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Wednesday, May 25, 2011Distributed with

Moscow’s Club Scene

Justice for Sergei Magnitsky?

It’s not all crazy excessPresidential advisers: Charges fabricated

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Focus on the FamilyHowmodernrelation-shipsare changing

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In a sharply worded statement concerning the Libyan rebellion, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that “the contact group is a self-appointed organizational structure that somehow made itself responsible for how the [U.N.] resolution is carried out,” reported The Daily Telegraph. “From the point of view of international law, this group has no legitimacy,” Lavrov pointed out. He also indicated regret over Russia’s de-cision not to veto the U.N. Mandate.

Following advice from former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky that he flee Russia, blogger-turned-anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny has stat-ed that he intends to remain in his homeland. The statement is in response to a criminal case launched against him for a third time since 2009 for bad advice he gave while serving as adviser to a regional governor. Navalny has called the charges a fabrication. “I’m not going to leave the country,” he told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “If I did, then there would be no sense in what I am doing. People will only believe you if you share the same risks that they face. I can’t persuade people in Bryansk to follow me if I’m sitting in London, can I?”

Foreign Minister Denounces Libya Group

Anti-corruption Activist Navalny Stays Put

OPiNiON

Russia’s dependence on raw materials has decreased.

reFLeCtiONSthe end of Multiculturalism?Some new immigrants in Eu-rope are a world apart.

A Moscow jury sentenced ultranationalist Niki-ta Tikhonov to life in prison for the murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova in 2009. The court also sentenced Tikhonov’s accomplice and civil partner Yevgeniya Khasis to 18 years in pris-on.Markelov and Baburova, who worked for the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper, were gunned down in broad daylight in downtown Moscow in January 2009. Investigators said Babu-rova was killed as a witness to the murder of Markelov, who was an active member of an anti-fascist movement.

Markelov Murderer Sentenced to Life

Business Yandex warns investors of political interference

In her many incarnations — political arm-candy, society princess, purring provocateur, magnificent artist and, yes, fat ballerina — no one has ever accused Anastasia Volochko-va of understatement. Take her million-dollar wedding to the businessman Igor Vdovin. Vo-lochkova arrived at the Cath-erine Palace in St. Petersburg sitting in an armchair attached to a hot air balloon and wore a snow-white dress with its train floating in the wind.

Or consider her recent tran-sition from establishment dar-ling to self-made dissident after a nude photo shoot upset the Kremlin’s official party, United Russia: “Today, membership in Vladimir Putin’s United Rus-sia party is a much more com-promising fact for somebody’s reputation than nude pictures published on Internet,” she

Ballerina Dances Away from the PartyPolitics Anastasia Volochkova Defines Controversy

2003 and now scorns is main-taining a stiff upper lip. “We have a firm position of giving no comments on the Voloch-kova scandal,” sniffed United Russia spokeswoman Inna Chernavina.

Russians love fairy tales. One could go so far to say it is their favorite type of fiction. What else is there to believe in, some Russians ask? Volochkova is Russia’s living, indomitable fairy tale princess.

In her book “A Story of a Russian Ballerina,” Volochkova compares the chapters of her life with the plots of 12 major Russian ballets she has starred in. Of course, the her-oine triumphs again and again and again.

As a teenager, Volochko-va heard from her teachers at Vaganova Academy, the noto-riously harsh ballet school that also trained Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev, that a big-boned ballerina like her would never dance on the best stag-es. The provinces, they said, beckoned.

A few years later, Volockho-va debuted as the Mariin-sky’s prima ballerina in Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York.

CONtiNueD ON PAGe 6

Telling investors just how po-litically charged it is to work in your country might seem a funny way of selling your shares, but that is what Rus-sia’s leading search engine did ahead of its widely anticipated IPO.

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ANNA NeMtSOvAsPeCiAl To RussiA noW

investors are eager to get a piece of russia’s burgeoning internet market despite political risk.

Banished by the ruling party, Anastasia volochkova recreates her fairy tale.

CONtiNueD ON PAGe 2

Looking Beyond Oil

PAGe 5

PAGe 4

Anastasia volochkova, who once wowed the critics, is now fighting them off.

tising spending grows on the back of accelerating econom-ic recovery. Even so, the price range is still low compared to Yandex’s peers in other emerg-ing markets due to the high risks of investing in such a pub-lic and attractive company.

Under Russian law, all inter-net service providers have to allow the FSB, Russia’s security service, to attach a black box to their servers that can

Yandex, russia’s Google, Launching iPO on NASDAQ

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of Manned Space Flight 50th Anniversary

Yandex, rus-sia’s version of Google, debuts on the NASDAQ exchange this month.

pronounced on her blog. For her, being shunned by the party was a wake-up call, she said. Now she is among its crit-ics.

Volochkova, 35, is the talk of the town again. And she’s

playing a familiar role: The jilt-ed, outspoken, slightly outra-geous diva.

“I am bigger than your party!” Volochkova said in a recent interview. The United Russia she famously joined in

Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google, recently announced the price range for its upcom-ing share offering, which the company hopes will raise at least $1.3 billion.

However, in its 2,000 page prospectus, the company went out of its way to highlight the political risks and the dangers of a takeover bid from oligarchs close to the authorities. “High-profile business in Russia, such as ours, can be particularly vul-nerable to politically motivat-

ed actions,” Yandex stated in its prospectus. “Other parties” may also perceive Yandex’s news service as “reflecting a political viewpoint or agenda, which could subject us to po-litically motivated actions,” the document stated.

Russia’s most popular search engine filed with the U.S. Se-curities and Exchange Com-mission to list 52.2 million shares at $20-$22 each on May 9, which would value the com-pany at $6.7 billion at the top

of the range and make it Eu-rope’s biggest online compa-ny, according to analysts with Russian investment bank Ura-lsib.

Yandex claims to account for 64 percent of all search traffic in Russia — compared with Google’s 22 percent — and is the largest Russian-based In-ternet company by revenue. That puts it at the top of a seg-ment likely to develop as swift-ly as broadband is rolled out across the country and adver-

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Doubling Labor Productivity Over Next Decade http://rbth.ru/12825economy

business in brief

One of the largest banks in Russia, Nomos floated 22 per-cent of its shares near the top of its price range to raise $718 million on the London Stock Exchange. The money will be used to recapitalize the bank, which was low on funds after it took over Khanty-Mansiysk Bank (KhMB) in December.After a record $54 billion of Russian listings in the first half of 2008, the last two years saw 22 IPOs that raised a mere $12 billion. The pent-up demand among owners for IPOs is ris-ing fast but hadn’t been matched by demand from in-ternational investors until now. Analysts say there is already at least $50 billion worth of IPOs likely to launch in the next two years.The Nomos IPO bodes well for these upcoming IPOs; al-though the stock was priced near the top of the price range, that range was low.

In a sign of the growth poten-tial of Russia’s advertising mar-ket, Alfa Group has slapped a $1 billion price tag on its stake in the country’s largest com-mercial broadcaster, CTC Media.Alfa, Russia’s leading financial-industrial conglomerate, is in talks to sell its 25.3 percent stake in CTC (pronounced “S-T-S” — the company uses the Cyrillic version of its name in print) to Russia’s National Media Group, but has first of-fered the stake to fellow share-holder Sweden’s Modern Times Group at a price of just over $27 per share, or $1.07 billion. That’s almost double the cost of the shares during the company’s NASDAQ IPO in the summer of 2006.“In terms of ad spending, Rus-sia is already the ninth biggest market in the world, the fifth largest in Europe and, if cur-rent growth continues, it will be the largest in Europe as soon as 2013,” said CTC CEO Anton Kudryashov.

nomos London ipo deemed success

television advertising set to grow

Russia is no longer an emerg-ing market. That’s according to the cash-strapped Europe-an Union (E.U.), which wants to get rid of the preferential trade terms implemented in the 1990s to support Russia’s transformation into a free-mar-ket economy.The E.U.’s executive has an-nounced plans to exclude mid-dle-income countries such as Russia and Brazil from special rates, according to the E.U.’s General System of Preferences (GSP). The decision to cut ben-efits is viewed as the most sig-nificant revamp of the trade system since the preferential scheme was first introduced. “Global economic balances have shifted tremendously,” E.U. Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht told reporters. “If we grant tariff preferences in this competitive environment, those countries most in need must reap the most bene-fits.”The E.U. accounted for 49.5 percent of Russia’s trade turn-over in 2010 after the total volume of business increased more than four-fold in 2010.

russia beyond emerging market

monitor all e-mail traffic. In April, the FSB raised the stakes, sug-gesting bans on Skype and Gmail, claiming they pose a se-rious threat to national security.

President Dmitry Medvedev, known for his web savvy, dis-missed the idea, but the discus-sion throws into contrast the state’s uneasy relations with the information highway. Opposi-tion figure Boris Nemtsov claimed in an interview that the state has forced most Internet service providers to exclude op-position Web sites from their ser-vices.

Things took an ugly turn at the start of May when the com-pany announced that the FSB, Russia’s security service, had forced the search engine to hand over details of users of Yandex.Dengi, its money transfer sys-tem. Specifically, the FSB asked for information on financial con-tributors to well-known anti-cor-ruption activist Alexei Navalny, according to Yandex. Just over a week later, Russia’s Investiga-tive Committee opened an in-vestigation into Navalny, claim-ing he used his position as adviser to a regional governor to force a timber company into an unfavorable deal.

Still, investigators seem to be shrugging off the risks — as long as the price is right.

Hungry for exposure to Rus-sia’s booming Internet sector, investors have been waiting for Yandex to offer up its equity for close to three years. Given the low price of the stock, analysts and investors doubted at press time that Yandex’s risk warnings

would have a serious impact on the IPO, because it has such a compelling story.

Tom Mundy, chief strategist at Otkritie Financial, said that investors in Russia are less con-cerned about murky politics and security services than many might think. “We rarely speak to investors who are not already skeptical concerning Russia risk,” he said. “Whether that be po-litical issues, corporate gover-nance, corruption, et cetera.”

Alexander Vengranovich, a media and IT analyst at Okritie, agreed. “The investors we’ve been speaking with aren’t pay-

ing much attention to the po-litical risk story,” he said. ”They’re more interested in the Yandex growth story.” The proof is in the IPO this week.

Konstantin Chernyshev of Uralsib said that Yandex is a good bet for investors: “Inves-tors in the Internet segment are very risk tolerant because the entry barriers are very low: It’s cheap to set up a venture and success is driven by innovation. It’s not like drilling for oil.”

the price is right At press time, the lesson here

yandex Launching nasdaQ ipo

arkady Volozh, ceo of yandex.

of life sciences or nanotechnol-ogy for instance — have proved lackluster, IT is also the only high-tech segment in which Russian companies have made signifi-cant strides. Yandex is showing the kind of progress that Med-

vedev has said should form the core of his top project, the drive to modernize the economy.

Whether that success, and the attention it brings, is purely pos-itive for the country’s top portal remains hard to say.

The metal cage used for pris-oners in courtroom No. 14 at the Tverskoi regional court was empty during a recent hearing, its door wide open. Moscow spring sunshine streamed through windows, their metal bars pushed aside.

There was no need for locks two weeks ago when the court considered the arrest of Ivan Cherkasov, a senior executive at British investment fund Her-mitage Capital. Cherkasov lives in London and has no inten-tion of returning to face the charges of tax evasion he says are false. He says his arrest is a counter attack by rogue forc-es in the Russian security ser-vices.

In a bold and surprising move just days before, an in-dependent commission set up by President Dmitry Medve-dev said that the charges in the case of Russian lawyer Ser-gei Magnitsky were fabricated by Interior Ministry officials and that Interior Ministry and FSB security service officers were at least partly responsi-ble for Magnitsky’s death in 2009.

Magnitsky died after 11

months in pre-trial detention and after repeated requests for medical treatment.

The findings of the presiden-tial commission are in a prelim-inary report that was leaked to Russian newspaper Vedomosti

and then confirmed by com-mission members.

Magnitsky was working for the Hermitage Capital when he uncovered what he claimed was a $230 million tax refund scam set up by a group of corrupt police and tax officials.

“When Sergei Magnitsky tes-tified against the police officers, the same police officers put him in pretrial detention, tortured and killed him,” said William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, in a telephone interview from London.

Magnitsky’s death became an international cause célèbre, and Medvedev has staked much on investigating the case.

“Medvedev has taken the Magnitsky case under his per-sonal control,” said Alexei Mukhin, a prominent Russian political analyst. “If the author-ities do not react to such things, then people will not vote in the elections and foreign investors will be reluctant to invest.”

People involved in the com-mission say that there is a bat-tle going on behind the scenes to temper the results.

Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Com-mittee, is working on a sepa-rate part of the report. He says pressure has been relentless.

“There are several officials well-known in politics who have stated openly that they don’t give a damn about our investi-gation,” said Kabanov. “This is

“Who Knows Where I Will Be Soon”

natalya magnitskaya holds a portrait of her son, sergei.

“After the report was leaked, we started to be pressured by security officials,” Valery Borschev said.

“The investors we’ve been speaking to haven’t been paying much attention to the political risk. story,” said Alexander Vengranovich, a media and IT analyst at Otkritie.

appeared to be that pricing re-mains the ultimate key to the success of Russian IPOs. The market is clearly expecting de-mand to be robust for this jewel in the Russian Internet crown. The stock would join, and some say dominate, Mail.ru — which in November recorded the only really impressive Russian IPO of-fering.

Chernyshev said he expects the Internet advertising segment to grow at 27 percent annually over the next five years, adding that Yandex is the better bet for investors. “Unlike Mail.ru, Yan-dex offers a clear investment

story,” he said. “Mail.ru bene-fited from being the first to offer exposure to the sector and the backdoor it offered to Facebook shares. It looks like it will lose both of those advantages in the near future.”

blogger-in-chief Meanwhile, the flare-up of

political risk surrounding Yan-dex is only the latest in a grow-ing debate around the Internet in Russia, which is credited as one of the last bastions of in-dependence in a media indus-try dominated by state owner-ship. The discussion appears to have opened a floodgate of sorts, with the sector front and center in the news media since.

Investors also consider that there are 60 million Russians, or more than 40 percent of the population, already on the In-ternet, making it one of the largest groups of users on the planet. And it is not near satu-ration.

The Internet has a powerful

champion in the form of Presi-dent Medvedev. Russia’s “blog-ger-in-chief” has repeatedly in-sisted that he will not allow censorship of the Internet. And while some of Russia’s innova-tors in other fields — in the areas

60 millionRussians, or over 40 percent of the pop-ulation, use the In-ternet, making it the seventh-largest audi-ence in the world.

$1 billionis the size of Russia’s Internet advertising market, which has experienced double-digit growth for the last decade.

80%of Russian Internet users prefer Yandex, making it one of few countries with a local search engine more popular than Google.

in figures

investment climate Presidential commission concludes that security service officers fabricated Magnitsky charges

gaLina masteroVa, VLadimir ruVinskySPecIAl TO RuSSIA NOw

president medvedev’s advisers speak to russia now about the case of sergei magnitsky.

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wild, brutish arrogance. They aren’t puppets, they are play-ers. And the [security service] isn’t prepared to surrender its employees, partially for the fact that they know a lot and could tell people. In addition, there is huge money at stake.”

The final report is set to come out at the end of May, begin-ning of June, Kabanov said.

Medvedev has made fight-ing corruption the centerpiece of his presidency, but critics say there have been few concrete results.

Officials from the Butyrka jail, where Magnitsky was denied medical help, were fired. But there have been no arrests or direct police investigation of the officials accused of corruption.

soured relationshipHermitage Capital was once

one of the most enthusiastic of Kremlin cheerleaders. Since its head, William Browder, was re-fused entry to Russia in 2005, it has been a strident critic.

Hermitage Capital has spent an enormous amount of time and money on its own investi-gation of the officials involved in the alleged tax fraud. A series of videos have been released de-tailing the case, most notably documenting lavish purchases made by the officials in the year after the tax scam took place.

The refund, normally a com-plicated process, took only one day, according to Hermitage. The most recent video created by the company accused a tax official who approved the tax refund of wiring millions into a Swiss bank account opened in her husband’s name. It also chronicles the purchases of lux-ury property in Dubai and Mon-tenegro as well as a Moscow country house the size of an

airplane hangar, valued at more than $20 million.

The purchases were made even though the official and her husband, the video reported, have an annual salary of only $38,000.

Swiss authorities froze the bank account of the official’s hus-band after a complaint from Her-mitage Capital. Russia has not made any similar moves yet.

The leaking of the report has unnerved the people involved, and Kabanov and others see the hearing against Cherkasov as a counterattack. Cherkasov him-self has called it revenge.

At the end of the recent hear-ing, the court backed investi-gator Lieut. Col. Oleg Silchen-ko (who handled the Magnitsky case) and sanctioned the arrest of Cherkasov.

Silchenko refused to com-ment afterward, but he did throw out the phrase “Who knows where I will be soon,” a fairly common remark in a coun-try where people are not used to planning too far in the fu-ture.

But it is a question with spe-cial resonance and poignancy in this case that has taken on international proportion.

“After this report appeared [was leaked], we started to be pressured by security officials,” said presidential adviser Valery Borschev, acknowledging he re-ceived phone calls from officials. “They call me and ask why we are attacking Silchenko, and I an-swered that we are simply lay-ing out the facts. We are striving for real punishment for those who are guilty, and we have only touched the tip of the iceberg at this point. Important figures stand behind the investigators and tax officials — we hope to get to them.”

“Investors in the Internet segment are very risk tolerant because the entry barriers are very low,” said Konstantin chernyshev of uralsib financial corporation.

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Family Russia’s government wants bigger families, yet changing values and more stress have led to smaller ones

happy Families are alike, but are they big?

the Vorontsov family has four chldren, a rarity in russia.

In the 1968 Soviet film “Let’s Wait Till Monday,” a schoolgirl named Nadya states during class that her idea of happiness is to become a mother of four. This bold statement infuriates her teacher, who stands firm in her Soviet ideology.

The film is now more than 40 years old; the country has transformed radically and peo-ple’s lifestyles along with it. Yet mothers with many children still face a wall of public indifference and even hostility, despite plum-meting demographics and gov-ernment incentive programs.

Maria Ipatova, 25, has two sons: Oleg is almost 2 years old and Trofim is 6 months. She and her husband are thinking of hav-ing a third child. “My older son was born very weak, the doc-tors said he would not survive,” Ipatova said. “Perhaps that was the moment when we realized that we would have many chil-dren. Having one child will make him an egotist; two children will be rivals, but three children are a family.”

But Ipatova is unique. There are fewer families like hers every year. Only 3 percent of all cou-ples have more than two chil-dren and 48 percent, almost half, have none, according to statistics.

Victoria Yakovleva, 34, has been married for five years. “It’s not that I’m a follower of the child-free movement,” she said. “On the contrary, I feel that chil-dren are pure joy and embody

the number of childless couples is growing in russia, while families with multiple children stand out as unusual.

elena noVikoVaRussia now

the entire meaning of life. But I just don’t have time for them.”

Anna Kuleshova, 30, has three daughters: “There are a good many families with lots of children in our neigh-borhood of Chertanovo, and we always support each other. But when I venture outside our circle I hear torrents of abuse. People say we have no conscience, that we jump the queues everywhere, that we are lazy and we have children in order not to have to go to work.” Kulshova made the point that she has a doctor-ate in social sciences and went back to work when her young-est daughter turned just three months old.

“My husband and I bought an apartment in Moscow on credit,” Yakovleva added. “We have a mortgage to pay and we have to work a lot. I don’t want to have a child so that he’s then raised by a nanny. I want to raise him myself, but, unfortunately, it’s very difficult to be a mom in our society.”

There is no data available on how many families with many children divorce (as opposed to fewer children), but overall sta-tistics are grim. They show that while about a million marriages are registered in Russia every year, 700,000 couples divorce. That means almost three out of four marriages are collaps-ing.

Psychologists and sociologists have long been sounding the alarm and talking about a “cri-sis” and even the “extinction” of the institution of the family. It is not only about divorce sta-tistics, however. More and more couples live together instead of

adoption Finally, a bilateral agreement

psychology single moms hire men to help raise children

The Russian government is tack-ling the problem of adoptions by foreign citizens in earnest. A watershed event is scheduled to take place imminently: the signing of a bilateral agreement on adoptions between Russia and the United States, which will take place at a meeting be-tween Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secre-tary of State Hillary Clinton.

The need for such an agree-ment has long been apparent. Over the past 20 years, Ameri-cans have adopted some 60,000 Russian children. In the mid-1990s, some 14,000 children left Russia for the United States every year. Various private agen-cies dealt directly with the heads of orphanages with little regu-lation. Russian children are ad-opted not only by Americans, but also by citizens of the Unit-ed Kingdm, France, Italy, Ger-

Vladimir, 35, recently found a job as a dad. He said he met Dima’s mother, Irina, in a fancy restaurant in Moscow where he was working as a security guard. Irina offered him the job of act-ing as the father of her child and assured him that he would be well paid. At the time, Vladi-mir was having some financial difficulties and accepted. Dima, who was 5 years old at the time, was used to living without a fa-ther. In fact, he never knew his dad. His mother told him that his father was working as a spy in Cuba and couldn’t write or call his son. But he suddenly appeared.

“I don’t like children,” con-fessed Vladimir, who did not want to be identified for this story. “I don’t have children of my own and don’t know if I ever will, but I needed the money and was willing to do almost anything to get it. I re-member the first day I met Dima, the three of us walked in the park together. I told him, actually made up, some sto-ries about the buildings we saw. The poor kid was mes-merized. Then we went to a restaurant. I took a cherry and flung it at him. He loved it. He would imitate everything I did, just because ‘his daddy’ had shown him. What surprised me even more was when I went to tuck him in bed the first night and he hugged me and said, ‘You’re the best dad in the world.”

Irina, who also wanted her identity protected, needed help, according to Vladimir’s recount-ing. Her son was less obedient

russia and the united states prepare to finalize a watershed agreement on adoption, and russians explore the orphans’ plight.

domestic agencies in russia are branching out beyond nannies and drivers to offer “fathers” for rent. but is it a good idea?

many, Holland, Norway and Sweden. But up until now, Rus-sia has had an official agreement regulating adoptions only with Italy.

The American agreement has involved five rounds of nego-tiations. Seventeen children ad-opted from Russia have died in the United States in recent years, leading to tension between the two countries. The last straw, significantly hastening the agreement’s signing date, was the case of Artem Savelyev. His American adoptive mother sim-ply put him on a plane back to Russia with a note.

The agreement offers new means of controlling the adop-tion process. Adoption agencies will have to receive accredita-tion both in the United States and in Russia. They will have to collect more information about future adoptive parents and monitor the foreign family for years after the adoption. Final-ly, and most important of all, this agreement will apply ret-roactively and cover all adop-tions of Russian children by American citizens in the last 16 years.

Protecting Russia’s orphans, one at a Time

Daddy for Rent Becomes a Trend among the wealthy

sVetlana smetanina sPecial To Russia now

elena noVikoVa Russia now

Fathers-for-hire are increasingly common in russia.

every day. Her friends recom-mended that she rent a dad to see if it would change things. Dima didn’t understand the meaning of “no,” according to Vladimir. Irina said that only a man would be able to help her raise her son.

Vladimir would wake up at six o’clock every morning to be at his “son’s” home at seven. He would wake him up, pre-pare his breakfast, feed him and then go to work. One day, he decided to teach Dima to wash his face with cold water. He said, “This is how all men do it.” Since then, Dima has washed his face with icy water, even though until a short time ago his mother had to force him to take a bath, Vladimir said. Four months went by like this.

“I started getting tired,” Vladi-mir said. “Irina paid me 1,000 euro a month, which was great, but the kid exhausted me. I told Irina, of course, but she didn’t want me to leave. She was very

happy with my work. Her child had changed a lot: He picked up his toys, obeyed his mother and even started learning Eng-lish. One day we called Dima and told him that I had to re-turn to Cuba. He asked me how long I would have to stay there and I told him two or three years. He got very angry and told me that he would never become a spy because it would mean he would have to aban-don his family.”

Vladimir said that for him the role was only a job and he tried to do it in a way that the child wouldn’t realize it was a farce. But he also seemed to become attached to the child: A month after he stopped working, Vladi-mir said he hid in the park to watch Dima play.

Irina isn’t the only woman who rents a father for her child. In Moscow and other Russian cities, agencies that specialize in domestic services such as housekeepers, cooks, drivers

marrying, and prefer this to a registered marriage, some-

thing that was unthink-able in the Soviet years.

Another recent trend among mothers is to

have a child on their own, without a husband

or partner: more than 30 per-cent of Russian children are born out of marriage, according to the latest data. Add to this a se-rious drop in births, and the fu-ture of the nuclear family looks bleak. The average number of children per family in Russia is 1.59, compared with 1.9 in 1990.

Russia is still among the world

leaders in terms of the number of abortions, and even late abor-tions. Sixty percent of pregnan-cies are terminated.

There are many reasons for the decline in the birthrate. About 31 percent of Russians do not want to have children because of financial difficulties, as well as insufficient state sup-port for families, according to VCIOM, the state’s official sta-tistics organization. Combining a career with childbirth and rais-ing children is another prob-lem. One in every five young women between 24 and 35 is not prepared to marry and have a child because she wants to pursue a career. This is under-

scored by a shortage of kinder-gartens and the high rates charged by nannies.

The state is trying to encour-age young families to have more children, mainly by offering so-called “mother’s capital,” a check for about $12,800 (365,000 rubles) issued upon the birth of the second and third child. While the measures have led to a 22 percent increase in the birthrate since 2006, they have not been enough to fix the demographic crisis.

Last year, United Russia, the ruling party, took a desperate step: The deputies of the Chely-abinsk regional government proposed reintroducing a child-

Today, the number of chil-dren taken abroad by adop-tive families is significantly less due to already stricter condi-tions and increased scrutiny. The number of orphans in Rus-sia is also decreasing. In 2005, there were some 450,000, and today that number has de-creased to 370,000.

In the opinion of experts from the Ministry of Education, the number of orphans could be reduced through a special foster care system to help both poor families and adoptive par-ents. Today, the guardianship system has a mainly punitive function: It imposes fines on negligent parents, deprives them of their parental rights and puts their children in or-phanages.

Yet positive examples of fos-ter services already exist in sev-eral regions of Russia, such as Tyumen. They offer these fam-ilies help finding work, finan-cial subsidies, as well as treat-ment for alcohol or drug dependence. Advocates help these parents keep their pa-rental rights and keep their children at home.

causes of divorceIt’s estimated that approxi-mately 75% of marriages in Russia end in separation. Ten percent of those end after over 20 years of living together.

drug or alcohol abuse by one of

the spouses.

low incomes.29%

lack of home ownership.

41%

51%

of Russian families have three or more children, while 48% of married couples have no chil-dren at all.

marriages and 4.2 divorces oc-curred for every 1000 people in 1980, versus 8.9 and 4.8 in 2007, respectively.

3%

10.6

in Figures

less tax that existed in the So-viet Union between 1941 and 1992. Childless men between 20 and 50 and childless mar-ried women between 20 and 45 were supposed to have 6 percent of their salary taxed until they gave birth to or adopted a child. Members of the State Duma also proposed to “fine” childless parents several years ago.

However, a public outcry over the initiative forced deputies to drop the idea and promise to find more humane ways of com-bating childlessness. Still, inno-vative ways of encouraging fam-ily life seem to elude the state.

and nannies also offer daddies for rent. The cost of renting a father in the Russian capital is around $17 (500 rubles) per hour and between $140-200 (4,000 and 6,000 rubles) per day. In the regions, the agen-cies tend to charge a little less. Most rentals are men between 35 and 40 years old; they tend to be psychologists or former soldiers, according to a repre-sentative of the Moscow agen-cy The Lights of the Capital.

Psychologists and educators disagree on the wisdom of “daddy for rent” services. Some say that communication with a man, even a babysitter who comes to the house on weekends, is a positive and im-portant experience for any child who doesn’t live with his father. Others maintain that rental dads could cause psy-chological trauma in children, particularly if the kids are led to believe that the babysitter is their real dad.

FoTo

imeD

ia

Juli

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ish

neV

eTs

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

most read Let the Gas Buyer Bewarehttp://rbth.ru/12857opinion

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georgy bovtspecial To russia

now

by institutions, the law and writ-ten rules. As soon as the leader leaves or makes it clear that he is leaving, he ceases to exist.

Because of this situation, if Medvedev were to announce that he won’t run for a second term, Russia would virtually be without a president for a year,

political analysts in Rus-sia and across the world are speculating on who will become Russia’s

president in 2012. It seems like both current President Dmitry Medvedev and former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are doing all they can to keep tensions high. Re-cently, Medvedev took time out yet again to address the elec-tion, saying he “doesn’t count out the possibility” of running for a second term. At the same time, Medvedev made it clear that he and Putin have some differences of opinion on how the country should move for-ward. A few days later, Putin also made it clear that he “doesn’t count out the possi-bility” of running for president, and added that people shouldn’t be getting so excited over the presidential elections.

Political commentators, none-theless, are continuing to cre-ate a lot of hoopla, now dis-cuss ing how Put in and Medvedev differ on any given issue. Given that both of them are coming out more and more often with conflicting view-points on various topics, there is plenty of room for discussion. To be fair, we should keep in mind that analysts are discuss-ing differences that involve fair-ly minor issues.

until the next elections. Like-wise, should Putin call it quits, the entire government hierar-chy (already not very effective) would break down once and for all. Both men understand this perfectly well and don’t want to take this kind of risk. Apart from that, each has his

own political ambitions and vi-sions for the presidential throne.

What isn’t clear at all is how Putin and Medvedev perceived this situation unfolding when they laid the foundation for it in 2008. How did Putin plan for everything? Will Medvedev, in having kept the presidential seat warm, walk away from power by conveying that he will not run for a second term? There was something behind the ru-mors that Medvedev, having just assumed power, would resign from office to avoid a long ex-istence as a lame duck. But then why would Putin discredit the institution of the presidency, which he did so much to strengthen and to which he pre-sumably plans to return? Did Putin initially assume that he would serve as prime minister for a long time, but now being convinced that Medvedev is able to handle his responsibilities, wants to take a seat on the side-lines? If that’s the case, then it isn’t clear what a politician like Putin, who is full of power fairly young, will do with his time.

And of course it’s possible that the dual-leadership scenar-io and how to get out of it was not thought through to the end, or that life itself has thrown Putin and Medvedev a curve ball. What is also uncertain is whether either of them took into account the possibility of the electorate becoming tired

of the same person being at the helm no matter how suc-cessful he may be. Today, peo-ple demand progressive growth, daily news. And even should it be insignificant news, there should be change nonetheless. Just as people today want to see new episodes of a televi-sion series, politics needs to constantly have new themes. Recent polls indicate that 25 percent of Russians said they would prefer seeing neither Putin nor Medvedev on the bal-lot in 2012. This doesn’t mean that their ratings are a lost cause, but it at least goes to show that the public is thirst-ing for change.

One way to respond to this desire for change would be to have both men run for presi-dent. Then, rather than debat-ing who will run, the main issue in Russian politics would be each candidate’s goals and plans for a new presidential term. Despite the myriad of worries, this would not cause a dangerous schism in the rul-ing elite and break it into two irreconcilable camps. Rather, it would provide relative stability to the entire system. A com-petitive election campaign be-tween Putin and Medvedev, one focused on separate, insig-nificant differences of opinion (for they may not have any sig-nificant ones), will ensure the country’s course for develop-ment as a whole will be safe, while at the same time preserv-ing and relatively stabilizing Rus-sia’s social and political sys-tem.

While in 2009 a full 62 per-cent of those polled planned their family’s budget, today that figure has decreased to 49 percent. Heads of house-holds cited many reasons for a lack of planning, including a lack of a sizeable income, not seeing the point in planning a budget and spending money too quickly.

facing the billsdo russian famiLies pLan a budget?

the poLLs

SEEING EYE TO EYE AFTER OSAmA BIN LADEN

LOOKING BEYOND OIL’S cuRSE

The liquidation of al-Qae-da leader Osama bin Laden presented Russia and the United States

with a rare opportunity to see eye to eye on an important issue. Lately, the two countries have been sitting in opposite corners of the ring, with Rus-sia accusing the United States and NATO of exceeding — some in Moscow even say abusing — the mandate of United Nation Security Coun-cil Resolution 1973 on Libya.

Yet the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist has shown that both countries still share common interests.

Moscow was visibly pleased by the fact that President Dmit-ry Medvedev was in the select-ed group of world leaders whom U.S. President Barack Obama briefed on the news

analysts have been talk-ing about Russia’s nat-ural resource curse for years, but now the dis-

cussion has reached the broad-er population as well.

Recent polls show that about half of all Russians are aware of the main fallout from the curse — that high oil prices, although profitable in the short term, have a negative impact on the country’s long-term develop-ment. The logic is simple: A windfall of petrodollars from un-usually high oil prices has cor-rupted the ruling elite, eliminat-ing the incentive for them to diversify the economy beyond the export of natural resourc-es.

Nonetheless, there are many examples of countries whose economies were heavily reliant on raw materials but were able to diversify. Take, for example, the United States, which is one of the largest raw materials pro-ducers in the world. Last year, the United States replaced Rus-sia as the world’s largest pro-ducer of natural gas, thanks in large part to its booming shale gas production. In addition, the

United States is in second place for coal extraction and is the world’s third-largest oil produc-er. But proponents of the curse theory tend to downplay the United States as a leading glob-al natural resource producer to avoid contradicting their theo-ry.

Norway, Canada and Austra-lia are three other good exam-ples. They prove that stable de-mocracies and effective public

institutions make the resource curse virtually unnoticeable.

Ten years ago, the resource curse was a main topic of dis-cussion among economic ana-lysts and commentators. Many focused on the need to raise taxes on the oil and gas indus-try to stimulate investment in manufacturing and other sec-tors.

Surprising as it might seem, Russia actually made some prog-ress in diversifying its economy.

In addition to the manufactur-ing sector, Russia also has a sig-nificant services sector, and many economists believe that the growth of the service sec-tor is a main indicator of a de-veloped economy.

You can find another indica-tor of Russia’s diversity by look-ing at its employment figures. Today, 10.5 million Russians are employed in the manufacturing sector, or 10 times more than in the raw materials industry. Al-most 12 million work in trade, 6 million in education, 5 million in health care and social servic-es, 1.2 million in the hotel and restaurant business and another 1.1 million work in the banking and financial services sector. Thus, contrary to popular belief, manufacturing and service sec-tors dwarf the raw materials sec-tor in terms of people employed. The problem, of course, is that the manufacturing and service sectors produce relatively little wealth for the country in com-parison with oil and gas.

But even in a worse-case sce-nario — if, for example, all of Russia’s oil and gas were to dis-appear — it is highly unlikely that employees would sudden-ly start working better or that the ruling elite would rush to implement reforms.

We need to rely less on the theory of a natural resource curse as an explanation for most of Russia’s woes. Although there is some truth to this theory, Rus-sia’s oil and gas wealth is by far not the main reason why the country lags behind other lead-ing economic powers. We should focus less on curses and more on developing and mod-

eugene ivanovspecial To

russia now

before making a TV announce-ment. The Kremlin responded with a statement of its own that pointedly reminded everyone that Russia had firsthand expe-rience with Al-Qaeda terrorist activity. The statement went on to express Russia’s commitment to increased international co-operation on fighting global terrorism.

Medvedev and Obama will have a chance to discuss spe-cifics of this cooperation when they meet on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Deauville, France, at the end of the month.

Bin Laden’s death will in-crease pressure on the Obama administration to find an ac-celerated exit strategy for the war in Afghanistan. (The Wash-ington Post quoted “a senior administration official” as say-ing “Bin Laden’s death is the beginning of the endgame in Afghanistan.”) A negotiated settlement with the Taliban is expected to be an intrinsic part of this strategy.

Russia has a lot at stake in Afghanistan and needs to care-fully watch how the situation develops there. Obviously, Moscow was never happy with the presence of a substantial U.S. military force in Afghani-stan. Yet the Kremlin is deeply concerned that any precipitous departure of U.S. troops may result in the installation of a radical Islamist regime in Kabul, which, in turn, will destabilize countries in Central Asia and send waves of radicalization to-ward Russia’s southern borders.

Russia’s additional pain is the constant flow of narcotics orig-inating in Afghanistan that has increased dramatically in the past two years.

Russia feels that by agreeing to allow the transport of NATO equipment to Afghanistan through its airspace, it has earned a voice in the discus-sion of Afghanistan’s future. It therefore appears certain that the role Russia could play in achieving a “negotiated settle-ment” over Afghanistan will also be a topic in the Deauville conversation.

The clandestine operation that led to bin Laden’s killing will undoubtedly become a crowning achievement of CIA Director Leon Panetta. Almost everyone in Washington agrees that Panetta’s two-year tenure at the agency was largely a suc-cess, albeit limited to improv-ing the morale of the CIA cadre and facilitating intelligence-sharing between different se-

ernizing the country’s political and economic institutions.

Konstantin Simonov, director of the National Energy Security Foundation, is a columnist for Vedomosti, where this comment appeared.

this article was originally published in

the moscow times.

Eugene Ivanov is a Massa-chusetts-based political ana-lyst who blogs at The Ivanov Report.

Georgy Bovt is a Moscow-based political commenta-tor.

TwO LEADERS, ONE ThRONE

surprising as it might seem, russia actually made some progress in diversifying its economy.

with panetta at the helm of the pentagon, obama loses his Gop helping hand.

final term is not lame, but rath-er dead — and his corpse gets kicked around. Russian politics is traditionally dependent on a single leader. The country’s enormous bureaucracy is guid-ed by this leader — his style, wishes, habits, whims, strengths and weaknesses — rather than

curity entities. Panetta’s critics would argue that he failed to reform the agency to make it better handle the new securi-ty threats facing the country. But who would listen to the critics now?

Besides, the time to criticize Panetta’s role as CIA director is up — Obama has tapped him to replace Robert Gates as the new secretary of de-fense, and there is little doubt that, given the recent devel-opments, Panetta will breeze through his Senate confirma-tion.

At first glance, Russia need not pay much attention to this personnel change. Panetta’s limited experience in national security issues notwithstand-ing, he’s a savvy Washington insider and capable bureaucrat. More importantly, Panetta is an experienced budget man-ager, and because of that, Obama picked him to shep-herd through Congress the huge cut in military spending ($400 billion over the next 12 years) that Obama included in his deficit-reduction plan.

If anything, Russia can only welcome any reduction in U.S. military spending, however, Moscow may come to regret Gates’ departure. For more than two years, Gates — a Re-publican who served under

President George W. Bush — has been Obama’s national se-curity “cover,” giving him cred-ibility with the Republicans in Congress. Gates was indispens-able in “selling” to the Senate Republicans the New START treaty; there is every reason to believe that a number of GOP Senators eventually voted for the treaty only after personal assurances by Gates that the treaty was beneficial for U.S. national interests.

Although well respected, Pa-netta enjoys no such credibil-ity with Capitol Hill Republi-cans. With him at the helm of the Pentagon, Obama will have no helping hand should any arms control agreement with Russia reach the Senate.

Moscow should also careful-ly follow the rise of the liberal interventionist “wing” of the Obama foreign policy team. It has been widely reported that the president’s decision to join military action in Libya was

strongly lobbied for by Secre-tary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the Unit-ed Nation Susan Rice and Na-tional Security Council official Samantha Power, who per-suaded Obama that it was the moral obligation of the United States to intervene in what they called an imminent humani-tarian catastrophe in Benghazi. Curiously, Obama made this decision over objections from Vice President Joe Biden and Gates, both known as foreign policy “realists.”

If Obama gets re-elected — as it’s looking increasingly like-ly — and Clinton retires in 2012, as she promised, Rice will become a natural choice to become the next secretary of state. And Power will have a decent chance to move into Rice’s chair at the United Na-tions. Should this happen, mil-itary interventions to fulfill vaguely defined moral imper-atives may become a new modus operandi of the Obama administration.

It’s only a matter of time be-fore such a “value-based” U.S. foreign policy causes a new chill in U.S.-Russia relations.

konstantin simonov

The moscow Times

The speculation swirling around Putin and Medvedev is fueled first and foremost from the peculiarities of Russian pol-itics, which have been shaped over centuries. In contrast to a “lame duck” president in the United States, in Russia, a pres-ident coming to the end of his

russia can only welcome any reduction in u.s. military spending.

niyaz karim

dmiTry divin

05Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru reflectionsmost read Russia’s Culture of Corruption Easier to Accept than Fight

http://rbth.ru/12858

UnsUng Icons of DesIgn

bibliophile

In his irreverent, quirky and loving book, “Made in Rus-sia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design,” (Rizzoli), editor Mi-

chael Idov brings in a team of heavyweight writers and artists to explore Soviet life, art and kitsch. Together, they reminisce and rediscover the hardscrab-ble, ineffable designs that helped to shape Soviet life. They chose 50 of the most evocative icons to riff on.

Recalling one of the Soviet Union’s brightest moments, when Sputnik-1 orbited the earth in 1957, Idov quotes Claire Booth Luce, who called the spi-der-like orb “an inter-continen-tal outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.”

Inevitably, Idov writes, Sput-nik “jump-started a number of design trends.” He also readily acknowledges that many Sovi-et designs were clumsy rip-offs of Western inventions. Made in Russia manages to focus on the most inspirational emblems, the best of a “crazed, Modernist pastiche,” Idov writes. “It jum-bled together wartime know-how, space-age aesthetics, ac-cidental shabby chic, Slavic motif and warped dreams of the West.”

Most of the items then, cho-sen by Idov and described by Bela Shayevich, are not feats of Soviet engineering. More in-triguingly, they are the flotsam and jetsam of a dead society, from the ubiquitous 12-sided drinking glass to the loot-reveal-ing fishnet shopping bag.

“Unsung Icons” offers duel-ing memories. One of the most

powerful images is that of street soda dispensers with a single communal glass. Pathetic, inti-mate and warm-hearted, the image does evoke some eerily simple life.

“The book started out as an antidote to nostalgia,” Idov said in a phone interview. He found a recent tome by acclaimed Rus-sian journalist Leonid Parfyon-ov, called “Our Era,” “omniv-orous in its nostalgia.”

Idov said he worried he had gone too far in the other direc-tion. He decided to balance the hipper, ironic tone with person-al essays.

The essays are written by the likes of artist Vitaly Komar and Russian Jewish émigré writer Gary Shteyngart. The result is a bit chaotic — the book is at times a raw mix of essays, text, de-scription and images — but packed with emotional power.

Lara Vapnyar’s recollection of her school uniform — which awkwardly resembled a blocky version of a French maid cos-tume — conjures an archetyp-al scene of an adolescent whose stirrings are stanched by a So-viet mother. The epic question: At what point does a school uni-form fit? For a daughter, when it fits her form. For a mother, when it hides her growing daughter.

But the most visionary essay is written by Vitaly Komar, the pre-eminent founder of the Sots Art movement. Not only does he deconstruct the hammer and sickle, he recalls a limerick, what he calls an “infamous folk ditty of the 1960s.”

Here’s the hammer, here’s the sickle

Our nation’s proud symbolForge your steel,

cut your hayYou’ll be buggered

either way.

noraFitzgerald

SpecIal to RN

A hIstory of DIetIng

eXpat Files

Dee Dee, a fresh expat, recently wailed: “Is there a Jenny Craig in Moscow?”

“Of course,” I quipped back. “I’m amazed you didn’t notice it — it’s right there on Red Square, between Target and Whole Foods.”

Alas, no. There is not even one single Weight Watchers meet-ing. If you are feeling homesick for the United States, there is a McDonald’s on almost every street corner, KFC and a newly opened Chili’s on New Arbat Street. Moscow is the last place you want to diet: It takes twice as long to lose a kilo as it does a pound, and stocking your kitchen with fresh fruit, lean meat and whole grains is a three-day marathon. Is it any wonder expat women are struggling to take off some weight?

I met Dee Dee for a latte, and after much persuasion, Larissa the barista made them with 1.8 percent instead of the usual 3.5.

“I’ve put on 10 pounds in two months! I didn’t notice at first because the scale in our hotel room was in kilos — I actually thought I’d lost some weight — but then our container arrived with my regular scale and I was horrified. Do you think it could have been recalibrated during the voyage?”

“Very possibly,” I soothed.“And look at all those skinny

girls out there,” she waved her hand toward Tverskaya Street. “Are you telling me they subsist on high-fat milk and deep fried everything?”

“They are the Banana Gener-ation,” I explained. The dubious Banana Generation theory is a soothing balm to every expat woman who ever warily eyed her husband’s 89-pound secre-tary. According to the theory,

the generation of Russians who are now abnormally tall and en-viously slim were entering pu-berty in the years just after per-estroika, when vassal states such as Cuba were repaying their debt to Russia in fruit, flooding the previously barren shelves with bananas. And, the theory runs, bananas produce abnormally high growth spurts.

“That’s ridiculous,” scoffed Dee Dee. “There must be some dieting help here.”

In 20 years of Moscow life, I have seen hundreds of diet fads come and go. In the early 90s, there were hyperactive salesmen in the metro wearing buttons on their grimy leather jackets say-ing, “Want to lose weight? Ask me how.” Soon a revolutionary program known as “New Vays” took their place. “New Vays” po-tions and powders turned out to be manufactured from out-dated talcum power at a dubi-ous factory outside Minsk. Diet pills from Thailand enjoyed huge popularity, until a spate of hos-pitalizations.

Then-president Vladimir Putin introduced the briefly popular Kremlin Diet — an innovative program that eliminated sugars, starches and alcohol, leaving pro-tein and vegetables. This was eclipsed by the arrival of the At-kins Diet. Finally a diet made for Russians!

Dee Dee and I hit upon a very expat solution. We created our own Weight Watchers-type sup-port group, easily recruiting other expats as members. We met a few times for weigh-ins, but it quickly spiraled into a wine drinking/moaning evening about the servant problem.

Which is how we piled on the kilos in the first place.

Jennifer eremeevaSpecIal to

RuSSIa Now

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

after decades of espous-ing a doctrine of mul-ticulturalism and na-tional diversity, Western

societies are discovering that they have stifled themselves with their own ideals.

In simplest terms, where is the borderline between tolerance and the preservation of those values that turned Europe into a pilgrimage site for millions of immigrants?

Even more bluntly, why can women walk in London or Wash-ington, D.C., in full Muslim dress, called the niqab, and this will be defined as tolerance, while walk-ing in a tank top in many Mid-dle East capitals is forbidden out of “respect for national tradi-tion”?

That is certainly a simplistic angle; in reality, the problem is more expansive, namely, wheth-er it hasn’t been an egregious mistake for Westerners to show infinite tolerance toward other identities while letting their own be diluted. Aren’t those founda-tions and values under threat, which shaped the very identity of Western society, a society that is so attractive and, at the same time, to some, repulsive?

Multiculturalism will be one of the topics of the Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum this Sep-tember. While the United States hasn’t confronted the issue as acutely as, say, Europe, different aspects of multiculturalism and the co-existence of various soci-eties will likely become very im-portant to Americans over the next decade.

Following France and Switzer-land, Germany and Great Brit-ain are beginning to recognize their conundrum.

Last fall, Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged the utter failure of multiculturalism in Ger-many. In February, speaking at the Munich Conference for In-ternational Security, British Prime Minister David Cameron also la-mented “the doctrine of state multiculturalism,” under which Europeans “have encouraged dif-ferent cultures to live “separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.” In his words, instead of providing “a vision of society” to which other communities wish to be-long, Europeans “have tolerated” even those who live “complete-ly counter” to Western values.

Europe is increasingly coming up against extremism, not in hazy far-off regions, but at home, within its borders. Cameron said that many “point to the profu-sion of unelected leaders across the Middle East and say, ‘Stop propping these people up and you will stop creating the con-ditions for extremism to flour-ish.’ But this raises the question: If it’s the lack of democracy that is the problem, why are there so many extremists in free and open societies?”

A number of explanations can be given as to why many new immigrants do not integrate into Western societies, triggering a backlash of xenophobic feelings. One factor is the entrenched so-cial infrastructure of Europe that complicates quick assimilation. Another involves an unspoken sense of national superiority that results in a condescending atti-tude toward immigrants — “By letting you in and allowing you to live and work, we have grant-ed you a great favor.” The same bias exists in Russia toward em-igrants from former Soviet re-publics who cannot obtain legal status and work.

Immigrants have long been an intrinsic part of any strong,

Svetlana Babaeva is the bu-reau chief of RIA Novosti in Washington, D.C.

Elena Zaretskaya, a Doctor of Philology, is head of the Department of Social Sci-ences at the Russian Presi-dential Academy of National Economy and Public Admin-istration and professor and creator of the “communica-tive education in Russia” concept and other communi-cation techniques.

tAKen In IsoLAtIon

A gUIDe to Post-sovIet PArentIng

the current breakdown in communication be-tween parents and chil-dren in Russia has been

festering for decades — long before Perestroika: At least six generations of Russians were never taught how to bond, nor to be friends with their chil-dren.

I am not referring to the kind of friendship in which there are no boundaries or control, but a friendship in which parents enjoy and respect their children, and allow for their individuality as they grow.

This kind of nurturing has, until recently, been totally ab-sent from Russian parenting; we are only seeing glimpses of it now that parents travel, read parenting books and observe that there are other ways to shape their children other than the way they were taught.

But there is a long journey ahead toward what I would call healthy, happy parenting.

As a rule, Russian parents don’t compliment their children enough. After a certain age, once the children enter school, par-ents are no longer affectionate in their language and tone. Yet the first step in nourishing Rus-sian family life is for us to praise our children in ways we were never praised as kids ourselves.

healing a history of Family trauma

At least six generations have been taught to indulge their

power at the expense of their children. During Soviet times, the only way a Soviet citizen — traumatized if not “spooked” by the State — could “feel the power” was by bossing young-er people around.

Children were there to be controlled. As a result, several generations were raised as gods and slaves. There was no com-munication encouraged be-tween family members, and the joy of family life was crushed.

In order to bond with chil-dren, Russian parents need to start forming a friendship as soon as their children are born, bearing in mind that they are no worse than you just because they weigh less or measure less in height. This is the kind of re-spect we have to start fostering in Russia. I will go even further by saying that children are smarter than adults!

If you can start perceiving children as fully legitimate mem-bers of the society right from the beginning, you are able to step into their shoes without bossing them around. Discuss any issues that may arise by lis-tening to their arguments and proposing your own.

We expect our children to be better copies of ourselves, or some kind of trophy achievers. We have not learned that our children do not have to do what we do and like what we like. This concept of, dare I say it, God’s creation, an individual, is also almost completely absent in Russia.

What can you expect from a nation that has been deprived of its most educated people, in-

cluding clergy, in the first quar-ter of the 20th century? The clergy was exterminated while “intelligentsia” of all sorts were deported from the earliest days after the revolution.

I am not sure I can name all

of the reasons behind the mal-aise of the modern family. But it involves a great lack of trust and, secondly, failure to ac-knowledge the sacred rights of others. These same generations of people have been taught to take what belongs to others.

What did the Bolsheviks do in 1917? They implemented a policy of pillage. They forged the sense that someone else’s property is always, potentially, yours. This is one of the major causes of our lost moral com-pass, our cynicism. Why are we

failing at becoming a properly capitalist country? Capitalism rests on two giants — on the recognition of the sacred right to private property and on trust. The trust element has fallen apart completely and the pri-vate property right is simply not part of our worldview.

In Russia, some think that someone else’s husband is po-tentially their property, and the same goes for someone else’s wife. Even at school, girls start sizing up other people’s pock-ets.

Let’s consider a woman who is young, attractive and mar-ried. In Russia, she might start looking for a new partner among her husband’s friends. If she entered the marriage as a way of getting on the “up-ward mobility ladder,” no one can expect her to be faithful and, subsequently, there can be no trust. She keeps looking for a wealthier spouse, while her partner may explore opportu-nities with women as objects, younger and more sexually at-tractive every time.

Of course there are many wonderful exceptions to these schemes, namely Russian ro-mantics who get married in the hopes of spending their lives to-gether. This kind of love and trust occurs in Russia as it does everywhere else. But just not frequently enough. It’s time to foster trust, and pass it on to our children.

Before it’s too late.

Prepared by elena shapovalova

prosperous power. They realized all the hardships that a new homeland conceals even as they aspired to a new life, and were equipped to endure and over-come them.

Now, for the first time in his-tory, newcomers enjoy all the privileges Western society offers, including welfare entitlements. Yet they also have every oppor-tunity to preserve their former way of life.

Investigating the flow of em-igrants from Latin countries to the United States, Samuel Hun-tington wrote in his book “Who are we?” that this is the first wave in American history without the need to learn English or embrace an American lifestyle. This is not just because of the number of immigrants, but the technology that allows constant contact with immigrants’ homelands.

The result is paradoxical. Twit-ter, phones and television en-able some to live apart from so-ciety. The alienation of ethnic communities grows as they are no longer compelled to assimi-late.

Respect for minorities’ rights is an essential part of democra-cy. Those who are different from most, whether ethnically, sexu-

ally or politically, must feel free and secure. Recently, this respect has turned more into a demand that new minority groups be al-lowed to live apart: A certain path is cleared so that they don’t feel obliged to learn a new lan-guage. They can invite their rel-atives, even those who will re-ceive welfare benefits when they can’t, or refuse to find a job. And women are allowed to become isolated at home in their nar-rowly defined traditional roles.

The Western world has a con-siderable number of residents who remain foreign in their val-ues with no respect, nor respon-sibility, toward their new home.

Ongoing turbulence in the Middle East could ignite a refu-gee crisis in Europe. As many as 2 million refugees could flee, causing new concern about the ability of institutions to cope and the willingness of these new Eu-ropeans to embrace a Western lifestyle. It again begs the ques-tion: Can the interlinked world avoid a “clash of civilizations,” and if so, at what price?

we expect our children to be better copies of ourselves, or some kind of trophy achievers.

Newcomers enjoy all the privileges western society offers, yet they have every opportunity to preserve their former way of life. what keeps immigrants apart?

europe is increasingly coming up against extremism, not in hazy far-off regions, but at home, within its borders.

svetlana babaevaSpecIal to

RuSSIa Now

elena zaretskayaSpecIal to

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It’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday and there is a procession of BMWs and rickety Russian cars leading to the site of an old chocolate factory, once renowned for its rivers of chocolate and mouth-watering fragrance wafting over the riverfront neighborhood. These days, the chocolate fac-tory is one of Moscow’s most Dionysian of clubs, a study in crass opulence, what one club blogger called “the nightmare of a 7-year-old boy who ate too much candy and fell asleep.”

Girls, in heels designed for better pavements, get out of taxis and head toward the red brick building. To a paradise of sorts. Some say that Rai, which means Paradise in Russian, is not Moscow’s hottest club anymore, but you wouldn’t know it from the long line of hopefuls stand-ing outside waiting to be let in on this Saturday night.

Entrance is free, but that doesn’t mean just anyone can get in. In its unparalleled celebra-tion of excess, Rai is still the face of Moscow clubdom. It is also emblematic for its face control, which is now part of the Russian vernacular (feis kontrol). Entry depends on one man at the door. Moscow has turned feis kontrol into performance art.

Yet some night owls suggest the oversized glamour clubs, with their chronic techno beats, are becoming a tad passe. At the very least, they have some earthy competition. A vast

Entertainment Moscow nightlife offers diversity as well as excess

The famous Red October chocolate factory site on the Moscow River offers a dazzling spectacle of clubs, face control and arm candy.

range of clubs have debuted nearby since Rai opened its doors, even after the financial crisis of 2008. Many cater to entry-level professionals who can’t afford Rai’s VIP couches, or students looking for an al-ternative venue.

Vladimir Face ControlA beautiful young girl comes

up to Rai and stares doe-eyed at a man called Vladimir, Vladi-mir wouldn’t give his last name, saying that he could be referred to simply as “Vladimir Face Con-trol.”

“Can you let me and my friend in,” one girl asked Vladi-mir plaintively. “I want to go to the VIP area.”

“You can come in, but you have to book a table,” Vladimir said. Tables cost a minumum of 50,000 rubles ($1,824).

“Our feet are tired,” she moans, knowing that if you are not in the VIP area, there is no-where to sit down in the club.

“Show me your friend. Maybe I won’t like her,” said Vladimir, explaining in a few brutal words the concept of face control.

Her friend, sheathed in a leopard-skin top, passes mus-ter and they enter the Rai tem-ple, which resembles a mad grotto with elephant heads coming out of the wall. Pretty girls and rich men are still the

cynical mainstay for these high-end clubs. Yet a stone’s throw away, another club caters to an entirely different clientele. Roll-ing Stone Bar and Tattoo ap-pears to be part college pub, part fashion rocker bar. It still has face control, but the con-trast between the two clubs so close to each other is enormous. The main gimmick is that those who drink too much may well end up in the tattoo parlor.

The financial crisis of 2008 scuppered plans to turn the chocolate factory into a “mil-lion dollar mile.” Luxury lofts were shelved, and instead it has become Moscow’s most thriv-ing nightlife area.

At first, clubs closed down during the crisis. But soon, real estate moguls saw new oppor-tunity for their failing develop-ments — party caverns. “Prices are lower, but real estate is cheaper and new [clubs] are opening up,” said Rolling Stone’s face control man Fillip Alexeev, who says he gets a staggering $8,000 a month for his grueling two-day week.

“It’s a dangerous job,” he said. “I get death threats, peo-ple say that they will wait for me after work. The security es-corts me home after work.”

His advice on getting in? “You have to look good, have an intelligent face.”

For some, that’s too much pressure. They head over to Mayak, a bar linked to the Mayakovsky Theater. Friday nights is a raucous dance night in a place that has been adopt-ed by journalists, actors and art-ists. Anyone who doesn’t dance when on the dance floor can expect to get shouted at by the owner.

World. Atop an abandoned fac-tory, the club looks onto the Moscow financial center, called Moscow City. Some revelers cannot say goodbye, even when it costs $16-20 for a Cuba libre. Partygoers finally stumble outside to the waiting taxis, the girls’ heels in their hands. They pour into cars as the unforgiv-ing sun rises.

Some of these places, called “demokratichniye,” or demo-cratic, are not wildly expensive, but they still have face control. And if you can’t get past face control on looks and charm alone, it seems to be increas-ingly difficult to buy your way in.

A few hours before closing, Vladimir is surveying the appli-

cants for Rai, some hopeful, some arrogantly expectant. Two young guys with watches that look too heavy for a wrist come up to the second gate.

When told that access is de-nied, one said, “I have known the club owner for years, do you know who my father is?” The other, Adam, rubbed his fingers together in the global

sign for money and asked, “Can we solve this in a Chekhovian way.” The euphemism is odd, but Vladimir understood the gesture. He refused the bribe.

Closing TimeIt is now 6 a.m., and nearly

all of Moscow’s clubs have closed. The party moves to Krisha Mira, or Roof of the

From Water and Chocolate, a Club Scene

A dancer at Club Rai, located in the old Red October Chocolate Factory.

Cars wait outside the Strelka club in central Moscow. Guests at Club Rai.

GALINA MASTEROVASPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

Entrance is free, but that doesn’t mean just anyone can get in.

A longtime survivor of back-stage battles, surrounded by what she called “jealou-sy and evil insults,” Volochk-ova describes the drama of the movie “Black Swan” as “little flowers” compared to the in-trigues of the Bolshoi Ballet.

It was the Bolshoi Theatre that threw the next “never” at Volochkova, firing her in 2003, a year after she won the prestigious Prix Benois de la Danse. The executives of Mos-cow’s most famous theater pronounced Volochkova the “fat ballerina,” too heavy to ever appear on the theater’s stage again. Volochkova sus-pects the vindictive hand of a powerful former lover, but will not speak his name publicly. She cried under the marble columns of the Bolshoi, she said. “Nobody had a word of support,” she said.

The ballerina remembers with bitterness the day she had to step onto a scale that a New York Times reporter brought to an interview for an inde-pendent measure of her weight — without fear or favor. That scale showed 109 pounds, a fine dancing weight for a 5-foot 6-inch woman.

But her Bolshoi career was over in the most embarrass-ing fashion, after performing as a soloist in six major bal-lets and touring the world for more than five years.

lems” led to her exclusion from the ballot in the race for mayor of Sochi, the city that will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. One of the bespoke, gray men took the job. Suddenly, she said, solo dance performances were being cancelled for her political impertinence in chal-lenging one of the party’s anointed.

The final break, however, did not come until recently when Volochkova photoshopped a semi-nude photo to make it seem like President Dmitry Medvedev was leering at her.

And then she posted it on the web.

tomobile. Curious reporters wondered where she got it. “Where, where?” she wrote on her blog. “I just prayed to God. And He listened to my prayers. I got out of my home, and there it was, my beau-ty.”

Anna Nemtsova is a Moscow-based correspondent for News-week magazine.

CAPTION

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

AnastasiaVolochkova

BORN: JAN. 20, 1976SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

STUDIES: Volochkova stud-ied at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Peters-burg, where both Rudolf Nu-ryev and Mikhail Baryshnikov also trained. She obtained an MBA from Moscow’s Higher School of Economics in 2010.

AWARDS: prestigious Prix Benois de la Danse

EXPERIENCES: The prima bal-lerina was a soloist with the Mariinsky (1994-98) and then the Bolshoi Ballet (1998-2004). She has also worked as an ac-tress and model.

VITAE

Ballerina Dances Away From the Partybered I was a member of Unit-ed Russia.”

Senior members of the party dismissed her departure from the party ranks. But Volochk-ova fought back. She said that in 2005, without her knowl-edge, the party signed her

name on a collective letter in support of the impris-onment o f Mikha i l Khodorkovsky. The former

oil tycoon, she said in a re-cent assessment, was “more

of a man” than those she saw in Putin’s party.

The standing ovations now come from Russia’s belea-guered opposition. “Anasta-sia Volochkova attracted the attention of Russia’s glamor-ous elite by showing an ex-ample of a stoic civil position. I admire her choice,” said Boris Nemtsov, opposition activist and Kremlin foe.

Criticizing the party is not taken lightly, critics say, add-ing that mayors and adminis-trators have lost their jobs for less.

Volochkova likes to say that u n d e r n e a t h h e r f u r coats and silk dresses given to her by admirers over the years, she is “a powerful horse with iron stamina.” And although it seems she has fallen out of favor with the ruler, her fairy tale life is not over.

In one of her recent blog posts, the ballerina posted photos of a new $1 million Maybach, the super-luxe au-

“My beach photoshoot caused serious indignation in the party ranks. ‘How can this be! A member of United Rus-sia suddenly bares her breasts!’ the party aunties yelled,” wrote Volochkova. “They sud-denly remem-

In the wake of the scan-dal, Volochkova joined Unit-ed Russia, one of a num-ber of celebrity recruits designed to brighten up a party more associated with colorless bureau-crats. Volochkova says she was a loyal servant. Her image adorned cam-paign literature. She accompanied re-gional governors on trips to Western Eu-rope as a cultural ambassador. She demonstrated her famed 42-fouetté-t u r n s t o 6 , 0 0 0 state ap-paratchiks, oil magnates, gas company e x e c u -tives and in-vestment fund managers at the country’s major con-cert hall in the Kremlin. Just a few months ago, she danced between the tables at a United Russia gather-ing, gliding between the men in suits and the vodka bottles.

“For as long as I was spin-ning with their flag in my hand, they were my friends, but now they turn their backs,” she said.

The souring in her relation-ship with the party began in 2009 when “paperwork prob-

Volochkova performs the character of Nikia in the Lud-wig Minkus Ballet “La Baya-dere.”

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