.

Soviet rock music developed in a tumultuous and energetic period, when the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet citizens could for the first time look beyond borders and traditional limitations.

rbth.ru/29179

Some bands were accused of being ideological and moral saboteurs of Soviet society.

Shifting from underground to mainstream wasn't an easy process for some musicians.

Vasily Shumov

NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN

AGE: 53

WORK: MUSIC PRODUCER

CAREER: Vasily Shumov is a musician, producer, photo-graphic and video artist. He founded Moscow's New Wave and Electronic Band Centre (Tsentr) in 1980. From 1990 to 2008, he lived in Los Angeles, California, where he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1998.

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Literature

15

ALENA TVERITINARBTH

A literature campaign has

been turning themes from

Russian classics into snappy

online news stories, in an

effort to hook more internet

users into reading books.

Online news flashes lurenew readers for literary masterpieces

Innovative nationwide program has been launched to encourage Russians to reconnect with their classical literature

Ecologists sound the alarm: Developers threaten ancient forestParty-goer shoots friend over a passing fl irtationWife of high-ranking official kills herself after argument with loverVisiting caretaker proves to be ruthless dog hunter

These and other headlines fi l-tered across the Russian in-ternet news landscape on September 2, the fi rst day of school after the summer hol-idays – a day known in Rus-sia as the “Day of Knowledge”.

Encoded within these spu-rious news stories were the plots of classic Russian liter-ary works: Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Alex-ander Pushkin’s Eugene On-egin, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Ka-renina, Ivan Turgenev’s Mumu and many more.

Readers who couldn’t rec-ognise the works themselves were not left in the dark: the headlines led to a specially created portal that connect-ed the news copy to the cor-responding literary work, which users could then read or download for free.

“We are demonstrating to internet users who visit news sites that all the plots that can be found in modern news stories have already appeared in Russian literature in some form or another,” said Yuri Pulya, head of the periodi-cals, book publishing and printing division of the Fed-eral Agency for Press and Mass Communications (Rospechat). The agency, to-gether with the Russian Book Union and independent ad-vertising agency Slava, is or-ganising a campaign to en-courage reading. The main goal is to attract attention to Russian literary classics, which for many Russians re-main little more than a fea-ture of the school curriculum.

“The result has been an ap-pealing, interesting and, most importantly, benefi cial initi-ative,” says Pulya. “At the very least, people read these news

items, post them on social networks and a conversation about literature takes place on several levels.

“Also, this sparks creativ-ity: the initiative makes read-ers want to find their own classic literary work and think up a news item based on its plot. And the informa-tion noise will make them in-terested: what is in these works that makes everyone talk about them?”

Anyone who offered their ideas for news headlines based on classic Russian mas-terpieces to the portal of the project was entered into a contest with attractive priz-es. Examples included “Envy prompts sisters to attempt double murder of a mother and baby”, and “Official’s daughter confessed she dated a lunatic”.

Readers willingly joined in the game, though some visi-tors to the portal did not seem to realise it was a joke. They revealed their feelings about the fate of an opposition lead-er’s mother (a news headline based on Maxim Gorky’s novel The Mother read: “Mother of one opposition leader may be sentenced to long-term imprisonment”), or debated the ethics of ex-perimentation on stray dogs.

The movement to popular-ise literature is a response to a troubling decline in read-ing among Russians, which sociologists seemingly bring

citizens use different media for a total of around eight hours per day, but that the amount of time they spend reading a book comes to just 1.8 per cent of that total – or only about nine minutes a day.

It is not then surprising that attempts to popularise reading are being given plen-ty of attention, including at government level.

Russia’s National Program for Reading Promotion and Development started in 2006 and includes several memo-rable initiatives.

For example, in last year’s project by Rospechat, Read, which targeted teenagers, the organisers portrayed the pow-erhouse Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Pushkin in athlet-ic uniforms, and had them rap soulfully along with Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Besides Rospechat, pub-lishers, social organisations and even the City of Moscow authorities are zealously pro-moting reading. And over the past few years, noteworthy initiatives have appeared quite regularly.

Some have been rather tra-ditional. For example, in A Word for the Book, a major

2008 campaign by the pub-lisher ACT, famous Russian writers were pictured on posters describing the impor-tance of reading. There were also projects by the Eksmo publishing house (Read books – be a character; and Read books!) in which popular fi g-ures and musicians, along with Russian footballers and coaches, discussed the ben-efi ts of reading.

Other promotional cam-paigns have sought to im-merse potential readers in the textual medium. Moscow’s subway system boasts colour-ful Reading Moscow and Po-etry in the Metro trains, where train interiors are cov-ered not with advertisements but with excerpts from liter-ary works, authors’ biogra-phies, illustrations of char-acters and original graphics. The exhibitions are themat-ic and change periodically.

The Books in Parks cam-paign, which Rospechat launched in 2012, also turned fi ve popular Moscow leisure venues into arenas for meet-ing with writers. In addition, the campaign equipped the venues with “Gogol modules” – kiosks where visitors could purchase books for the low-est price in Moscow.

To encourage Russians to reconnect with reading the classics, great Russian writers were enlisted into a communications cam-

paign where they were portrayed as sports coaches: from left, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy.

" With the aim of getting young peole to read, we need to support reading

of various forms, including the most modern. Obviously noth-ing can replace books, but pa-per books and e-books are the same. We need to digitise them and make them available in that format, otherwise, we won't make any progress."

" Russia has long been one of the most "reading nations". But, to be hon-

est, we're going to lose this sta-tus. According to sociologists, the number of non-readers in Russia is increasing, and this is something of concern."

QUOTES

Dmitry Medvedev

Vladimir Putin

PRIME MINISTER OF RUSSIA, KNOWN FOR

BEING AN EARLY ADOPTER OF NEW MEDIA

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA AND THE INITIATOR

OF NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL REFORM

Screen gems: the rise of e-books

to public attention year after year. This summer, the Pub-lic Opinion Foundation re-leased data showing that 44 per cent of Russian respond-ents had not read a single book in the course of the pre-vious year. Just as unsettling was data from the market re-search company TNS Russia, which reported that Russian

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Plans for Sochi after the Olympics rbth.ru/30423Sport

13November

The lowdown on Olympic prices

Russian government promises to prevent price hikes

MARIA KARNAUKHSPECIAL TO RBTH

TIcket sales have already

begun for individual events

and “Olympic tour packages”

for the 2014 Sochi Winter

Olympics in Russia next

February.

The Olympic tour packages do not come cheap. For ex-ample, watching the ice hock-ey in Sochi is priced at $US14,000 for two, includ-ing a four-night stay at a three-star hotel (excluding airfares).

During the 2010 Vancou-ver Olympics, Dash Tours sold packages for $US22,000 apiece, including air tickets from any American or Cana-dian city and 18 nights at a four-star hotel – but admis-sion to the competitions was extra. In Beijing, local oper-ators offered an air ticket, hotel accommodation (the number of nights depending on the hotel category) and one admission ticket per day for $US16,000.

Russian citizens are able to buy tickets online at the official 22nd Winter Olympics website (tickets.sochi2014.com). For instance, the open-ing ceremony costs between $US200 and $US1500, while the closing ceremony is cheaper at $US150 to $US1200. Event tickets cost in the range of $US16 for the Mountain Cluster and $US30 for the Coastal Cluster. Ice hockey is the most expensive

event, with prices to the fi -nals ranging from $US220 to $US1070. Figure skating (the Gala Exhibition) will cost $US150 and $US720. Accord-ing to the organisers, more than 40 per cent of all tick-ets will be priced below $US100 and half of them below $US160.

The list of official ticket distributors by country is available at tickets.sochi2014.com. For example, cosport.com, an international distrib-utor, offers Mountain Cluster tickets at reasonable prices: bobsleigh for $US41 and the biathlon starting at $US145. Cosport.com’s opening cere-mony tickets are sold out, and it is quoting $1379 for the closing ceremony.

The ticket price range for the 2012 London Olympics was between $US32 and $US3120. Admission to some open-air events was free. The soccer fi nal went for $US64 to $US296. Some 75 per cent of the tickets cost less than $US60.

In Beijing 2008, the open-ing ($US650) and the closing ($US390) ceremonies were the most expensive events.

Spectators did not have to pay more than $US20 for most others. Chinese citizens could take advantage of a special offer: $US1 per seat.

The Russian government has promised hotel accom-modation rate controls dur-ing the Olympics.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree in December 2012 capping pric-es for the duration of the Olympics. Under the policy, a double room at a Sochi mi-ni-hotel (one-two stars) can-not officially cost more than $US145. At a three-star hotel it is capped at $US180 and four-star at $US204. Premi-um hotels cannot charge more than $US332 a night.

The lack of direct fl ights to the Olympic host city is one of the biggest inconvenienc-es for visitors to Sochi.

Only travellers from CIS capitals and Turkey can book direct fl ights. Everyone else will have to change planes in Moscow or St Petersburg.

Russian airlines such as S7 and Aerofl ot offer fl ights to Sochi from Moscow. Accord-ing to the skyscanner.com booking system, prices for February flights have not risen yet, at $US130-180 each way.

Travel by train is also pos-sible, but if you enjoy your creature comforts, the least expensive option – “platzkart” (from $US80 each way) is probably not for you. An up-graded level of service in a “coupe” will cost $US160, with business class quoted at $US330.

Those prices are for travel now, however. It remains to be seen by how much Rus-sian Railways will decide to increase prices prior to the Olympics, and train tickets are available for sale no more than 45 days before depar-ture.

The Russian government has promised to prevent price hikes and to look for legal ways to control prices dur-ing the competitions.

Ticket prices for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremony, to be held on February 7,

start at $US200 but go as high as $US1500.

Nostalgia for a

sporting peak

Thanks to footage from the 1980 Moscow Olympics be-ing shown on state television in Russia, the lead-up to the Sochi Winter Games has been triggering nostalgia for the last time the Olympics were held on Russian soil. The 1980 Olympics probably represent the pinna-cle of Soviet sporting prow-ess. Misha – the Soviet mascot bear from 1980 – has also been having a revival on Russian tel-evision and is appearing on T-shirts, so it is probably no coin-cidence that he resembles Bely Mishka, one of the mascots for the Sochi Games.

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