RBTH Australia (December 2014)

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This supplement is sponsored by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which takes sole responsibility for its contents and is wholly independent of Fairfax Media. The supplement did not involve Fairfax Media editorial staff in its production. P 14-16

Museum guide

Russia's best museums and art collections

P 7

The contemporary beliefs and practices of an Orthodox minority

Russia's Old Believers

Thursday, December 11, 2014

New-look Moscow emerges New-look Moscow emerges from its grey Soviet pastfrom its grey Soviet past

DESPITE TENSIONS WITH THE WEST, RUSSIA'S CAPITAL CITY

IS MORE EUROPEAN THAN EVER PAGES 8-9

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02

MOST READNews SANCTIONS COULD COST RUSSIA $170 BILLION

rbth.com/41845

Separatism concern declines

Firms quit London exchange

Ten police dead and 28 wounded in Chechnya

Minister claims oil is in dairy products

OPINION POLLS

ANTI-TERROR

STOCKS

FOOD REGULATION

The number of Russian citi-zens who believe that nation-al separatism (regions’ aspi-rations for autonomy or independence) is a major problem in Russia has de-clined this year. It is down by 16 per cent, from 50 per cent in 2013 to 34 per cent at the end of this year, the Le-vada Center told Interfax.

Thirty-eight per cent of res-pondents to the latest survey described the problem of na-

Ten police officers were killed and 28 wounded during a special anti-terrorist opera-tion to fl ush militants out of two buildings in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Republic of Chechnya, on December 4, according to reports by news agency TASS. According to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who led the opera-tion, at least nine terrorists were also killed.

The militants seized and occupied Grozny’s Press House and a nearby school in Grozny, after a firefight with traffic police in the early hours of December 4.

Local intelligence had said terror attacks were likely.

Russian Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov has accused large international dairy pro-ducers Danone and PepsiCo of illegally using vegetable oils in their products.

According to Fyodorov’s official statement, the gover-nment subsidises the produc-tion of milk, then the inter-national companies buy it, add palm oil and transform it into a dairy product, thus misleading the government.

“This dairy product con-tains only 10 to 20 per cent

Australian travel website traveller.com.au named the top 10 geotagged destinations on Instagram this year and two Moscow locations made the list: the beautiful 120-hectare Gorky Park and the city's iconic Red Square.

TRAVELGORKY PARK AND RED SQUARE MAKE TOP 10

IN PICTURES AND NUMBERS

Gorky Park, which has been hugely popular with Muscovi-tes since its redevelopment, was the fifth-most geotagged location in the world in 2014.

Home to St Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's mausoleum and his-toric events and concerts, the UNESCO heritage-listed Red Square came seventh.

5th 7th

ONLY AT RBTH.COM

Photographs of foxes in Chukotka that went viral in RussiaIvnsula.

Instaweek: statements in style captured on the Moscow metro

RBTH.COM/41595

RBTH.COM/41805

Russian construction compa-ny Rose Group, which oper-ates in Moscow’s upmarket real estate sector, is delisting its shares from the London stock exchange. In the seven years since its initial public offering (IPO), the company’s capitalisation has dropped from $US1.4 billion (£895 million) to $US272.2 million (£174 million).

On November 21, another Russian construction com-pany, Gals-Development, an-nounced its decision to delist from the London exchange, while in September, a simi-lar decision was taken by Russian bank FK Otkrytie.

Analysts have said that these decisions are part of a broader trend of Russian is-suers switching from Euro-pean to Asian markets. Russian companies abandon the London stock exchange in favor of Asia.

milk, the rest is vegetable oil,” Fyodorov told the TASS news agency.

In response to the minister’s accusations, Soyuzmoloko, a union of large Russian dairy producers of which Danone and PepsiCo are a part, has appealed to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with a request for the accu-racy and ethics of the Agri-culture Minister’s statement to be thoroughly evaluated.

“In our company’s portfo-lio there is only one product that is produced with the use of vegetable fats,” Danone said in an official statement. “And information about its ingredients is written on the container for consumers,” the company said.

want their region to secede.Eighty-six per cent of those

polled were also opposed to the possible secession of other Russian regions and only 6 per cent welcomed the idea.

When asked about the si-tuation in the North Cauca-sus, 49 per cent of respon-dents described i t as “favourable and quiet” – a higher percentage than in January, when 18 per cent held this view.

IVAN KISLOV

tional separatism as insigni-fi cant (24 per cent in 2013). Another 16 per cent of those polled believe that this pro-blem does not exist at all (9 per cent in 2013), and 13 per cent didn’t know, in a poll that was conducted across Russia from November 21 to 24 involving 1600 people.

Ninety per cent of respon-dents said they did not want their region to secede from Russia, while 8 per cent did

Speed, risk and dreams: the future racing champions of RussiaREAD

ONLINE rbth.com

Transneft pipeline conflict the latest episode in the Russia-Ukraine fuel saga

rbth.com/41929BUSI

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rbth.com/41865

The cost of living in Moscow and St

Petersburg a century ago

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Five Russian books for your Christmas

gift list

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03

MOST READ FRANCE BLOCKS MISTRAL SHIPS DELIVERY TO RUSSIA

rbth.com/41739 Politics

IN BRIEF

The damage the European Union could incur from the sanctions imposed on Rus-sia could reach about 40 bil-lion euros ($US50 billion) in 2014 and 50 billion euros in 2015, according to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov.

The level of Russia’s loss-es is likely to be compara-ble, the minister said in an interview with Interfax.

Road accidents kill about 30,000 Russians and injure another 250,000 every year, according to figures from Russia’s Interior Ministry’s road police.

These figures do not change much year on year.

Russia’s road accident mortality rate was reported to be 27,025 in 2013, which was 3.5 per cent less than it had been in 2012. The European Union sees the

statement that Russia has de-cided to halt the South Stream gas pipeline project because of Bulgarian oppo-sition as an excuse for aban-doning the economically un-feasible venture amid declining hydrocarbon pric-es, a European source told Interfax.

The South Stream is a very expensive project, and its construction has become un-affordable as oil and gas pric-es are going down, he said.

The source added that it was convenient to blame lit-tle Bulgaria for thwarting the project.

The source emphasised that the EU had never said that it opposed the South Stream. It had said that a company wishing to do busi-ness in it had to comply with its laws – the Third Energy Package – just as a Europe-an company wishing to do business in Russia had to comply with Russian legis-lation.

EU sanctions bill

$50b: minister

30,000 a year

die on roads

EU: Don't blame

Bulgaria on gas

OLEG KONYUKHOVRBTH

President Vladimir Putin's

annual speech to the

Russian Parliament firmly

outlined his stance

in a variety of areas of

foreign affairs.

President resolute on foreign policy stance

Annual speech Moscow will not submit to Western pressures in Ukraine, says Putin

On December 4, President Vladimir Putin made his an-nual address to Russia’s Fed-eral Assembly. In it, he talked about Russia’s crisis in its re-lations with the West, eco-nomic policy in the context of sanctions and what Mos-cow sees as the reasons for the confl ict in Ukraine.

Putin’s intentions to con-tinue pursuing Russian geo-political interests rather than blindly kowtowing to West-ern direction and notably US hypocrisy were key themes, which he expressed unapolo-getically.

On CrimeaIt is in Crimea, Putin said, that Prince Vladimir, who as a result baptised all of Rus, was baptised. That is why the “spiritual source for the for-mation of the diverse, yet monolithic Russian nation and Russian state” is located there.

“Crimea, ancient Korsun, Chersonesus and Sevastopol hold immense civilisational and sacred importance for Russia, just as the Holy Mount in Jerusalem does for those who profess Islam and Judaism,” Putin said. “And we will treat it in exactly this way for now and forever.”

On Ukraine“Now is not the time to play politics or pass around loud empty promises; it is the time to aid the economy of Ukraine, of course, using re-forms,” Putin said. Moscow is not going to submit to Western pressure in the Ukraine situation. “We are correct to ask: for what is all this tragedy in Ukraine? Was it really impos-sible to resolve the issues, even contentious issues, through dialogue within a legal framework and legiti-mate processes?”

Putin is openly sceptical and critical of Western motivation.

On the USThe US has always directly, or from behind the scenes, in-fluenced Russia’s relation-ships with its neighbours, the president said.

The Russian leader reiter-ated the system of double standards wherein the pro-visions of international law are only remembered [by the US] when it is benefi cial for their interests.

“When understanding the role and signifi cance of in-ternational law, about which we talk so much, we must en-sure it is not adjusted to serve

somebody’s tactical interests contrary to fundamental principles and common sense, in a way that suggests [the US thinks] everyone around is poorly educated and can-not read or write,” Putin said.

On sanctionsTouching upon the theme of sanctions, Putin said that the containment policy in rela-tion to Russia is not tied to the events in Ukraine and had, in fact, been going on for many years.

“We can easily recall who, and at that time how practi-cally openly, supported sep-aratism and even outright terror against us, calling the murderers who were up to their elbows in blood, noth-ing more than rebels, and then who received them at high levels.

“Notwithstanding our un-precedented openness, not-withstanding the fact that we looked at our former rivals as close friends and almost allies, the support of separa-tism in Russia from behind a hill – informational, politi-cal, fi nancial and via special services – was absolutely ob-vious,” Putin stated.

On the economyPutin proposed fi xing and not changing the tax system that has been functioning for four years so that entrepreneurs didn’t need to worry about any potential unpleasant sur-prises from the state. The president also promised to give full amnesty to offshore capital provided it returns to Russia. The head of state dis-cussed Russia’s war with bu-reaucracy, and announced that measures will soon be taken to prevent excessive bu-reaucratic control over busi-ness activities. It is hoped these efforts will improve business confi dence.

Western media 'closing its eyes' reasons behind the crisis of confi dence in Europe.

We often hear European deputies sharply criticise their own governments and the EU. I remember someone even said that the EU had taken Europe hostage.

But unfortunately, the Western press mostly repro-duces only anti-Russian statements and phraseology. The Western press, assumed to be so free, is suddenly clos-ing its eyes and ears.

Take, for example, our meeting in Paris with the French parliamentarians and our other colleagues. There were almost no French jour-nalists there. Were they not interested?

Later we were told that they [the French legislators] had “done a little work” with the local media.

Sergei Naryshkin, the speak-er of the Russian State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, spoke to RBTH about the current tense atmosphere between Russia and the West.

RBTH: Parliamentary ties were

one of the first casualties in the

souring relations between Rus-

sia and the West. What does the

future hold for them?

Sergei Naryshkin: It is prob-ably natural that we are hear-ing radical assessments di-rected at Russia from individual deputies of foreign parliaments. After all, radi-cal statements are always the loudest statements.

However, there are many parliamentarians who have a completely realistic assess-ments of the situation sur-rounding Ukraine and of the

What can be done now?

[We must] Not grow weary, set forth our position, tell the truth. Speak at international parliamentary platforms such as the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the PACE, no matter how ambivalently they may feel about us.

Will Russia make its payments

to PACE?

We will pay because Russia’s fee generally goes towards the work of the entire Council of Europe structure.

But if PACE doesn’t restore the Russian parliamentary delegation’s powers – and I mean in full – we’ll then think about whether or not to con-tinue with Russia’s contribu-tion.

I was amazed. Russia is seemingly a young democra-cy – our constitution is going to be just 21 years old. But that kind of thing isn’t pos-sible here. Our Foreign Min-istry would have been ashamed to have behaved that way with journalists.

Read full version at

rbth.com/41917

INTERVIEW SERGEI NARYSHKIN

Interview byIgor Rozin

In this monthly report, RD experts focus on

Brisbane's recent G20 summit and what could

be achieved by its participants. It examines the

role the G20 can play in the creation of a new,

multipolar world and how the group is acting as a

foil to the G8.

Never before have post-Cold War relations

between Russia and the US been surrounded with

such pessimism and uncertainty. Bilateral contacts

in almost all areas and at all levels are frozen,

suspended or stagnant. So where do we go from

here? And what lessons could we come away with

for the new year?

C O N V E R T I N G M O N O L O G U E S I N T O D I A L O G U E

Russia Direct is a forum for experts and senior decision-makers

from Russia and abroad to discuss, debate and understand

issues in geopolitical relations from a sophisticated vantage

point.

RUSSIA-DIRECT.ORG

November Monthly Brief:

What’s next for the G20

December Monthly Brief:

Year in review

SUBSCRIBE BEFORE THE END OF 2014 FREE OF CHARGE ATRUSSIA-DIRECT.ORG/SUBSCRIBE

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04

MOST READ HOTEL OPERATORS TO DOUBLE PRESENCE BY 2020

rbth.com/41761Business

ALEXEI LOSSANRBTH BUSINESS EDITOR

The dramatic drop of the

rouble this year, which many

analysts attribute to low oil

prices, prompted Russia’s

Central Bank to bring forward

its plans to float the currency.

Falling rouble brings forward currency floatEconomy Russia’s Central Bank changes its strategy in relation to the recent instability of the money market

At the time of writing, the Russian rouble had dropped by 60 per cent in relation to the dollar and euro this year alone.

“Currently, the key factors contributing to the weaken-ing of the Russian currency are the decline in oil prices and other raw assets,” says Anton Soroko, an analyst at investment holding Finam.

On November 13, the price of Brent crude fell below $US78 per barrel, even though in midsummer quotes were about $US115.

According to Soroko, this process is occurring against the backdrop of the dollar’s aggressive growth not only in relation to the rouble but also the yen, Swiss franc, euro and other currencies.

“The dollar’s growth fi rst and foremost reflects the shortage of the currency on the market, which is due to the increase in demand,” says Mikhail Khromov, scientifi c collaborator at the Centre of Structural Research of the Russian Academy Institute of Applied Economic Research.

“The decline in oil prices

is the main indicator, but for now, it affects only expecta-tions, since investors are afraid of a decrease in Rus-sia’s export revenues.”

According to Khromov, the second factor infl uencing the rouble is that due to the sanc-tions on Russia and geopo-litical instability the country has no foreign capital infl ow.

In response to the decline in the rouble’s value, Russia’s Central Bank carried out a

series of currency interven-tions at the beginning of Oc-tober. To reduce demand for foreign currency, the regula-tor began selling dollars in order to support the rouble’s value. In October, the Central Bank spent almost $US29.3 billion supporting the rouble, and in the course of nine days from the end of October, sold more than $US2 billion a day.

“This way the regulator only smoothed out the mar-

ket fl uctuations, but did not try to stop the current de-scending trend in the Rus-sian currency,” asserts UFS IC’s chief analyst Alexei Ko-zlov. However, the large-scale intervention did not produce results and on November 7, the Central Bank decided to let the rouble fl oat freely.

It was initially assumed that the Russian rouble would switch to a complete free fl oat. However, in view of the

The decline in the value of the rouble has helped the Kremlin to balance the federal budget.

pressure on the national cur-rency, the Central Bank de-cided to accelerate the pro-cess. According to a new strategy, the Bank of Russia will not carry out full-scale currency interventions – that is, selling dollars on the Rus-sian market. The maximum value of a Central Bank sale will be $US350 million a day, which, analysts say, will not affect exchange rates. The Central Bank’s press office explains that refusing unlim-ited currency interventions will deter speculators from betting against the rouble.

The decision has led to a dramatic change in the ex-change rate: in the course of trading on November 8, the rouble fell by about 10 per cent against the dollar before rebounding to almost cancel out the decrease.

“The Central Bank’s deci-sion falls into the strategy of switching to infl ation target-ing, a part of which is the free fl oat of the national curren-cy,” explains Dmitry Beden-kov, director of the analysis department at Russ-Invest.

At the same time, Beden-kov says that the Central Bank has reserved the right to intervene with more than the $US350 million an-nounced if it senses a threat to the rouble’s stability.

The establishment of daily intervention limits on the borders of currency corridors

is intended to lower the pres-sure on Russia’s gold reserves, Bedenkov adds. The weaken-ing of the rouble is also ad-vantageous for the Russian government, since it leads to the reduction of a possible budget defi cit.

According to Soroko, the fall of the rouble has a posi-tive effect on the budget, since it helps compensate for the fall in revenues of oil and gas sales. The lion’s share of hy-drocarbons is sold in dollars and euros, while the Russian budget is drafted in roubles.

The weakened rouble also places the Russian producer in an advantageous position since the value of imports in-creases, thus helping Russian producers to compete more successfully with foreign producers.

Khromov dismisses wide-spread fears that the low price of Brent will leave a hole in the Russian budget, which currently requires an oil price of just under $US100 a barrel to avoid a defi cit.

“The average annualised price of oil remains above $US96 per barrel (the Rus-sian budget is based on this price) since in August the price of oil was $US106, and even if oil will cost $US85 until the end of the year, the average annualised price will still be about $US100, which does not pose any risks for the budget,” he says.

LEONID HOMERIKISPECIAL TO RBTH

Gazprom and the China

National Petroleum

Corporation sign agreement

for Russia to supply China

with natural gas for 30 years

via the new Altai pipeline.

Gazprom secures 30-year contract in latest China deal

Energy Altai pipeline to carry gas on ‘western route’ after Beijing agreement

western route will be signed by the end of 2015.

In particular, the document touches upon conditions such as the volume and terms of delivery, the level of “take and pay” (the buyer’s obligation to pay a certain penalty in the event that consumption volumes are less than speci-fi ed in the contract) and the location of the transfer point for the gas on the border.

In the future, the sides will have to sign a sales contract and an intergovernmental agreement. The contract value, and consequently the gas price, have not been de-termined.

“It is clear that the price will be lower than that of the deliveries made through the eastern route [the Power of Siberia gas pipeline, whose price per cubic metre is not known, though it is estimat-ed at $US350 – RBTH], since the investments in infrastruc-

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller and the chairman of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Zhou Jiping, have signed a frame-work agreement on the sup-ply of natural gas from Rus-sia to China via a “western” route.

The document, signed by the two parties at the APEC summit in Beijing on Novem-ber 8-10, envisages an annu-al supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas from western Siberian deposits to China through the Altai gas pipeline for 30 years.

According to Miller, the supply contract using the

The Altai gas pipeline could become the world’s biggest.

ture (transportation and ex-traction) are significantly less,” says Grigory Birg of In-vestcafe.

According to Platon Ma-guta, general director at the Maguta Fund, the economi-cally rational gas price for China is about $US380-400 per 1000 cubic metres. This is infl uenced by the fact sup-plies will mostly come from the deposits in the extreme

north of Russia (the repub-lics of Yamal and Yakutia).

Gazprom has recently ac-celerated the pace of collab-oration with its Chinese part-ners. The construction of the Power of Siberia, the world’s biggest pipeline, which will deliver gas through the east-ern route, is moving at full speed, although the Altai pipeline may surpass Power of Siberia in capacity.

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MOST READ ST PETERSBURG TOPS MOSCOW IN FINANCE RATING

rbth.com/41863 Business

IGOR ROZINRBTH

International clothing brands

have been invited to localise

their production in Russia,

with new factories being

offered long-term tax breaks

until 2025.

Material gains tempt clothing companies

Production Incentives on offer to foreign brands

Russian authorities are en-couraging foreign clothing manufacturers to base their production in Russia, Depu-ty Industry and Trade Min-ister Viktor Yevtukhov said in an interview with the Rossi-yskaya Gazeta newspaper.

Yevtukhov explained that state support programs en-visage subsidies for partially recovering the costs of ma-terials, technical upgrades and new investment projects. New factories can also enjoy long-term tax breaks until 2025. Furthermore, the min-istry guarantees manufactur-ers who accept this invita-tion a market share of the state procurement order.

State support“Since the Soviet era, Russia has had a solid textile indus-try,” Yevtukhov said, adding that the industry occupied a middle-range price niche be-tween Asian and European markets.

One way to achieve this

goal, he explained, was to es-tablish foreign manufactur-ers’ production facilities in Russia, in the same way that Russia did with the auto in-dustry. “This is, of course, a task for the future,” he said, adding that “our textile fac-tories already have good foundations to build upon”.

In particular, during meet-ings with the China Nation-al Textile and Apparel Coun-ci l and some leading companies at the Super ex-

hibition in Milan, it turned out that Chinese companies don’t just view Russia as a market; they are ready to in-vest in product there.

At South-East Asia’s big-gest fashion event, the Mer-cedes-Benz China Fashion Week in Beijing, a three-year strategic co-operation was agreed between the Russian Chamber of Fashion and the China Fashion Association.

The drive to localise pro-duction in Russia may bring down prices for clothes made

in Russia. “Consumer goods production requires a consid-erable safety margin in terms of prices,” Yevtukhov said. “If in terms of quality there are no issues, in terms of cost we are still running behind [our] Asian competitors.”

He added that in the mass segment it is important to es-tablish relations with large retail chains and to develop sources of raw materials. As for external markets, there are more prospects there for high-tech Russian goods, such as technical textiles and non-woven fabrics. At the mo-ment, this market accounts for about 30 per cent of in-dustry sales. Furthermore, over the past fi ve years, the production of non-woven fabrics in Russia has in-creased eightfold, while in the EU market, technical textiles account for 50 per cent of in-dustry growth.

First successesConsumer goods manufac-turing in Russia has contin-ued to grow despite the re-cent economic slowdown. According to the Russian In-dustry Ministry, in 2013 in-dustrial output in the coun-try grew by almost 5 per cent. And in the fi rst nine months of 2014, clothing production

Despite Russia’s economic slowdown, consumer goods manufacturing has continued to grow.

in Russia grew by 7 per cent, whereas overall economic growth in the same period was just 0.7 per cent.

At the same time, follow-ing Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation and the subsequent cancel-lation of duties, the produc-tion of leather and leather goods dropped by 10.5 and 20 per cent respectively.

To address this, in August the Russian government banned the export of semi-fi nished leather, and is seek-ing a similar ban on the ex-port of raw hides.

“We are not alone here. For example, Belarus has already introduced this kind of ban,” Yevtukhov explained. “Argu-ments in favour of the move include a shortage of raw hides, a high demand for them from Russian manufac-turers, and shadow exports.”

According to him, problems with the domestic production of fabrics are rooted in the loss of a considerable part of the raw materials base fol-lowing the break-up of the Soviet Union: 100 per cent of the production of cotton fibre and natural silk re-

mained in former Soviet re-publics.

Despite the fact most types of synthetic fi bres are import-ed, considerable progress has been made toward establish-ing domestic production, Yev-tukhov said.

“Since Russia is a leading oil and gas producing nation, we have a good chance of suc-cessfully developing the pro-duction of synthetic fibres and yarns in Russia, includ-ing through developing a pro-duction chain at the high end of the petrochemical indus-try,” he said.

Chinese companies don't just view Russia as a market; they are ready to invest in production there

ALEXEI LOSSANRBTH EDITOR FOR BUSINESS

Russia will call off its

South Stream project in

order to construct a new

gas pipeline to Europe

via the Black Sea.

Gas pipeline project axed Energy Russia announces it will replace $55b South Stream with new pipeline

Russia has abandoned its project to build the contro-versial South Stream gas pipeline linking Russia and central Europe via the Black Sea, citing Bulgaria’s refusal to allow construction on its territory as a key factor.

President Vladimir Putin announced the decision at a one-day visit to Turkey on December 1. “We cannot start construction in the sea until we get permission from Bul-garia, and it would be absurd to begin construction in the sea, approach the Bulgarian coast, and stop there,” Putin said at a press conference.

He added that Russian en-ergy resources will be redi-rected to other markets.

According to the presi-dent’s estimates, Bulgaria will miss out on at least 400 mil-lion euros ($US500 million)

Bulgaria's refusal to approve construction a factor in decision.

a year in transit fees. Russian gas giant Gazprom will suf-fer even more – the company has invested $US4.66 billion in the project in the past three years. Operator South Stream Transport estimates that Eu-ropean companies will lose at least 2.5 billion euros be-cause of the abandonment.

“The suspension of the pro-ject comes as no surprise given the fact that Bulgaria has long been talking about a ban on laying pipes through

its territory. We were com-pletely unable to get our Bul-garian partners to budge,” said Ivan Kapitonov, an as-sociate professor at the Rus-sian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration.

In August 2014, the Bul-garian Ministry of Economy and Energy suspended the project because it violated the European Union’s Third En-ergy Package. According to those rules, owners of gas

pipelines in the EU cannot be gas producers.

The cost of the project had ballooned to $US55 billion, which Kapitonov said must have informed Russia’s deci-sion to drop it.

After the announcement, Gazprom shares jumped by 1.1 per cent. “Investors have a positive view of the deci-sion,” the director of the An-alytics Department at Alfa-Forex, Andrei Dirgin, said.

Later, Gazprom chief Alex-ei Miller said the gas giant will channel the pipeline away from Bulgaria to Tur-key. According to him, the pipeline will carry 63 billion cubic metres of gas a year.

“In this case, Russia will get the same planned effect [as from the South Stream pipeline]: diversifi ed supplies and a way around unreliable transit countries,” Ivan Ka-pitonov said.

He added that European countries may be surprised by the choice of a route through Turkey, since the EU did not anticipate any trade-offs in the project.

As it stands, Russia is de-pending on Turkey as a tran-sit country, but that is a nec-e s s a r y c o m p r o m i s e , Kapitonov said.

A LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES

FACING MOSCOW

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www.russia-direct.org/ebook

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MOST READSociety WHY RUSSIANS ARE DELAYING TYING THE KNOT

rbth.com/41673

MARIYA BASHMAKOVAOGONEK

Old Believers are one

religious minority who have

become more visible in post-

Soviet Russia. And for many,

their unusual practices

symbolise pre-Soviet Russia.

Old Believers shun visibility despite new openness

Religion Insight into Orthodox minority

Old Bel ievers (cal led starovery in Russian) refers to groups that trace their or-igins to those that separated from the official Russian Or-thodox Church after 1666, as a protest against church re-forms introduced by Patri-arch Nikon in the 1650s and ’60s. Today, the lives of Old Believers in Russia revolve around their church and their confessional community.

Often perceived to be un-sociable or even superior, Old Believers see themselves as the bearers of truth, and some believe that mixing with those outside their church threatens their identity.

It has been difficult to know the numbers of Old Be-lievers in Russia because re-ligious persecution discour-aged them from identifying themselves. Before 1917, it has been estimated that the Rus-sian Empire probably had be-tween 15 and 20 million of this religious minority. Sovi-et religious persecution, how-ever, signifi cantly decreased their number.

Today, according to the Russian Ministry of Justice, Russia has 336 registered and functioning Old Believer re-ligious organisations. Com-munities of Old Believers are concentrated in the cities of Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, Kazan, St Petersburg, Novo-sibirsk and Ekaterinburg.

“What keeps us together?” considered the priest of the Old Orthodox Coastal Church Arseny Shamarin. “Recogni-tion of the truth of our way. Understanding that we are Orthodox faith, which we try to preserve and pass on to our children.

“For us, every man is re-sponsible for the salvation of his soul. The reforms of the 17th century destroyed con-scious faith. They turned the

sacraments and rituals into exercises and prayer into de-mands.”

Old Believers are brought up with strict rules, religious and domestic. These vary among groups, but some ex-amples are not being allowed to marry outside their con-fessional group, not having passports and not being able to use the internet.

“Old Believer entrepre-neurs don’t want to be vis-ible,” explained historian Alexei Bezgodov, who heads a small publishing company. “Many of us are in small and medium-sized businesses, and we have our own busi-ness alliances.”

The International Guild of Old Believer Entrepreneurs is registered in Latvia. There are also other informal asso-ciations based on personal partnerships. Industries that Old Believers often work in include building, traditional trades and crafts, forestry, farming and beekeeping.

Alexander Zagorodny is the chairman of the Ligovs-ky Old Believer community. Zagorodny does not borrow money from banks, either for himself or for his business – he does not want to be dependent.

“It [borrowing money] drags you towards sinful at-tainments,” he said. “With the interest comes sin.

“Old Believers do provide loans to each other in the community, even to members of different confessionals. But they are, as a rule, loans with-out interest and money is lent on the basis of someone’s word of honour. I have used such loans and have provid-ed them myself.”

Communities of Old Be-lievers have also survived out-side Russia. To escape perse-cution, Old Believers started leaving Russia after 1685, with many leaving shortly after 1917. Today there are large communities in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Romania and smaller communities in Aus-tralia, the US, Italy and parts of South America.

Old Believer churches are found across Russia, also in Moscow.

Prior to the bill, the degree of religious freedom allowed in prisons varied and was at the discretion of prison managers.

MARINA OBRAZKOVARBTH

A Protestant priest who

found his faith behind bars

talks about the importance of

religious freedom and how it

could improve the lives of

prisoners.

New bill protects rights of spiritual freedom in jail

Prisons Greater religious tolerance for Russian inmates

In August, a Russian govern-mental commission approved a bill to protect the freedom of religion of prisoners. The bill makes it possible for pris-oners to adopt new religions and it gives them better ac-cess to spiritual education and guides.

Mikhail Senkevich, a mem-ber of the public monitoring committee for the implemen-tation of public observation of human rights in centres of detention, spoke with RTBH about religion in Russia's prisons.

Senkevich is a Protestant priest and a human rights ad-vocate. He has also spent more than 10 years in deten-tion facilities, where, as a prisoner, he fi rst adopted his faith.

“I had a completely nor-mal family; my parents were in the military, and my broth-er was a scientist,” Senkevich recalled. “But I was drawn to the streets. I was fi rst con-victed at the age of 14, but the sentence was suspended, so I didn’t end up going to prison then. I got my fi rst real prison term – a sentence of 27 years – for robbing a fl at.

“I served six years, after which I was released. Later,

I got 10 years for a narcot-ics charge.”

Senkevich embraced reli-gion in 1987. “Evangelists ar-rived with sermons to the de-tention centre where I was serving my sentence. They gave me a copy of the New Testament, and I started pray-ing and going to meetings. After a while, I became a group leader and began or-ganising services myself.

“When I was released in 1990, I found my way to the church. With my criminal life in the past, I graduated from the International Bible Col-lege and I became a priest. Then I started holding class-es in prison because I want-ed to make a difference in the lives of prisoners.”

Senkevich enjoyed eight years of freedom, which for repeat offenders is a long time. But at one point he re-lapsed and started using drugs again.

“I was sentenced to anoth-er 10 years that time. Being behind bars again made me come to my senses very quick-

ly,” he recalled. “I ended up at the Ulyanovsk detention centre, and I started spend-ing time at the chapel. A group of worshipers eventu-ally formed. The members of the group started to behave differently from the other prisoners. We stopped violat-ing regulations, some quit smoking, we stopped evad-ing our duties at the facility.

“There were about 30 of us. The people in this group be-came immune to external pressure and infl uence, and the prison community began to feel uneasy about us.”

Antagonists convinced the warden that the group’s meet-ings were dangerous and that the members were not gath-ering to pray but to plan a riot. Prison officials respond-ed fi rst by placing Senkevich in solitary confi nement and later by transferring him to a different prison.

According to his transfer documents, Senkevich was to be forbidden from interact-ing with people in general prison areas. In this case,

however, bureaucracy’s slow mechanisms actually proved beneficial. While officials were processing his docu-ments and determining how to proceed with his case, Sen-kevich was able to spend an entire week among the gen-eral prison population.

“During this time I man-aged not only to become ac-quainted with two like-mind-ed brethren, but also to demonstrate to the authori-ties that I was law-abiding. They came to understand that I obeyed all the rules, and they never tried to isolate me. Eventually, I formed another group of worshippers.”

After enduring these trib-ulations, Senkevich fi nally re-gained his freedom. He con-tinued to serve the church, where he eventually met his future wife. Now in his 60s, he is the father of two young boys. He said that it is diffi-cult for people to adapt to a normal life after living in de-tention. But with the help of religion, the adjustment pro-cess is a great deal easier.

Russia’s current Criminal Code states that a prisoner has the right to interact with spiritual guides, but the code neglects to explain the spe-cifi cs of how this right is to be implemented.

Lawmakers are currently hoping to propose specific guidelines that indicate ex-actly under which conditions and for how long an incar-cerated individual is allowed to speak with clergy repre-sentatives, and to which types of religious accoutrements prisoners should be allowed access.

Today in Russia, nearly every prison has an Ortho-dox priest. The majority of them also have places of wor-ship for Muslims, Jews and Evangelicals.

However, because these re-ligious amenities are not or-ganised according to a cen-tralised public policy, but rather at the discretion of each prison’s management, there are no official statistics about them.

Reforms relate to new leadership

Vladimir Osechkin, a human rights activist and organiser of social network gulagu.net, claims that the status of prison-ers’ rights with respect to re-ligious freedom has improved with the new leadership in the Russian Federal Penitentia-

ry Service over the past two years. Osechkin says: “Religious ceremonies are now being con-ducted, prayer rooms are being created and in Moscow prisons, there are Orthodox temples, synagogues and different plac-es of worship.” L

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MOST READ UNESCO TO CLOSE ITS MOSCOW OFFICE IN 2015

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MARINA OBRAZKOVARBTH

Russia's Constitutional Court

has ruled that information

about a number of

circumstances that were

previously classified can no

longer be state secrets.

Court reduces scope of state secrets Censorship New ruling on classified details seen as a step forward for freedom of information

In October, Russia’s Consti-tutional Court forbade con-cealing the circumstances surrounding the death of rel-atives or close persons on the basis that the information was classifi ed. In addition, the court ruled that according to the law on “state secrets”, it would no longer be permit-ted to classify information re-lated to human rights or to forbid lawyers who do not have the right to access state secrets to examine pre-inves-tigation material.

These new decisions lengthened the expanding list of what can no longer be kept a state secret in Russia.

The list already includes information about emergen-cies, disasters, the environ-ment, health, demographics, education, culture, agricul-ture and crime. Other areas about which information can no longer be kept classifi ed include the privileges of pub-lic servants, the violation of human rights and freedoms, the size of the gold and cur-rency reserves and corrup-tion. In the context of these reforms, what can still be kept a state secret in Russia today?

According to Russian law, a state secret is information protected by the state that could cause the state dam-age, notably in the areas of politics, economics, the mili-tary and intelligence. In order

to gain access to a state secret, a person must meet certain parameters defi ned by the level of the classifi ca-tion of the information.

Svetlana Boshno, head of the Department of Public Ad-ministration and Law at the Institute of Public Adminis-tration and Management at RANEPA (Russian Presiden-tial Academy of National Economy and Public Admin-istration), said that she had come across someone who had been granted clearance for classifi ed information but because he hadn’t reported that his sister had migrated abroad, his clearance had been revoked.

Boshno added that foreign-ers may face barriers if they want to work in Russian state agencies or state corpora-tions, such as the nuclear en-ergy giant Rosatom, or if they want to work with historical documents that might be classifi ed.

Open informationEven information gathered from open sources can some-times be classifi ed. For exam-ple, the physicists Oleg and Igor Minin wrote the non-fi c-tion work The Institute of Ap-plied Physics: Research Schools and Technologies.

A criminal court case was brought against them on the basis that their book revealed classifi ed information and the publication was taken off the shelves. This provoked criti-cism from academics. The scholars’ father, Vladilen Minin, told newspaper Rossi-yskaya Gazeta that the con-tent was available in other open sources and that any-

Mikhail, who works in a large company engaged in re-search and development, con-firmed Alexander’s words, saying that companies penal-ise their employees for dis-closures. “Not only do I not have the right to talk about the details of [my] work, but I can’t even tell people what area I’m researching,” he said.

Levels of Soviet secrecyThere were several levels of secrecy and security clear-ance in the USSR. The most basic was the third. People with clearance for the third level could travel abroad and have access to documents marked “for official use” (FOU), said Alexander, who added that in Soviet times many documents, including reports from Communist Party meetings, were FOU.

The second form allowed for the use of “secret” and “top secret” documents, but those with this access could not leave the country. There were also fi rst and zero levels of clearance, which opened up access to information.

Russian historian and tel-evision host Nikolai Svanidze notes that there was no logic for classifi ed documents in the USSR. “Vigilance trans-formed into general suspicion and persecution mania,” he said. “Everyone was feared – foreigners because they could be spies, ‘your own’ because they could be babblers.”

In Svanidze’s opinion, this tradition has been preserved to this day. “Now there are many documents kept clas-sifi ed due to inertia, or large agencies do it to justify their activities.”

body could have done the re-search. After lengthy inves-tigations, the case was closed and the scientists absolved.

Penalties for disclosures One source, Alexander, who was involved in developing weapons during the Soviet era, said that secrecy was necessary to safeguard important information. “If it was not this way, people would start to trade in secrets and it would damage the state,” he said. “And this is exactly how large companies protecting themselves from industrial espionage behave.”

The Federal Security Service (former KGB) headquarters at Lubyanka Square in Moscow.

THE FACTS

Russia’s answer to WikiLeaks The anonymous website Secret was supposed to encourage whistleblowers. What is it really being used for?David Byttow, the creator of the anonymous network www.secret.ly (Secret) believes that Russians do not fully un-derstand internet anonymity. Vladislav and Peter prove his point. Despite being security service employees, they seem to place showing how cool they are above online safety.

Given Russians’ nonchalance about online privacy, it is a lit-tle surprising that Secret, which went online in Russia at the end of May, has become so popular. The site allows users to make posts on an anony-mous social network without having to worry about their identities being discovered. Could the site be Russia's an-swer to WikiLeaks?

Russian Winter photo album

Available at

WHAT DOES A RUSSIAN WINTER REALLY LOOK LIKE?

Find out in our interactive photo album

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MOST READ FIVE MOSCOW TOURS NOT TO MISS

travel.rbth.com/destination/moscowSpecial

MOSCOW IS MORE EUROPEAN NOW THAN EVER BEFORE

RUSSIA'S CAPITAL HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED SINCE THE

COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM. WITH THE CHANGES HAVE

COME NEW PLEASURES AND PERKS – AND NEW CHALLENGES.

DEVELOPMENT MOSCOW'S NEW FACE

SAM SKOVESPECIAL TO RBTH

While political tensions have

broadened the gulf between

Russia and the West, at street

level, Russia's capital looks

more European than it ever

has in its 900-year history.

There was a time when a Cus-toms declaration at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport meant a bottle of whisky for you and one for the border official. Today, the only alcohol at the capital’s main airport is behind glass in the duty-free shops.

And a little past them, shiny new Aeroexpress trains wait to take arrivals to the city centre.

As political pundits debate the start of a new cold war, Moscow seems further from Washington or Brussels po-litically than it has been in decades. But the renewed po-litical drama underscores a distinct irony: at street level, Moscow is looking more like a Western European metrop-olis than at perhaps any time in its 900-year history.

As the world marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall last month, it might be said that no other major city has been trans-formed more dramatically since that event than Mos-cow. During the Cold War, Russia was cut off from in-ternational trends, and many Russians lived radically dif-ferent lives from those of their Western counterparts.

Today, the city is in the throes of a massive facelift as the new mayor, Sergei So-byanin, toils to undo the worst remnants of Soviet urban planning.

“Moscow is reborn in terms of architecture, green spaces and lighting,” says Justin Lif-fl ander, an American who has spent 27 years in Moscow as an embassy driver, business-man and business editor for English-language daily news-paper The Moscow Times. “When I moved here, the roads were ragged and de-void of vehicles,” he says. “The city was grey and so were the people.”

When it was the capital of the socialist world, Russia’s most important city present-ed Western visitors with something of an alien land-

scape. For many, the fi rst im-pression they got after the airport was wide streets with few cars and no advertising.

Today, the city is struggling to clear mammoth traffic jams, while officials weigh measures to reduce the clut-ter of advertising.

The changes have rendered the city centre cleaner, more convenient and – thanks to bans on the sale of alcohol in public after 11pm as well as on drinking in the subway – more sober than anyone can remember.

In one sign of the change, a survey by British multina-tional bank HSBC recently named Russia the 17th best country in which to live for expats. Five years earlier, Russia ranked 24th out of 26 countries.

Throughout the city, land-marks to the Soviet past have been torn down and replaced with modern versions. In the heart of Moscow, directly op-posite the Kremlin, once stood the colossal Rossiya Hotel. Built in 1967 at a scale meant to showcase rising So-viet power, the hotel boasted 3200 rooms and was for dec-ades the largest in the world.

Today, the Rossiya has been torn down and the location is being redesigned as an open public space by a group of companies led by the New York architecture fi rm that designed Manhattan’s cele-brated High Line, Diller Cofi dio + Renfro.

Meanwhile, a small island in the centre of Moscow that was once the home of the Red October chocolate factory has been gutted and revamped. Today, the island older Rus-sians associate with Soviet chocolates teems with Rus-

sian hipsters scuttling be-tween bars, cafes, galleries and media offices.

A few kilometres away lies the 120-hectare Gorky Park. The socialist “people’s park” fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet system, and the area became infa-mous for drug use.

The space has been trans-formed by design fi rm Wow-haus. The park has public art and free Wi-Fi and at week-ends the sprawling grounds teem with Muscovites play-ing table tennis and bocce and doing yoga classes.

In the aftermath of the So-viet Union’s collapse in 1991, the city grew from a grey so-cialist netherworld into a wheeler-dealing metropolis full of entrepreneurs rein-venting capitalism by their own rules.

“After the fake life of the Soviet system – big stores empty of goods, people lin-ing up for lemons – this seemed like real life, real commerce,” says Michele Berdy, an American transla-tor who moved to Moscow in the late 1980s.

After President Vladimir Putin took over in 2000, notes Nikolai Petrov, professor of political science at the High-er School of Economics, ris-ing global prices for oil and gas turned Moscow into a city of “massive amounts of money, massive market growth, all accompanied by international interest in opening up stores, business-es and hotels.” Moscow be-came a “24-hour city”.

But as Berdy says: “No mat-ter how many times I tell peo-ple, really, it’s a modern Eu-ropean city, nobody believes me – until they come here.”

KIRA EGOROVARBTH

Moscow's restaurant scene

has boomed, with the

number of restaurants

growing by 15 to 20 per cent

per year since 2002.

Sanctions to slow therestaurant revolution

Eating out City's love affair is cooling

However, a revolution in dining culture has been gain-ing momentum. Official city statistics now list 11,000 res-taurants, a number that has been expanding by 15 to 20 per cent a year since 2000, according to Andrei Petrak-ov, executive director of Rest-Con consulting.

Another Western tradition, coffee, has also been taking hold in Russia’s traditionally tea-drinking capital. Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks opened its first location in Moscow in 2007; it has 70 branches in the city today.

But residents of Moscow have a way to go before they catch up with the dining-out habits in many Western coun-tries. According to the Mos-cow Department of Trade and

Eating out has never been a big tradition in Russia. Just a few years before the Sovi-et Union collapsed in 1991, there were only 87 registered restaurants in the country’s capital.

An Associated Press arti-cle from 1981 wrote that Mos-cow had no Italian or French restaurants whatsoever, and noted dryly that the city’s lone pizzeria, on a narrow side street a few blocks from the Kremlin, “falls well short of world pizza standards”.

Today Moscow is neither a

grim Soviet capital or a wild

gangland paradise.

A survey by British multination-al bank HSBC named Russia the 17th best country for expats to live in out of 26. Five years be-fore it had been rated 24th.

17IN NUMBERS

KINGS AND

QUEENS OF SUBWAY

STYLE

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MOST READ SpecialMUST-SEE SITES IN THE KREMLIN

travel.rbth.com/destination/moscow

ban on food imports from the US and the EU.

In October, the Department of Trade released a forecast showing that by the end of the year the city’s restaurant market may suffer a drop of as much as 15 per cent.

A spokesperson for the Federation of Restaurant and Hotel Owners told Russian daily Izvestiya that in re-sponse to these challenges, some chains have stopped opening new outlets and have begun a review of the exist-ing ones.

In Soviet times, Moscow only had 87 registered restaurants.

Services, Muscovites spent 7.4 per cent of their food expens-es on eating out in 2013. For North Americans living in big cities, the equivalent fi gure is 76 per cent, according to the US Department of Agricul-ture.

Despite the recent rapid growth, Moscow restaura-teurs may now face some challenges. Economic sanc-tions and the falling rouble have restricted purchasing power, and restaurants have been forced to change menus and suppliers, due to Russia’s

SAM SKOVESPECIAL TO RBTH

Home of the world’s worst

traffic jams, Moscow has

launched a major initiative to

clear its roads, by introducing

paid parking and raising the

costs of car ownership.

$74b plan to fight the world's worst traffic congestion

Transport Capital 'not a city for cars'

Moscow has launched an am-bitious, multibillion-dollar campaign to unsnarl its no-torious traffic jams, a gargan-tuan task in a city ranked as the world’s most-gridlocked.

Moscow aims to transform itself by 2020 through spend-ing a total of 2.9 trillion rou-bles ($US62 billion) on a major investment in public transport, in a series of pro-jects initiated by the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin. Meanwhile, a paid-parking regime and expanded toll roads will increase the cost of car ownership.

Amid signs of early pro-gress, sceptics say success will only be able to come in de-grees. “Even if you spent the entire Pentagon budget [on improving Moscow’s roads], you couldn’t solve the prob-lem,” said Mikhail Blinkin, director of the Institute for Transport Economics and Transport Policy Studies.

The city’s twisted streets and centuries-old layout mean that “Moscow just isn’t a city for cars,” he added.

The plan, which includes suburban rail development, road construction and creat-ing 300 kilometres of bike lanes, aims to save drivers 88 hours a year, said deputy mayor Maxim Liksutov.

A priority of the plan is try-ing to get Muscovites to park in approved spaces, instead of simply pulling their cars up on to footpaths or double-parking in the road, as is the convention.

The latter creates an acute problem, by reducing traffic fl ow and creating bottlenecks. To deal with the problem, city officials dispatched a fl eet of small green tow trucks, which quickly became notorious for making off with inappropri-ately parked vehicles.

In 2013, paid parking, reg-ulated by the towing fleet, began in the city centre then spread outwards.

In October, Sobyanin an-nounced that the average speed of traffic in the paid parking zones has “risen by an average of 12 per cent”.

The plan also foresees an expansion of the Moscow metro, with the number of stations being boosted by 78 to 250, which will put 93 per cent of Moscow’s residents within walking distance of a metro station.

Moscow is ranked as the world’s most gridlocked me-tropolis, ahead of Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, according to road navi-gation company TomTom’s 2014 yearly traffic report.

But it wasn’t always so. The roots of the city's problem with traffic stretch back to Soviet times.

In the Soviet Union, defi -ciencies in the socialist econ-omy made cars a luxury item. That left Moscow’s centuries-old byways largely uncon-

gested and meant that city planners had no need to plan for traffic.

When the Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s, a pent-up demand for auto-mobiles was unleashed.

As Russian incomes grew, car ownership exploded and Russia emerged as one of Eu-rope’s top fi ve auto markets.Young Russians, whose par-ents and grandparents had never dreamed of owning their own car, embraced this new symbol of wealth.

In 2014, Moscow’s official population of 11.5 million was driving at least four mil-lion cars, according to the In-terior Ministry.

Unlike the orderly grids of New York or Chicago, Mos-cow is not a well-designed city, and the business-heavy city centre is just clogged.

“Just look at [the roads] on Google maps – it’s like an as-terisk,” Mikhail Blinkin said.

Yet even as Moscow grap-ples with its existing traffic problem, its population growth may only make the challenge even more difficult. The city authorities estimates that Moscow's population may grow to 15 million by 2025 – and illegal immigra-tion may drive the actual pop-ulation much higher.

Blinkin noted that progress will depend in part on the city’s commitment to spend-ing in the face of economic uncertainties.

In the meantime, accord-

Moscow was ranked the world's most gridlocked city in 2014.

ing to Alisher Budtobaev, a Moscow taxi driver, the con-struction associated with the plan is actually making the city's traffic problem worse in many places. “As soon as the construction ends, I ex-pect it’ll become gradually better,” he says.

Millions of Russian com-muters hope that he’s right.

NIZHNEKAMSK,

PETRO-CHEMICALAND OIL

REFINERY

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The debate over Euro-pean security turns on the different ways Russia and the West

interpret NATO’s expansion – and their different interpre-tations are rooted in the ways both sides viewed the Cold War.

According to Russian lead-ers, the Cold War ended as a result of the joint efforts of the USSR and the US in the late 1980s to move from a re-lationship based on confron-tation to one focused on co-operation.

After the agreed-upon end to the icy confrontation, Rus-sians expected that the two sides would jointly determine the future of the areas where their interests overlapped, that is, primarily in the area of European security.

The main issue to be de-cided was the future of NATO, which had been established as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union.

In the late ’80s, in talks on the future of Germany, the subject of how German re-unification would affect NATO was frequently dis-cussed. As part of the discus-sions, the Soviet Union agreed not to oppose German reuni-

Russian President Vladimir Putin left Australia’s recent G20 summit earlier

than expected, returning home to “get some sleep ahead of the working week”.

This was largely interpret-ed as his way of saying that he was irritated with the re-ception he received in Bris-bane. Whether or not the re-ception and the reaction were justifi ed, what is important is what his early departure might indicate about the G20 and the future of Ukraine.

First, it means that the cur-rent crisis in Ukraine will continue, because no solution agreeable to all parties has emerged. In his fi nal remarks to the media, Putin said that the bilateral meetings during the summit were almost ex-clusively devoted to Ukraine, even though it had never been part of the official agenda. Essentially, he went to Aus-tralia to talk about Ukraine.

It seems the G20 as a glob-al institution is of limited sig-nifi cance for Moscow at the moment. In Russia’s success-ful hosting of a G20 summit in St Petersburg in 2013, the goal was to organise the meeting in the most efficient manner, to prove once again that Russia belonged in the top tier of global financial players.

This year, the opportunity to meet with global leaders at the summit was far more important for Russia than the actual G20 agenda.

Of course, some core G20 issues are still pressing, but they are being superseded by Ukraine in the minds of Rus-sian decision makers. That could be one of the reasons why Putin left early.

As the head of state, he deals with the issues he con-siders the most important and in the foreign policy domain right now that would be Ukraine. Having held all the bilateral meetings where the issue was discussed and hav-ing used every other oppor-tunity to discuss it between the meetings, Putin could

Andrey

SushentsovPROFESSOR

VIEWS SHAPED BY COLD-WAR PRISM

PUTIN'S G20 EXIT MEANS UKRAINE STILL TOP ISSUE

fi cation and NATO member states agreed not to deploy the alliance’s military infra-structure in East Germany – an agreement they honour still. However, there was much debate as to whether the agreement not to expand eastward would apply only to East Germany or to east-ern Europe generally.

According to the personal notes of US Secretary of State James Baker, the subject was discussed in a conversation with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in Feb-ruary 1990. But Baker’s notes are inconclusive about how the parties left the issue.

Despite the fact that the USSR was clear in its ada-mant opposition to NATO en-largement, no agreement was signed that would guarantee no expansion. During discus-sions in 1989-90, the issue did not come up because the War-saw Pact was still in place.

However, from 1991, the USSR lost its control over central and eastern Europe.

Communist governments fell, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the West had no impetus to engage in any negotiations or agreements with Moscow.

Motivation to negotiate with Moscow further de-creased with the breakup of the USSR. Under Boris Yelt-sin, Russia not only set aside Soviet demands for guaran-

tees that NATO would not expand, but even toyed with the idea of joining the alli-ance itself.

In 1990, Yeltsin, the chair-man of the Russian Supreme Soviet, wrote: “In what ap-pears to be almost a mock-ery of our four and a bit years of perestroika, in a matter of days, the GDR, Czechoslova-kia and Bulgaria made such a leap from the past towards a normal, humane, civilised society that it is no longer clear if we shall ever be able to catch up with them.”

These words explain why Russia was so tolerant of for-mer Warsaw Pact members’ aspirations to join NATO.

For their part, members of the North Atlantic Alliance perceived the situation as a clear victory, and put forward a program to turn the bloc into a universal security or-ganisation. In this context, Russia lost its status as an equal partner and became, as far as NATO was concerned, just another country that the alliance would deal with on its own terms.

From these beginnings pro-found imbalances around Eu-ropean security emerged, and these caused ongoing disa-greements between Russia and NATO from the mid ’90s onwards. Over time, omis-sions and reticence led to a complete breakdown of un-derstanding between the par-ties. In effect, the West failed to create a coherent and pur-poseful policy for working with Russia.

It was customary to believe that Moscow was moving to-ward the West, and therefore that the West could not do Russia any harm by acting unilaterally. While the goal of this policy was not to ignore Moscow’s interests, in prac-tice, that was what it did.

This approach didn’t change even after the fi rst se-rious disagreements between Russia and NATO erupted during the conflicts in the Balkans. At that time, the West acted unilaterally on its own interpretations of how to ensure European security, which included expanding NATO and deploying US mis-siles in eastern Europe.

When Russia baulked at these moves, Washington and Brussels responded that Rus-sia could also take whatever steps it felt were necessary. The West was not concerned with the corresponding steps Russia was taking to strength-en its own security because it believed that Moscow was not an adversary and did not represent a credible threat.

The widely held belief was that while Russia wanted equal partnership, it was not an equal partner.

The Ukrainian crisis is just the latest example of Russia and the West’s failure create a post-Cold War world order.

To prevent future confl icts in Europe, Russia and the West should agree on new rules of engagement, both in Europe and in the rest of the world.

Andrey Sushentsov is an as-sociate professor at the Mos-cow State Institute of Inter-national Relations (MGIMO) and a Valdai Club fellow.

honestly say that his job was done. In that sense, the Aus-tralian summit was round three for Russia trying to es-tablish a presidential-level communication mechanism.

First, Putin expressed his world views at the meeting of the Valdai Club in Sochi in October. Then there was the APEC summit in Beijing last month, where Putin had a couple of short conversa-tions with US President Bar-rack Obama. Finally, there were the bilateral meetings in Australia. Yet there have been no indications of pro-gress on the Ukrainian crisis.

The second outcome of the abrupt summit ending for Russia means that we all have to be more responsible. Glob-al politics is no longer about closed-door, minister-level meetings. It involves numer-ous stakeholders including the expert community, media and the public.

Transparent meetings, as well as cameras all over the summit venue, prevented frank and open communica-tion. National public opinion leaders and domestic oppo-sition members essentially sit behind every G20 participant, looking for opportunities to capitalise on what could be perceived as indications of weakness.

Too much friendliness with the Russian President would probably have been seen this way. Diplomacy requires clear communication, and this is sometimes the reason why ne-gotiations need to take place away from the public and the media.

Apparently, the leaders used the G20 summit, as far as they were able, to at least exchange opinions. But this is as far as things went.

Alexey Dolinskiy is a partner at Capstone Connections consultancy. He has a PhD in political science and is a win-ner of the Valdai Club Foun-dation Grant Program. He currently works in corporate diplomacy in the Asia Pacifi c region and Europe.

Alexey

Dolinskiy ANALYST, SPECIAL TO RUSSIA DIRECT

Motivation to negotiate with Moscow further decreased with the breakup of the USSR

In effect, the West failed to create a coherent and purposeful policy for working with Russia

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MOST READ THE BERLIN WALL: UNFULFILLED HOPES

rbth.com/41219 Opinion

11

The processes by which great nations are born and die, global em-pires are transformed

into mediocre states and ob-scure upstarts turn into rul-ers of the world, are myste-rious and little understood, despite all the best efforts of academics and politicians to analyse them.

Today China is at the cen-tre of the debate over this process, just as the US was 100 years ago. At the turn of the 20th century, the US was still waiting for its fi nest hour. It had already made a re-markable economic leap, but had not yet received interna-tional political recognition.

There are many similari-ties in the historical develop-ment trajectories of the US and China at their moments of transformation into world hegemonies.

The founding father of Chi-na’s economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, instructed his suc-cessors to be modest in their dealings with the outside world and wait for the right moment to come into their own. Similar recommenda-tions some 200 years earlier were left by US founding fa-ther George Washington in his political will.

The US began to shed its isolationism only after it had overtaken all its internation-al economic rivals, which oc-curred under Theodore Roosevelt in the 1900s.

China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has much in common with Roosevelt. China’s “big stick” policy in the South China Sea, tough rhetoric and ambitious statements all in-

In the 20-plus years since Ukraine declared inde-pendence from the Soviet Union, the country’s gov-

ernance has lurched from one corrupt group of oligarchs to the next.

Transparency Internation-al ranked Ukraine 144 on a scale that sets 177 as most corrupt. Russia fares slightly better, at 127, and the EU member states are all well below 100.

I point this out not to de-fame Ukraine as much as to ask why Ukraine is always portrayed in the Western media as a “little bit of Eu-rope” suffering under Russian

Pat Davis

SzymczakCOMMENTATOR

Ivan

TsvetkovPROFESSOR

PUTIN'S CHINA CARD MAY BE AN ACE

UKRAINE LET DOWN BYCORRUPT LEADERS

dicate China’s desire to ac-celerate the process of spend-ing its economic capital on foreign policy.

For the US, the event that removed all obstacles on its path to establishing its inter-national political infl uence was World War I.

A glance at today’s head-lines prompts the conclusion that China will not have to wait long before it rises to the top of the global pedes-tal. Of course the confronta-tion between Russia and the West is a true godsend for China.

Just as the self-destruction of the Euro-centric world a century ago prepared the ground for building a new US-centric system, the weak-ening of the US in its stand-off with Russia in the 21st

century will result in its being replaced by China as the lead-ing global power.

It is sad to admit that in both cases, the role of the key spoiler – the country that ru-ined the balance of the glob-al power system – belongs to Russia.

In the opinion of many Americans, modern Russia does not present a serious force to be reckoned with in-ternationally and can claim only the status of a regional power. They may be right as far as Russia’s positive capa-bilities are concerned, but its negative potential is immeas-urably higher.

The real Russian threat lies in Moscow’s ability to destroy the US-centric world order by starting to play the China card in the hope of hurting

the US and compensating for losses resulting from Western sanctions.

The argument in favour of Russia forming an anti-American bloc with China and other countries, often re-peated by Moscow’s politi-cians, is that a new interna-tional system will not be based on hegemony or bipo-larity, but rather on equal partnership between the growing economies of Eura-sia and Latin America, which form a counterbalance to the US and challenge the dollar’s global domination.

This utopia may have some propaganda value, but the problem is that even the mas-terminds of Russian foreign policy do not believe in it.

It is absolutely obvious that the sluggish progress in Rus-

sian-Chinese economic rela-tions prior to 2014 and its substitution with grandilo-quent, but ineffective, decla-rations and memorandums of understanding had only one reason: Russian President Vladimir Putin did not want to let China on to his terri-tory. Now, however, in 2014 this resistance is no longer possible.

Putin has decided that the threat of China’s economic and demographic domination of Russia is less serious than the threat of the US provok-ing a “colour revolution” in Russia.

Suddenly, the future of the global political system has become less important than the more immediate fear of losing political control. Putin was faced with the dilemma of losing power under the Americans or retaining it under the Chinese. It could hardly be a surprise that he opted for the latter.

A similar strategic choice is being presented to the US.

The recent series of East Asian summits has clearly shown that China will not miss this opportunity to fi sh in these troubled waters, so the US must now decide which is more important to it: to punish the aggressor, Putin, losing its world he-gemony in the process, or to fi nd a way of resolving the conflict with Russia, thus halting the process of Chi-na’s transformation into a political and military super-power.

Unfortunately for the US leadership, the choice is not as obvious as it was for Putin.

Ivan Tsvetkov is an associate professor at St Petersburg State University.

tyranny. It’s worth remember-ing that Kiev has run its own show since 1992, and in those 20 years Ukraine has behaved like a teenager: living off Rus-sian gas but not wanting to follow Russia’s rules.

My friends and acquaint-ances in Ukraine sprout a rainbow of political opinions, but they all agree on one thing: Ukraine’s economy never had a chance to devel-op, because one group of po-litically embedded oligarchs after another have profi ted off the state, effectively bank-rupting the country. Red rev-olution, orange revolution, and whatever colour it was in 1992, the old bosses haven’t differed much from the new.

In the mid-1990s, I inter-viewed Shell’s Ukrainian

America to Europe, “if the price was right.”

The offer was to encourage Europe to consider sanction-ing Russian diesel.

In May, Spain’s Iberdrola power company signed a 20-year contract to buy $US5.6 billion worth of US LNG from Cheniere Energy Inc.

And as talks commenced this summer on the Transat-lantic Trade and Investment Partnership – potentially the largest trade agreement in the history of the world – the Washington Post obtained a “leaked” document in which the EU pressed the US to end its ban on crude oil exports.

Events in Ukraine and dis-trust of Russia were cited as reasons.

Pat Davis Szymczak is the founder and editorial direc-tor of Oil&Gas Eurasia, a monthly, bilingual trade pub-lication devoted to the appli-cation of Western technology to Russian and CIS oil and gas fi elds.

only in 2013 to sign a $US10 billion deal to develop shale gas in eastern Ukraine. Shell drilled two exploration wells in the Yuzivska fi eld before fighting around Slovyansk forced it to freeze operations this spring.

Shell’s agreement in Janu-ary 2013 was followed in No-vember by a similar $US10 billion deal negotiated by Chevron to develop the Oless-ka shale gas fi eld in western Ukraine.

The US Energy Informa-tion Administration estimates Ukraine’s shale gas reserves as Europe’s third largest, at 42 trillion cubic feet.

Offshore it’s a similar story. Shell, Chevron and Exxon-mobil have tried over the years to develop projects there, together with Ukrain-ian interests. A New York Times article recently quoted experts as saying the energy potential of the Black Sea might even exceed that of the North Sea. But nothing ever really took off.

Ukraine’s inability to get its act together and take ad-vantage of its assets has cre-ated an opening likely to be fi lled by the US, which has seemingly overnight moved from being an energy import-er to a potentially massive ex-porter, at a time when Rus-sia is struggling to maintain

its position as the world’s top energy exporter in the midst of a production decline in its prolifi c west Siberian fi elds.

As the EU and US dis-cussed its fi rst round of sanc-tions against Russia earlier this year, Platts reported that Washington had let Europe-an leaders know it was pre-pared to shift US diesel fuel exports bound for South

Of course the confrontation between Russia and the West is a true godsend for China

country manager in Kiev. At that time, Shell was negoti-ating with Ukraine’s first post-Soviet government to reopen Ukrainian gas fi elds.

Shell’s manager told me that there was enough gas left to supply Ukraine’s domes-tic needs and even to export. But the company abandoned the project when it couldn’t reach an agreement with the Ukrainian side.

The executive told me that the demands for payoffs had made it impossible to nego-tiate a deal, even though the project would have enriched the economy of newly inde-pendent Ukraine with new sources of tax revenue, new jobs and even energy inde-pendence from Russia.

Shell returned to Ukraine

China will not have long to wait long before it rises to the top of the global pedestal

Ukraine has behaved like a teenager: living off Russian gas, but not wanting to follow Russia's rules

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MOST READScience&Tech RUSSIA'S ANSWER TO THE IPHONE 6

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IVAN SAFRONOVKOMMERSANT DAILY NEWSPAPER

While Russia will uphold its

commitments to the

International Space Station to

2020, sources say Russia may

deploy its own high-latitude

orbital station from 2017.

Russia may quit space station and build its own

Space Roskosmos will fulfil its international obligations until at least 2020

According to industry sourc-es, Russia may begin work on the creation of its own space station in 2017.

It will have to give up de-veloping the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) but will fulfi l all its obligations to the other participants in the program to 2020.

It is proposed that some of the modules that were pre-viously intended for the ISS will be incorporated into the new station.

A source close to the ad-ministration of the Central Research Institute of Machine Engineering (the space indus-try’s leading research facili-ty) said that creating a Rus-sian high-latitude orbital station is one of the key pro-visions in a manned space program for the period up to 2050.

The program is being draft-ed by a joint group of experts from Russia’s space agency Roskosmos and associated re-search institutes.

The Russian station is pro-posed to be deployed between 2017 and 2019.

“The initial confi guration will be developed on the basis of the multi-purpose labora-tory and nodes of the OKA-T spacecraft,” the source said, citing the group’s proposals. “The operation of the station will be ensured by Soyuz-MS and Progress-MS spacecraft, whereas in 2020-2024 it may be possible to test the energy and the node module used in the lunar program.”

Some modules that were intended for the ISS may be used in Russia's own new station.

Despite these plans, sourc-es insist that there is no talk of ending Russia’s work on the ISS ahead of schedule. Moscow is determined to ful-fil its international obliga-tions until 2020.

In May this year, as rela-tions between Moscow and Washington were cooling and sanctions were being intro-duced, Deputy Prime Minis-ter Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the Russian space industry, said that Russia does not intend to extend the op-eration of the ISS until 2024, as proposed by the US, and will use the allocated fund-ing on other space projects.

But there are still uncer-tainties around Russian par-ticipation in the ISS.

Early last month, Roskos-mos head Oleg Ostapenko in-formed NASA chief Charles Bolden that Russia will make its fi nal decision on whether to extend the operation of the ISS until 2024 before the end of this year.

Reasons for the project One reason for the project is that the launch of manned Soyuz-MS rockets from the Vostochny cosmodrome (in the Amur region of Russia’s far east) to an orbital incli-nation of 51.6 degrees (which is the orbital inclination of the ISS) has risks for the crew during launch: in the event of a failure, the cosmonauts will end up in open sea.

Russia’s orbital station will be at 64.8 degrees, while the flight course during the launch phase will be above ground.

In addition, the station’s co-ordinates will make it possi-ble to deliver cargoes there using rockets launched from the military cosmodrome in Plesetsk, in Russia’s Arkhan-gelsk region.

Russia will thus get access to civilian space exploration from two sites and will elim-inate potential political risks associated with using the Bai-konur cosmodrome in Ka-zakhstan.

“The new station will be located in a geometrically ad-vantageous position, with a possibility to expand the sec-tor of earth coverage,” the source said. “From the station, it will be possible to see 90 per cent of the territory of Russia and the Arctic shelf, whereas for the ISS this fi g-ure is no more than 5 per cent.”

Another function to be per-formed by the new station will be conducting fl ight and development tests of manned lunar spacecraft.

“In effect, we are talking of creating a bridgehead of sorts: fi rst, spacecraft will be delivered to the station and then proceed to the Moon,” the source explained.

Costs of new stationThe cost of the new station has not yet been disclosed. For the initial phase of de-ploying the space station, modules and spacecraft being developed for the Russian segment of the ISS will be used. Experts anticipate that this should not involve any additional costs.

Russia has been taking part in the ISS program since 1998. Currently, Roskosmos spends just one sixth of the amount spent by NASA on its maintenance (in 2013 alone, the US allocated $US3 billion for the purpose), although Russia is entitled to half of the crew places.

Before joining the ISS project, Russia operated the Mir space station, which was ultimately decommissioned in 2001.

One of the reasons given for the decision to take it out of orbit was that Mir was ex-pensive to maintain, costing about $US200 million every year.

In 2011, the former head of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, Yury Koptev, admitted: “There were no grounds to continue operat-ing Mir because of the disas-trous state it was in. There were even such critical mo-ments when we simply lost control of the station when adjusting its orbit.”

In November, a session of the Russian-Kazakh inter-governmental commission was held in Astana, Kazakh-stan, where heads of state, in-cluding Ostapenko and Ro-gozin, together with officials from Roskosmos, discussed this plan and Russia’s other space-industry initiatives.

SOPHIE TEREKHOVASPECIAL TO RBTH

The 'Internet of Things', the

concept of objects interacting

with millions of other objects

and events, in Russia is

attracting interest as an

emerging market.

'Internet of Things’will unleash a newera of innovation

Web Coffee with a wave of your hand

The world’s fi rst Internet of Things (IoT) was created by John Romkey, one of the fa-thers of the TCP/IP protocol, who hooked his toaster up to the internet. The Internet of People transitioned to the In-ternet of Things in 2009, when the number of connected de-vices surpassed the number of users. The concept was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the end of the 1990s and has only recently appeared in Russia. However, it has already in-spired Russian developers to create new start-ups.

GO+, a new cloud service, came to market last year. GO+ allows you to unite a variety of devices, quickly deploy your own services and create new ones.

Europe and the US already have an enormous number of these devices and protocols. However, for Russia GO+ is a step into the world of IoT. Projects such as GO+ are tools that make it possible to in-troduce various devices to each other. In GO+’s case, it can be any device, even ones that operate on different com-munication protocols, start-ing with devices from the “smart home” concept such as motion sensors and light-ing and ending with more so-phisticated devices.

Now GO+ not only con-nects devices to control them, but also adds a developer en-vironment in which you can customise your own control scripts between devices.

“For example, let’s say you want the coffee machine to prepare a hot coffee for you when you’re entering the of-fi ce,” Alexander Grankin ex-plained. “It will determine your location using a GPS tracker. Then you’ll get a fi t-ness bracelet like the Jaw-

bone, and the coffee machine will be able to make your cof-fee with the wave of your hand.

“New devices are coming into being each day, and new demands and desires are com-ing into being with them.”

According to Grankin, eve-rything started with a pro-ject involving the develop-ment of GPS and geolocation services. At that time it was called machine to machine (M2M) because it was based on transferring data between sensors from machine to ma-chine. M2M became an inte-gral part of the IoT, which was born at MIT.

At its core, GO+ uses the architectural concept of the social network. The user adds devices and can provide other users access to their data.

The user does not have to have a single real device, but can be signed on to hundreds of others in his or her social environment – weather sta-tions, transport trackers, air-conditioners, video cameras. A person can come to a cafe, sign on to an airconditioner in his or her GO+ profi le and control it.

Internet services such as Twitter and fi tness apps like Moves also fit into the IoT concept. For example, if Twit-ter and a GPS navigator were joined up, it could serve as an interesting solution to au-tomatically broadcast data on the user’s travel directly to his or her Twitter feed.

All of the big brands are buying solutions making it possible to combine things with the internet.

“It is possible that the major brands are planning to take over the market this way, so that later they can com-bine all of the vertical solu-tions they bought up into one horizontal one,” Grankin said. “Big corporations are prepar-ing to pounce so they can oc-cupy leading positions, be-cause there isn’t a leader on the global market for the In-ternet of Things yet.

“So right now we’re like surfers waiting for a wave that’s really close.”

New cloud services are entering the Russian market.

At the end of last month, Mikhail Kokorich, the director of private Russian satellite produc-er Dauria Aerospace, proposed a new business project for the Russian part of the Interna-tional Space Station (ISS). He wants to start delivering nanosatellites to the ISS using a booster rocket and then put the satellites into orbit for clients.In Kokorich’s opinion, miniature satellites will make it possible to generate extra funds to de-velop Russia's space industry. This new service was scheduled to be implemented in 2019, but because Russia is planning to abandon its use of the ISS in 2020, it is unclear whether the project will come to fruition.Until recently, space programs in Russia were the preroga-tive of the government. How-ever, several space companies have already managed to prove themselves on this sector. In addition to Dauria Aerospace, another promising company is Scandex, which supplies satel-lite images for maps for Yandex and Russia’s Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography (Rosreestr).

Before joining the International Space Station project [in 1998] Russia operated the Mir space station, which was ultimately decommissioned in 2001

Private push for

mini-satellites


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MOST READ DID COMETS BRING LIFE TO EARTH?

rbth.com/41795 Science&Tech

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DARYA KEZINARBTH

Russian scientists have

developed a new antiviral

drug that combats viral

proteins and effectively

fights a large number of

viruses and infections.

New drug promises to lift fight against viruses

Pharmaceuticals Broad-spectrum antiviral drug to be on the market this year

By the end of the year, Rus-sian pharmacies will be stocked with the broadly active anti-viral medication Triazavirin – a drug devel-oped by researchers at the Chemo-Technological Insti-tute at Ural State University in Yekaterinburg, in collabo-ration with other research in-stitutes across the country.

The drug is said to be ca-pable of helping to treat so-phisticated viruses such as the Ebolavirus as well as eve-ryday strains of infl uenza.

The drug has also been shown to be effective against Crimean-Congo haemorrhag-ic fever, Rift Valley fever, the West Nile virus and other vi-ruses that are dangerous for animals.

Its application is potential-ly so broad that it is being touted as the new aspirin.

International interest“The drug indeed contains unique pharmacological qualities,” says Professor Oleg Kiselyov, director of the Re-search Institute of Infl uenza and member of the Russian Academy of Medical Scienc-es. “Currently, Russia is actively developing fi ve ana-logues, which are directed to-ward various treatment targets.”

The launch of Triazavirin was organised at the Medsin-tez Pharmaceutical Plant. Ac-cording to the producer's cal-culations, the optimal volume

of production could reach 12 million packets a year.

In its fi rst year Triazavirin will be sold only in Russia and only by prescription. In the future, however, the drug will likely be released in other countries too.

Kiselyov says that Triaza-virin has already attracted international interest. For ex-ample, two years ago the US successfully tested it against the West Nile virus, and in September, the drug was pre-sented at a World Health Organisation conference in Geneva.

“A comparative analysis of antiviral drugs against Ebola showed that Triazavirin is one of the leaders,” Kiselyov said. “Out of all the drugs that are on the market today, it is one of the best: it is the least toxic, it has a good therapeutic index, it can be administered intravenously to the extreme-ly ill and it is compatible with other therapies.”

The new drug belongs to the triazolo-triazine group, which has a special mecha-nism: it suppresses the early stages of cell infection that are important for a virus’s de-velopment.

By interacting with the vi-rus’s proteins, the Triazavirin molecule makes the virus non-viable. But the drug also helps protect the body at any phase of viral infection. Such drugs have never been used in clinical practice; most of

the antiviral medications used today act by supporting a person’s immunity or by treating the symptoms of the illness.

“Triazavirin is an example of the realisation of the Rus-sian scientific idea, of the product coming to the mar-ket,” said Alexander Petrov, member of the Russian Duma Health Committee and mem-ber of the Ural Biomedical Cluster Supervisory Board.

Petrov points out that Ural scientists Valery Charushin and Oleg Chupakhin were awarded the State Prize of

the Russian Federation for the development of the fun-damentals of the triazolo-tri-azine organic synthesis and the Triazavirin medication.

Low toxicityAccording to Vladimir Rusinov, a member of the sci-entifi c group developing Tri-azavirin and director of the Chemo-Technological Insti-tute at the Ural State Uni-versity in Yekaterinburg, a broadly active antiviral drug already exists: Ribavirin. However, Ribavirin is toxic and can accumulate in red blood cells.

During the SARS epidem-ic in China, those infected were given unprecedentedly large single doses of Ribavi-rin and the virus was elimi-nated, but some patients were left with damage to the liver and blood-forming organs. In

comparison, Triazavirin’s tox-icity is considered very low.

“During the testing stage, even increasing the dosage of the drug, we were unable kill lab mice,” says Vladimir Rusinov, who claimed that this was proof that it had in-signifi cant toxicity levels.

20 years in development The medication was in de-velopment for more than 20 years and was a result of re-search that started as far back as the 1990s.

After many years of labo-ratory testing on mice and primates, the drug was used to treat humans. Clinical test-ing to study the drug's ther-apeutic effectiveness on peo-ple infected with infl uenza of moderate severity was car-ried out successfully at the Research Institute of Infl u-enza in St Petersburg.

The medication was fi rst highly praised by Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova in 2009, when Russia needed protection from the swine fl u pandemic. After this, thanks to the Healthy Ministry’s support, the drug went through phase II and III of clinical testing and was registered in connec-tion with the necessity of being able to treat Ebola.

The main contributions to the research and development of Triazavirin were made by the Postovsky Institute of Or-ganic Synthesis in Yekaterin-burg, the Yeltsin Ural State University, the Russian Health Ministry Research In-stitute of Infl uenza, the Sci-entifi c-Research Testing In-stitute of Military Medicine in St Petersburg and the Vi-rology Centre at the Russian Defence Ministry.

Triazavirin is

being com-

pared to as-

pirin in

terms of its

capacity for

widespread

application.

The drug

has been

shown to

stop viruses

developing

in the early

stages of in-

fection, and

it has been

proved to

effectively

treat a

broad range

of viruses,

including

Ebola. Re-

search to

date also

suggests

that it is low

in toxicity.

The drug is said to be capable of helping to treat sophisticated viruses such as the Ebolavirus

In comparison to existing antivirals, Triazinvirin's toxicity is considered very low

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MOST READ HERMITAGE TO OPEN NEW BRANCH IN THE FAR EAST

rbth.com/41783Culture

14

ALEXANDRA GURYANOVARBTH

Seventeen popular Instagram

users were given free reign in

the completely empty halls

of Russia’s most famous

museum – the Hermitage –

for just one day.

Portraits of a museum on its day offPhotography Some of Russia's leading Instagram users take part in an unusual creative project in the Hermitage

Russia’s most active Insta-gram users have been given the opportunity to explore the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg on its day off.

On November 10, 17 lead-ing users of the online photo application took part in an action called #EmptyHermit-age, which allowed them to browse the completely empty halls of the museum and take photographs at their leisure.

The museum is tradition-ally closed on Mondays.

The group of amateur pho-tographers was selected by Instagram Russia based on the popularity and activity of their accounts.

This is the second event of its kind under a joint project by Instagram Russia and Rus-sian cultural institutions. In October, Instagrammers took over the empty Bolshoi The-atre in Moscow.

According to the organis-ers, the main purpose of these events is to open the doors of beautiful buildings to tal-ented Instagram photogra-phers during off-hours, when they are completely devoid of tourists.

The Instagrammers had to conform to a strict black-tie dress code to take part in the Hermitage event.

“The idea of dressing up also helped us at the meet-ing at the Bolshoi,” Insta-gram’s community manager for Russia and Eastern Eu-

rope, Olesya Shayakhmetova, told RBTH. “It’s really impor-tant to unite people prior to the shoot.

“It makes the photo session really more interesting. At the Hermitage it’s as if we were reincarnated into the protag-onists of a captivating movie that was unfolding in one of the world’s most famous museums.

“We had chases, love sto-ries – everything was like a real movie.”

The Instagrammers seemed to get a lot out of the expe-rience. “You have the oppor-tunity to view the space and photograph the museum from any angle in silence and calm, without thinking about visi-tors getting into the shot or ruining the composition,” Shayakhmetova refl ected.

Instagrammer Yekaterina Mishchenkova said: “It’s amazing to feel the breath of the empty Hermitage. It’s as if you’re inside an enormous living organism.”

Photographer Anastasia Kopteva agreed. “Without the crowds, you immediately get a special sense of just how much power and beauty there is in this space,” she said.

Instagrammers captured not only the empty halls of the Hermitage but also unique episodes involving the museum’s employees.

In some of the photos, you can see light bulbs being changed in enormous crystal chandeliers and picture frames being dusted.

“I was able to observe stu-dent artists who work at the museum on its days off – the Hermitage as a theatre with its own special life behind the scenes,” Melekestseva said.

Popular images from the #EmptyHermitage project include (1), (2) and (4), which were taken by the Instagrammer "Katia Mi",

who has about 10,000 followers, while image (3) was taken by the user "evgeniaanikeeva", who has about 30,000. The photog-

raphers were asked to dress in black-tie for the project, and they themselves ended up becoming subjects in the photo shoot,

which took on an impromptu theatrical life of its own.

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JOY NEUMEYERSPECIAL TO RBTH

Under the leadership of

maestro Valery Gergiev, the

Mariinsky Theatre has

remained one of Russia's

most revered and influential

cultural institutions.

Maestro brings new glory days to imperial theatre

Performance The additiion of Mariinsky II has created one of the world's busiest and most influential cultural institutions

The twin peaks of Russia’s classical world— the mint-green Mariinsky Theatre, the pride of the tsars, and the sleek modernist glass of Mariinsky II, completed last year – look over St Peters-burg’s picturesque Kryukov canal.

Today, the Mariinsky (known affectionately in Rus-sian as the “Mariinka”) is one

breaking point, then to the very edge of its abilities.”

The institution fi rst opened its doors in 1783 as the Bolshoi Stone Theatre. In 1860, when it was rebuilt after a fi re, it was rechristened the Mariinsky in honour of Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Tsar Alexander II. Under the tsars, it was frequented by the imperial family as well as luminaries such as poet Al-exander Pushkin.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the theatre premiered ballets including The Nut-cracker, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and operas such as Boris Godunov and Prince Igor. Under the lead-ership of Marius Pepita, it produced the canonical ver-sions of ballets that would become the bedrock of clas-sical repertoire worldwide.

In the Soviet era, the Kirov (as it was renamed in the 1930s) continued to be well

regarded and well funded. During this time,it staged in-fl uential performances of bal-lets and operas such as Eu-gene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, though it lost two its of its most celebrated dancers, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to the West. After the collapse of the Soviet system in the 1990s, Gergiev embarked on a heavy

touring schedule to keep the theatre afl oat.

Under Gergiev, the theatre also began to expand. First came a new concert hall in 2007. Then, with the backing of Russia’s President, a close ally of Gergiev’s, the maestro

was able to achieve his dream project, the Mariinsky II, a 2000-seat theatre that cost more than $US700 million.

The new theatre, which hosts opera and ballet, es-chewed the chandeliers and gilding of its predecessor for a sleek wooden auditorium with windows that look over the canal (a bridge also con-nects it to the old theatre).

Despite early snubs by the city’s cultural elite, who de-rided what they considered its bland design, the power-ful, crisp acoustics of the Mariinsky II have earned it enthusiastic reviews.

The Mariinsky’s sheer size now dwarfs most other clas-sical theatres. When its two theatres and concert hall are working, it has more than 5000 seats. When discussing the expansion, Gergiev, 61, told newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that he won’t be going on holidays any time soon.

of the busiest and most fre-netic cultural institutions in the world. It premieres six or seven major new productions a year (while the Bolshoi The-atre in Moscow typically pre-mieres two or three.)

It also hosts St Petersburg’s annual Stars of the White Nights festival, which this year presented 118 works by companies from Russia and abroad. The theatre brought to the public some of the world’s top singers and bal-let dancers, including Fyodor Chaliapin, Anna Netrebko, Anna Pavlova and George Balanchine.

After the collapse of the So-viet system brought the proud

imperial theatre to its knees, the Mariinsky’s reincarnation as a modern juggernaut has been largely due to one man:

Valery Gergiev, the maestro who has headed the compa-ny since 1996.

“Under Gergiev,” wrote critic Dmitry Rezansky, “the Mariinsky transformed into an immense theatrical mul-tiplex working, if not to

The Mariinsky's reincarnation as a modern juggernaut is largely due to one man, Valery Gergiev

The powerful and crisp acoustics of the Mariinsky II have earned it enthusiastic reviews

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MOST READ CULTURAL 'PASSPORTS' HELP TOURISTS SAVE MONEY

rbth.com/41715 Culture

15

SVYATOSLAV IVANOVSPECIAL TO RBTH

Little known outside Russia

perhaps, Russia's leading art

collectors are up there with

the world's best. RBTH looks

at five of them and where

their collections are today.

Collectors' devotion to art leaves the nation a rich legacy

Galleries Collections rival world's best

Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery is hosting an exhibition of works from the collection of George Costakis, one of the best-known collectors of Rus-sian art. It turns out that the storerooms housing one great collection of art have for a long time been hiding anoth-er. RBTH has decided to use this occasion to recall the big-gest collectors of Russian art and find out where their treasures are kept now.

Pavel Tretyakov (1832-1898)

Tretyakov is a key fi gure in the history of Russian art. The famous Moscow merchant conceived his collection as a foundation for a future gal-lery. The main provision of his will, which he made well in advance, was to preserve the collection as a whole, and it was that provision which saved the Tretyakov Gallery’s collection from being divid-ed between different muse-ums during the Soviet years.

The gallery’s art collection is one of the best known in the world. It traces the histo-ry of Russian art from icon masterpieces (including the original of Andrei Rublev’s

Trinity) through the realism of the Peredvizhniks move-ment (Savrasov, Shishkin, Repin) to the uncompromis-ing avant-garde art of the early 20th century (the famous Black Square by Malevich and his other works).

The building which houses the gallery was also built under Tretyakov’s supervi-sion. He commissioned the design of the facade from one of the most prominent artists of his time, Viktor Vasnetsov – a co-founder of folklorist and romantic modernist painting in Russia.

His ornate modernist im-print on the building trans-mits something of the spirit of the collection.

Sergei Shchukin (1854-1936)

Collecting was a family tra-dition with the Shchukins, an Old Believer merchant dynas-ty. Of the four brothers, the most successful collector was Sergei Shchukin, who decid-ed to focus on French mod-ernism.

A regular at Paris galler-ies, he set about buying Im-pressionists’ masterpieces long before they became ap-preciated by others. His brothers may have thought him eccentric, but it was Ser-gei’s collection that turned out to be the most valuable, with works by Monet, Mat-isse, Cezanne and Gauguin.

Sergei Shchukin may well be the greatest art buyer the

world has ever seen. In So-theby’s evaluation, his collec-tion would be worth $US8.5 billion today. After the revo-lution, Shchukin emigrated to France and his collection was nationalised. Paintings collected by him are now on display in state museums.

Ivan Morozov (1871–1921)

An heir to a renowned mer-chant dynasty, as a child Mo-rozov learnt to paint with Russia’s leading Impression-ist, Konstantin Korovin. How-ever, having graduated from a university in Switzerland, he gave up painting and began to run the family’s tex-tile factories. But his friend-ships with artists in Moscow mean that he never lost in-terest in art.

If sold at an auction today, Ivan Morozov’s collection would fetch $US5 billion, less than Shchukin’s, and yet it would still be one of the most valuable private collections in history. Highlights of his collection include Picasso’s Girl on the ball, Van Gogh’s The night cafe and Renoir’s Portrait of Jeanne Samary.

Combined with Shchukin’s legacy, in the 1920s-40s Mo-

rozov’s collection formed the basis of the Museum of New Western Art. Later the paint-ings were divided between the Hermitage and the Push-kin Museum in Moscow, where they can be seen still.

George Costakis (1913-1990)

A Soviet-born ethnic Greek, as a young man Costakis worked as a chauffeur at the Greek embassy in Moscow. He often accompanied dip-lomats on their visits to an-tique shops, where his love of art was born.

Costakis formed his out-standing collection in the 1930s-70s. He paid particu-lar attention to avant-garde artists who were not consid-ered noteworthy or valuable at the time.

The best example of his collection is Uprising by Kli-ment Red’ko, which depicts the Bolshevik Revolution pantheon styled as an icon. Costakis was also collector of icons.

In the 1970s, he emigrat-ed to Greece and had to leave a large part of his collection behind (it was transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery). He did manage to take some

pieces with him. Ultimately the Greek government, hav-ing bought most of the paintings that he brought, set up a modern art muse-um in Thessaloniki to house his collection.

Igor Savitsky (1915-1984)

Formally, Igor Savitsky can-not be considered a collector since he did not own any art. However, he single-handedly created a unique museum col-lection, thus becoming – alongside Tretyakov – one of Russia’s major art dealers.

In the 1960s-70s, Savitsky was the director of a muse-um in the remote town of Nukus in Uzbekistan. Even though it had been a local history museum, Savitsky at his own initiative collected tens of thousands of works of Russian avant-garde art.

His collection features works by Robert Falk, Kli-ment Red’ko, Lyubov Popova and many others. The collec-tion is prized by art histori-ans but little known to the general public, not helped by the fact that it is still kept in Nukus, in an art museum named after the collector.

A popular place for visitors to Moscow is the city's Tretyakov Gallery, which houses one of the world's best art collections.

Moscow's best

art gallery

The State Tretyakov Gallery has a collection of more than 17,000 works of art. The histo-ry of the gallery can be traced back to 1856, when Moscow merchant Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov bought works by Russian artists with the aim of creating a collection that could one day grow into a national art museum. In 1892, he gave his collection of about 2000 works to the Russian nation.Guided tours for interna-tional visitors at the gallery, which is divided in several buildings, have been running since the 1950s and are of-fered in English, German and French. Despite the popular-ity of 20th-century Russian art, international visitors gen-erally flock to see the gal-lery's early Russian art, which is held in the gallery's build-ing on Lavrushinsky Lane. The collection includes icons by both unknown and famous icon painters from the 12th to 17th centuries. As well, the gallery has paintings by Russian mas-ters including Kramskoy, Repin, Shishkin and Vrubel.

Address: 10, Lavrushinsky Lane, Getting there: The nearest metro stops are “Tretyakovskaya”, “Novokuznetskaya” and “Polyanka”Opening times:

Thursdays, Fridays: 10am-9pm;Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays: 10am-6pm.Mondays – closed. › tretyakovgallery.ru

Andrei Tarkovsky: Biography wrestles with the filmmaker’s remarkable life

rbth.com/41717

Zakhar Prilepin: "In literature, you have to constantly prove your worth"

rbth.com/41789

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MOST READ PRISON TURNS INTO GUESTHOUSE

rbth.com/41803Culture

16

YEKATERINA CHUPRUNOVASPECIAL TO RBTH

RBTH looks at the history

of Russia's oldest and

perhaps most notorious

museum, the Kunstkamera

in St Petersburg, which

opened in 1714.

Still shocking after 300 years Museums Peter the Great's unusual Kunstkamera collection is no less confronting today than it was to its first visitors

The Kunstkamera museum is famous for its unusual col-lection, which includes human body parts and foe-tuses with deformities pre-served in jars.

Although the museum opened in 1714, its history is considered to have begun with Peter the Great’s long trip abroad known as the Grand Embassy (1697-98), when he went to Europe to study shipbuilding.

In these travels, European life and culture made quite an impression on him. In par-ticular, he was fascinated by the kunstkameras that were appearing on the continent and inspired by what he had seen, decided to create his own cabinet of curiosities.

Peter decreed that anything he found amazing was to be brought to the Russian Kun-stkamera. The collection was supposed to show the diver-sity of the world and the mys-teries of nature. In 1706 the French Journal de Trevoux wrote that the muses and sci-ence were moving north, “where the current Tsar Peter Alexeyevich is intent on en-lightening his country”.

The foundation date of Russia’s fi rst museum is usu-ally considered to be 1714, when, according to Peter’s de-cree, all the articles he col-lected during his travels abroad were moved from Moscow to St Petersburg.

In the beginning, in order to attract visitors the Kunst-kamera offered treats and gifts. But the museum quick-ly became famous and soon visitors had to buy tickets.

The main difference be-tween the St Petersburg Kun-stkamera and its European counterparts was the reason for its opening. The museum had been created not as a pri-vate collection but as an ed-ucational institute. It is writ-ten that Peter said: “I want people to look and learn!”

In the 18th century the mu-

seum moved to a building on the eastern tip of Vasilievsky Island. According to legend, Peter had chosen the location himself after seeing an unu-sually formed pine tree.

The Petrine Baroque build-ing that was constructed on the spot later is still consid-ered one of the symbols of the city. The majestic struc-ture on the banks of the Neva is crowned by a tower with an armillary sphere, symbol-ising the solar system.

In its fi rst years, the Kun-stkamera collection, along with its rare books, devices, instruments, weapons and natural rarities, contained “live” exhibits. These were children who had been born with physical abnormalities. They lived in the Kunstkam-era and earned high incomes.

As years passed the Kun-stkamera transformed from being a collection of curiosi-ties and oddities into a real scientific collection. When Peter founded the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724, the Kunstkamera became its fi rst institution.

Having become more aca-demic, the museum subse-quently concentrated on col-lecting ethnographic rarities: clothes and household items from various peoples. Ever since then the museum’s per-manent exhibition has been dedicated to the native cul-tures of North America, Asia and Africa.

But it is the Kunstkamera’s collection of anatomical rar-ities and anomalies em-balmed in alcohol that the museum is best known for.

Peter bought most of these from a Dutch anatomy pro-fessor, Frederik Ruysch. He had collected them for sev-eral decades and agreed to sell the collection to the tsar in the hope that Peter would leave it for posterity.

The embalmed embryos shocked the 18th century public, and continue to do the same to today’s visitors.

The modern Kunstkamera is one of the biggest ethno-graphic museums in the world, and it actively carries out scientific research. The museum contains more than a million exhibits and is con-stantly enlarged, thanks to expeditions and new acqui-sitions.

Every year the Kunstkam-era organises about 50 scien-tifi c expeditions to various regions of Russia, as well as to Asia and Africa. Each ex-pedition enriches the muse-um with new exhibits.

Museum director Yury Chistov says that the Kunst-kamera no longer “fi ts” in its historical building. The ad-ministration is in talks with the city authorities about the possibility of creating a sep-arate storehouse for the col-lection.

The museum is widely known for its educational programs and themed guid-ed tours on various subjects: from the history of costumes to anthropology. Currently, only general orientations are available in foreign languag-es, but the Kunstkamera management promises to add more programs for foreign tourists.

“Our collections are inter-esting for the foreign visitor because they were collected long before those that today are exhibited in Europe,” Chistov says. “All our ethno-graphic exhibits are unique because they were not infl u-enced by European culture.”

During the media confer-ence dedicated to the Kun-stkamera’s 300th anniversa-ry, the President of the Russian Museum Union, Mikhail Piotrovsky, paid trib-ute to the museum: “Along with the Kunstkamera’s an-niversary we are celebrating 300 years of Russian muse-ology.

“This is the first and the oldest museum in our coun-try and it is also a very im-portant landmark in the de-velopment of museums in Europe.”

Putin praises museum's hard work

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the Peter the Great Museum of Anthro-pology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences on its 300th anniversary and described it as one of the most interesting museums in the

country. Putin said that thanks to the work of scientists and researchers, and the hard work of many generations of em-ployees, unique ethnographic, archaeological, and anthropo-logical collections had been assembled and preserved.

Peter the Great originally set up the museum as an education-

al institute, to inform visitors on anatomy and natural sciences.

The museum is also known for its ethnographic artefacts.

Learn about Russian cuisine and culinary

traditions with

useful tips from our authors

workshops from Delicious TV and

recipes from The Soviet Diet Cookbook rbth.com/russian_kitchen

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