News iN Brief

In his first article since announcing that he will run for another term as president, Prime Min-ister Vladimir Putin proposed in the daily Izves-tia a “supra-national union capable of becom-ing a pole in the modern world, and at the same time an effective connection between Eu-rope and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region.”Putin’s article mostly covered the economic as-pects of developing the new body out of exist-ing structures such as the Customs Union (which currently unites Belarus, Kazakhstan and Rus-sia) to cover more of the entire post-Soviet space.

The Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russians Abroad, Russian-American Historical and Cul-ture Center and Russian Way Film Studio will present the 2nd annual Festival of Russian Doc-umentary Films November 23-30 in Washing-ton, D.C. This year’s Festival will be accompa-nied by award-winning Russian directors like Igor Maiboroda, Sergei Zaitsev and Boris Shei-nin, who will have the oportunity to present their films to an American audience.More details at http://www.cinema-rp.com

Putin Proposes post-soviet “eurasian Union”

russian Documentary films Come to D.C.

In a gesture reminiscent of Hollywood’s “Arma-geddon,” Russia and the U.S. are joining forces to keep the asteroids at bay and the earth safe - using missile shield technology. One of the clinchers is that control of the project is put in the hands not of nations but of the United Na-tions.At first glance the brave new step switches the focus of Russia-U.S. security talks from squab-bles over missile defense shields in Europe to saving the world together.But not everyone sees big changes coming. “This positioning has a right to exist but it does not affect the missile defense shield, which the Americans are building in Europe,” Fyodor Ly-ukanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, told Kommersant.Tom washington, THE MOSCOW NEWS

russia and U.s. Team Up to Prevent Armageddon

religions A wondrous tradition is resurrected in an economically depressed region

“Let all our wishes come true! Let all living creatures be free of suf-fering, of danger, of diseases and sadness! Let peace and happi-ness govern on Earth!”

More than 2,000 Buddhists chanted the mantra, kneeling on mats before the Golden Abode of Buddha temple in Elis-ta, the capital of the republic of Kalmykia, one of three tradition-al Buddhist regions in Russia. They repeated words of prayer after the Kalmyk Buddhist lead-er, Telo Tulku Rinpoche. Finally, the square grew quiet as the group went into deep medita-tion.

As night fell, thousands of candles were lit. Buddhist monks visiting from Tibet, Thailand, and the United States, as well as Russian Buddhist regions of Buriatya and Tuva, blessed those who gathered from all over Ka-lmykia and the neighboring southern regions of Russia. They sent candles flying skyward in hot air balloons, illuminating the dark night sky.

The ceremony, an offering of light to Buddha, was introduced to Russian Buddhists for the first time as a symbolic event cele-brating the beginning of the in-ternational forum, “Buddhism:

ANNA NemTsovASpECiAl TO rN

one third of the population of Kalmykia was deported during stalin’s terror. As the region struggles, it returns to its roots for answers.

and culture of Tibetan Bud-dhism. The religion was adopt-ed by their predecessors, the Oirat tribes in Mongolia, in the 13th century and imported to the Russian empire when Oirats migrated there in 1609.

The first Cer-emony of Light offer-ing to Bud-dha was held last month in elista, the capital of Kalmykia.

Philosophy of Non-Violence and Compassion,” held in Elista last month.

Despite objections from China, a group of 30 Tibetan monks from the Gyudmed Mon-astery, assigned by the Dalai Lama, arrived to bless the re-public’s main temple and 17

sculptures of Tibetan Buddhist scientists inside.

At the ceremony, the candle kites formed a path of light in the pitch-black sky. “That is our white road,” somebody whis-pered in the crowd.

“Have a white road” is the most sincere greeting people

traditionally give each other in Kalmykia.

It’s a fittingly modest wish for people in this poor region, stuck in sandy steppe as flat as a pan-cake. The republic of Kalmykia, with its population of more than 300,000 people, chose to re-vive the traditional philosophy

Buddhist revival in Kalmykia

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ecology Nikolai Aladin’s research often went ignored

Nikolai Aladin was an underground researcher no one would fund. Yet his results aided the sea’s partial resurgence.

Nikolai Aladin approached the rusting hulk of a small, rusty ship on which the words Otto Shmidt were still readable on the bow. All around, the former bottom of the Aral Sea was walkable, stretching to the ho-rizon and blending seamlessly into the surrounding desert.

This research vessel was named after a famed Russian scientist and explorer of, ironi-cally, the Arctic. When it ended its last cruise in 1996, funded

by a Japanese grant, it was the last ship afloat on the sea.

“I went on 25 expeditions on this ship,” Aladin remarked in his stentorian voice on a recent expedition to the sea.

Aladin, a professor at the Zo-ological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Pe-tersburg, has studied the Aral Sea longer than anyone. He can take indirect credit for the re-cent rescue of the northern, Ka-zakh part that has turned the Aral from a symbol of cata-strophic environmental misman-agement to one of model re-habilitation.

And yet his career has been anything but easy: except dur-ing the brief Glasnost years of the late 1980s, Aladin — port-

Russian Scientist Never Gave Up on Aral Sea

The Kazakh part of the Aral sea is thriving again.

CHrisToPHer PALASpECiAl TO rN

ly, pony-tailed, erudite and strongly opinionated — has seen his research and generously dis-pensed advice often ignored.

He first saw, or rather did not see, the Aral Sea in 1978. In need of a vacation after defend-ing his doctoral thesis at the zo-ological institute, he went to Ar-alsk, the northern port, to go diving.

The Aral, the world’s fourth-largest inland lake, is located in the desert east of the Caspian Sea (Aral means island in Ka-zakh). It is fed by Central Asia’s two great west-flowing rivers, the Syr and Amu Darya, which bring it glacier water from the Pamir Mountains.

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Governor of the Chelyabinsk Regionhttp://eng.gubernator74.rurn special promotion

Regions Authorities in one of Russia’s industrial hubs are courting investors

A Warm Climate for Investors

southern ural authorities try to convince american companies of the benefits of investing in the region’s economy.

alexander skripovChelyabinsk

Recently, a delegation for the Chelyabinsk region, which in-cluded representatives of 20 leading companies in the area, made its first official visit to the United States. The group held negotiations with major U.S. corporations in Chicago, visited Silicon Valley and met with rep-resentatives of Google and Bank of America. The delegation, headed by Mikhail Yurevich, governor of the Chelyabinsk re-gion, urged American compa-nies to invest in production in the Southern Urals.

Several important agree-ments were reached. The com-pany Caterpillar, for example, decided to look into the possi-bility of expanding its produc-tion to the Chelyabinsk Region. This would be the joint-produc-tion of engines for railway lo-comotives based in the Chely-abinsk Tractor Plant. The legendary facility, which, inci-dentally, is one of the biggest in the world, was created dur-ing the era of Soviet industrial-ization at the beginning of the 1930s with the participation of American specialists. It was re-designed during the Second World War to manufacture T-34 tanks. A total of 18,000 vehi-cles were produced during the war, which is about one fifth of all combat vehicles rolled out in the Soviet Union. But the fac-tory has fallen on hard times in recent years. Outdated equip-ment and insufficient funding for modernization have led to

the manufacture of inferior products. The factory’s new owners have decided to correct the situation with the aid of the famous American company.

“The Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and Caterpillar have en-tered the phase of technical talks on the joint production of in-dustrial machinery and en-gines,” Simon Mlodik, general director, said. “The production of high-power diesel engines can be localized at the Chely-abinsk Tractor Plant site as early as 2012.”

“Chelyabinsk is in need of a new type of industrial produc-tion. We need to attract invest-ment and create modern pro-duction facilities. I mean not only the construction of new plants, but also the moderniza-tion of existing production fa-cilities, because we need to catch up with advanced econ-omies,” Governor Mikhail Yurev-ich explained.“I can say one thing for sure about the coop-eration between the Chely-abinsk Tractor Plant and Cater-pillar — there is no single

same task — to convince local entrepreneurs of the Chely-abinsk region’s favorable invest-ment climate. And the gover-nor’s international activities were successful.

In the first half of 2011, the foreign trade turnover of the Chelyabinsk region increased by 38 percent with China, 22 percent with Germany and 18 percent with Italy.

“Trade between the Chely-abinsk region and the United States is still relatively small, amounting to a little more than $100 million,” Deputy Gover-nor Yuri Klepov said. “But Amer-ica is of interest to us because it’s one of the largest econo-mies in the world, and its lead-ing companies, as a rule, are leaders in their industries.” The region’s leadership has set itself the task of directing U.S. tech-nology and investment to the Chelyabinsk region, which is competing with other emerg-ing markets.

In Chicago, the Chelyabinsk regional delegation took part in the 19th annual meeting of the U.S.-Russia Business Coun-cil (USRBC).

Governor Mikhail Yurevich explained to the members of the USRBC why he believes the market in the Southern Urals is promising for American in-vestors. Many enterprises in the region are developing dy-namically, and the region itself is demonstrating positive in-dustrial growth. If the project-ed figure for the year end in the whole of Russia is around 4 percent, it is expected to reach 7.5 percent in the Chely-abinsk region. Another factor that works in the region’s favor is its advantageous geograph-ical location in the center of

A Future in Education Chelyabinsk Governor Mikhail Yureyevich wrapped up a weeklong visit to the United States earlier this month fol-lowing meetings in California and Chicago, where he fielded questions about Russia’s in-vestment climate and copy-right laws from representatives of major U.S. corporations like Google and Bank of America.The official was on a mission

to convince American manu-facturers to bring production to Chelyabinsk. Just as im-portant to his region’s future, Yureyevich was also on hand to foster an internship program for Chelyabinsk State Universi-ty students to intern at Amer-ican companies, a program supported by the Washington, D.C.-based American Councils for International Education.

How’s the Climate There?

IntERvIEW dwigHT k. boHm

age: 64

education: petRoleum

manaGement

Dwight K. Bohm complet-ed degrees at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and the University of Kan-sas in Lawrence in Petroleum Management. In the 1990s, he served as president of Oh-kura-Rosemount Japan Co. and representative director of Fisher-Rosemount Japan Co. in Tokyo. He later worked as vice president of Daniel Mid-dle East & Africa before com-ing to Chelyabinsk in 2004, where he worked for the next six years.

hIs stoRyAfter working for Emerson in North America and Asia, Amer-ican Dwight K. Bohm served as general director of Metran in Chelyabinsk from 2004 to 2010. He is currently Vice President at Marine Business Strategy & De-velopment in North Carolina. Dwight spoke about doing busi-ness in Russia.

why was chelyabinsk chosen as the location for emerson’s global engineering center? There was already a successful group of engineers with expe-rience in product development that worked in the same envi-ronment as we do. We were also happy to see that their Re-search & Development peo-ple worked near the factory that mass-produced the final product — this is always im-portant.

Finally, we realized that set-ting up a similar center in Mos-cow would have been too ex-pensive. The relative costs would have made it uncom-petitive.

what are the greatest chal-lenges you faced in doing busi-ness in chelyabinsk?Communication and, specifi-cally, business meetings were a huge problem in the old days. The meetings were unproduc-tive and usually involved some-one standing and reading from a piece of paper before a large, glazed-looking audience. Mov-ing from that to an environ-ment where you would have people giving key messages and exchanging ideas was dif-ficult.

So you still see bits of the old Russia now and then.

what is the greatest miscon-ception foreign investors hold about doing business in rus-sia?The level of corruption. Yes, there is corruption. But I’ve worked in Asia and South

America and can say that it’s no worse here. The stereotype that corruption is everywhere in Russia and that you can’t trust anyone is just not true. You need a good process, good leaders and good mechanisms in place.

On the other hand, there is excessive bureaucracy. We often have to have a bunch of documents singed, sealed and stamped. But these things are evolving over time.

did you feel supported as an in-vestor by the local government in chelyabinsk?There is a desire among the regional leaders to provide a high level of support. I know my successor at Metran has ac-cess to the governor’s staff. The regional governments know they’re in competition with the rest of the world and each other to attract investors, and I know the Chelyabinsk region makes a huge effort to compete with neighboring Yekaterinburg. The governor’s office has always been very supportive of what we do.

what accomplishments are you most proud of during your tenure in chelyabinsk?My view going into Russia was that “this is going to be really difficult.” How well our inte-gration with Metran went was the most satisfying thing of all. I saw some of our young lead-ers develop very rapidly, and being their mentor was very gratifying.

I left knowing that the com-pany was in very good hands in terms of the Russian leaders that were in place. At Emer-son, my colleagues now point to the project at Metran as an example of how a merger should be done.

how has the investment cli-mate changed since you came to chelyabinsk?It has improved. Carbo Ceram-ics, the Texas-based producer and supplier of ceramic prop-pant, came to Chelyabinsk after us and their experience was very different than ours — it was a lot smoother. A part of the problem is that we occupy a federally owned building in Chelyabinsk; a lot of the issues we face are connected to this.

prepared byvladimir bartov

the country, which simplifies logistics. Products can be sold not only in Russia but also neighboring Kazakhstan and other CIS countries — and this too is a potentially huge mar-ket. It is also important that the Southern Urals, which is known for the high level of its education system, is home to a number of powerful research

oping and manufacturing in-strumentation and tools as a fully fledged part of the Amer-ican corporation. Moreover, al-most 70 percent of the engi-neers working in the Southern Urals are involved in internation-al projects. The Chelyabinsk Em-erson production is the largest in Russia, employing more than 1,000 people.

Recently, Metran, together with the South-Ural State Uni-versity, established the Global Engineering Centre, which de-velops and manufactures auto-mation equipment for the whole world.

The region also cooperates actively with the Finnish com-pany Fortum. Corporate man-agement recently allocated 73 million euros for the installation of two gas turbines, which will replace outdated equipment at the local thermal power station. They will also reduce the amount of emissions into the environ-ment 15-fold.

Largest Foreign Investors

Annual Foreign Direct Investment

institutions, as well as highly skilled engineers and scien-tists.

Such potential is highly val-ued by the American company Emerson, which has successful experience in the region. In 2004, the company became a strategic partner of the Chely-abinsk company Metran. Since 2009, Metran has been devel-

technological operation which cannot be done in Chely-abinsk.”

Before traveling to the Unit-ed States, the governor visited Germany, Italy and China, where he was faced with the

Cold weather — which regu-larly dips below -30 degrees in winter — is not the only reason foreigners have remained cau-tious about investing in the Chelyabinsk region. The new governor, Mikhail Yurevich, is trying to change that.

The 42-year-old business-man, named “Man of the Year” at the tender age of 28 for the organization of industrial pro-duction in Chelyabinsk, was ap-pointed governor by President Dmitry Medvedev last year. Yurevich recently launched a start-up office for foreign in-vestors in the capital. It pro-vides assistance to newcomers to Chelyabinsk, offering any-thing from the provision of in-

terpreters to help with regis-tering documents. Local authorities also provide tax credits during the early stages of investment and help select land and industrial sites with ready infrastructure.

To date, 55 projects have been supported by the region-al Ministry of Economic Devel-opment. Not all of them are focused on manufacturing.

One Italian company decid-ed to invest $118 million in the modernization of a ski resort near the city of Miass, a two-hour drive from Chelyabinsk. It is one of seven ski resorts oper-ating successfully in the South-ern Urals.

A number of powerful food holdings have been created with the help of foreign investment in the Southern Urals; local pasta and buckwheat is exported all over the world.

hotel in the city where foreign-ers could stay,” said Dwight Bohm, general director of Metran between 2004 and 2010.

Things have changed since 1992. People have begun to trav-el abroad regularly for holidays, business, study and professional exchange.

The town now has an inter-national airport, supermarkets, health spas, restaurants, internet cafes, shops. Chelyabinsk has over a dozen internationally competitive hotels, the latest newcomer being Holiday Inn.

Authorities are currently scram-bling to develop the city’s infra-structure in time for the Euro-pean Judo Championships, which will be held in Chelyabinsk for the first time in 2012.

investing in peopleWith a shortage of funds in the regional budget, Yurevich is con-vinced that foreign investment is the key to further develop-ment. New jobs will create de-mand for investing in educa-tion.

That is why Yurevich is par-ticularly proud of the agreement reached during his United States visit with the Washington, D.C.-based American Councils on Ed-ucation for International Educa-tion. The deal will provide internship opportunities for stu-dents of Chelyabinsk State Uni-versity at leading American com-panies.

welcoming Foreign Capital

people on vacation enjoy the ski resort outside the city of Miass.

a new governor wants to attract foreigners to the chelyabinsk region.

alexander skripovChelyabinsk

speCial promotion by the Chelyabinsk regional administration

breaking down barriersNonetheless, few foreigners have heard of Chelyabinsk. To tackle the problem, local au-thorities created a new position: deputy governor for invesment projects. Yurevich appointed 39-year-old Alexei Ovakimyan, who had previously run a suc-cessful consulting company, to the post.

“It became clear after meet-ings with foreign investors that they had never heard of Chely-abinsk before,” Ovakimyan said. “For many of them, Russia is still associated primarily with Mos-cow and St. Petersburg. But this is a completely misguided point of view.”

globalizationThe capital of the Southern Urals, Chelyabinsk, is a city with more than one million inhabit-ants. It is situated more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow on the slope of the Ural Mountains, near the border between Eu-rope and Asia, and recently cel-ebrated its 275th anniversary. In Soviet times, Chelyabinsk was a closed city filled with factories for the production of steel prod-ucts, weapons and agricultural machinery.

The area was also home to some of the most hi-tech labo-ratories for the production of nu-clear weapons.

“It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1990s there was only one

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Kalmykia (video) http://rbth.ru/13426 Politics & Society

NEXT ISSUEReal Estate: A New Bubble in the Making?November 30Russians buying homes at pre-crisis levels

Russian Scientist Never Gave Up on Aral Sea

The Fastest Shrinking Sea

Where Did the Water Go?Until 1960: The Aral Sea is 26,000 square miles with a sa-linity of 10g/liter. It produces 50,000 tons of freshwater fish a year, and the fishery employs 60,000 people. Upstream, in the two rivers, there are 12 mil-lion acres under cultivation. Ar-alsk is a significant port.1960: The Aral Sea belongs to the Soviet Union. The authori-ties in Moscow decide to ex-pand irrigation for its cotton industry and turn the sea into a brine lake, calculating that the cotton is worth 100 times the fishery.

1987: The sea has contracted to a third of its previous size, leaving a cracked, salty desert. The irrigated surface has dou-bled into north Small Aral and south Great Aral. Salinity has tripled and the fishery has dis-appeared. The number of birds and animals decrease twofold over 30 years.2011: The northern Aral, now 1,300 square miles, is revived with a dike, which was built with the help of the World Bank in 2005. It allowed salinity to drop and all two dozen fish species to return to the waters.

When the Soviet Union divert-ed the rivers, it made the deci-sion to let the sea die.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Sherpa to a Sea’s Rebirth

Nikolai Aladin was born in 1954 in Leningrad, now St. Pe-tersburg. Since 1989, he has been the head of the Labora-tory of Brackish Water Hydro-biology at the Zoological Insti-

tute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Aladin has been studying the Aral sea since 1978, when he first came to Aralsk for vaca-tion after defending his doc-

toral thesis — to go diving. “When I got to Aralsk, the port was dry and the sea was more than 30 kilometers [18 miles] away,” recalled Aladin. When he reached the sea, he found that its salinity had doubled in less than two decades, pos-sibly the fastest rise in his-tory. So he took samples and measurements; he decided he would make his life work the study of how the fish and wild-life adapted to the changes.Since then, Aladin has become an expert for a variety of in-ternational environmental pro-grams devoted to the Caspian and Aral Seas, including UNES-CO and the United Nations. He has contributed to more than 200 articles in scientific publi-cations and gone on 41 expedi-tions to the Aral Sea.

Until the 1960s, it produced 50,000 tons of fish a year. But in the 1960s, the Soviet author-ities began to divert water from the two rivers to produce cot-ton for uniforms and gunpow-der, knowing the sea would die.

“When I got to Aralsk, the port was dry and the sea was more than 30 kilometers away,” Aladin recalled. When he reached it, he found that its sa-linity had doubled to 2 percent in less than two decades, pos-sibly the fastest rise in history. So he took samples and mea-surements and decided he would make his life’s work the study of how the fauna adapt-ed to the changes.

But back in St. Petersburg, his proposals were met with eva-sive replies. While the decision to sacrifice fish for cotton was not secret, the authorities dis-couraged any examination of its appalling consequences on the ecology and the life of the local population.

Philip Micklin, a professor of geography at Western Michigan University who would become the leading Western expert on the Aral, remembers scrutiniz-ing the Soviet scientific literature for details in the early 1980s. “You’d find an occasional refer-ence to the fact the sea level had fallen by so much, or the salin-ity had increased, but you never saw a whole article devoted to the desiccation,” he recalled dur-ing the expedition.

In Russia, Aladin was forced to study other subjects and to ask for his father, a naval phy-sician, for money to fund his research on the Aral. At scien-tific conferences, he was some-times allowed to read papers on his research, but not to pub-lish them. “It was a form of sam-izdat,” he said, speaking of dis-sident self-publishing under communism.

All that changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost policy of openness. Aladin’s research was published and the consequenc-es of the cotton-first policy on the health of the Kazakhs on the north shore and the Uzbeks on the south shore were wide-ly described. The Academy of Sciences gave him his own re-search center, the Laboratory of Brackish Water Hydrobiolo-gy.

But while Moscow was still studying ways to reverse the di-saster, the Soviet Union dis-solved and what was left of the Aral Sea was bisected by the Uzbek-Kazakh border. The Rus-sian scientific authorities became reluctant to fund expeditions, in part in deference to nation-alist sensibilities there and in part because they were strapped for cash.

Meanwhile, Western donors questioned why they should

give money to Russians instead of to Western scientists or to Kazakhs and Uzbeks.

So officially, Aladin went back to studying the Caspian. His fa-ther passed away and he fi-

nanced his Aral research by tak-ing pay ing tour i s t s on expeditions and trying to turn a profit, with mixed results.

In 1993, he encouraged a local Kazakh governor to build, with a handful of bulldozers and little expertise, a crude dike that kept the water from the Syr Darya in the northern part of the Aral. Salinity dropped and some fish returned, but

the dike breached repeated-ly.

The World Bank eventually funded the construction of a proper, 8-mile earthen dike and concrete sluice — all work was done without consultations with Aladin. By 2005, the Bank had completed the dike, which al-lowed for the accumulation of water into the sea and the res-toration of wetland ecosys-tems.

Six years later, the fish bio-mass in the Kazakh part of the sea jumped from 3,500 tons to 18,000 tons, said local fisheries director Zaualkhan Yermakha-nov. Fishermen are hauling in 6,000 tons a year using crude nets. Villages in the area boast new houses, schools and satel-lite antennas while a fish-pro-cessing plant in Aralsk has cre-ated 41 jobs.

“The first dam was experi-mental,” Aladin said. “We want-

ed to prove that disasters made by the hand of man could be repaired by the hand of man. I am very proud they have built it properly now.”

Today, the government of Ka-zakhstan, a net creditor to the world thanks to booming oil and minerals exports, is considering taking the rehabilitation of the Aral one step further. Two plans are being considered. In the first, the Kokaral dike would be raised so the sea would rise another 20 feet, expanding its surface from 2,125 to 3,125 square miles. The other plan would in-volve digging a canal to the north that would divert Syr Darya water to bring the sea back to Aralsk, returning the town to its role as a port.

Aladin, who continues to trav-el to the Aral, urges that both steps be taken, one after the other.

“We wanted to prove that disasters made by ... man could be repaired by the hand of man,” Aladin said.

It was violently destroyed, to-gether with all Buddhist prayer houses, temples and holy rel-ics, during Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. The entire indig-enous Kalmyk population spent 17 years in exile in Siberia.

Today, Kalmykia is the sec-ond poorest region in Russia, after Ingushetia. Visiting Ka-lmykia last March, President Dmitry Medvedev called the sit-uation “difficult,” as the 15 per-cent unemployment rate in Ka-lmykia was twice as high as the national average.

Buddhism teaches tolerance and loving-kindness, so Kalmyks have learned to cope with their harsh realities. “We have seen it much worse,” Yevdokiya Kut-sayeva, 84, said. She had tears in her eyes as she recalled St-alin’s deportations. “One Oc-tober night in 1943, they packed the entire population of the republic into dirty train wagons and sent us to Siberia. Thousands died on the way. I remember the stacks of dead bodies along the plat-forms,” she recalled.

Until the late 1980s, it was dangerous for Kutsayeva and her family to light a candle for Buddha, much less send one into the sky in a hot air balloon. To Kutsayeva’s joy, Kalmykia has built 55 new Buddhist prayer homes and 30 temples in the past decade.

“That is all we have left to make people happy and peace-ful today,” Alexander Nemeyev, a local businessman, said. Nem-eyev pointed at the golden stat-ue of Buddha in the temple that

he had built for his village, Ul-duchiny, two years ago. He spent about $41,000, or 1,230 rubles. On a recent weekend, about 100 Buddhists came to pray together with Tibetan monks visiting the republic.

Not everybody in the village participated in the religious cer-emony. “The temple is not giv-

ing me food for my two chil-dren,” sa id Khondor, a 47-year-old widower and an electrician who did not want to give his last name, showing his modest two-room house that he shares with his two teenage children. Khondor said he was proud to be one of two people who had full-time jobs in Ul-

revival of Kalmyk Buddhist men-tality and culture, along with basic secular human ethics like compassion, love, kindness and forgiveness.

Exhausted after two decades of economic and social crises, Kalmyks often come to the re-public’s main temple, or Cen-tral Hurul, saying, “my soul is damaged, please help me,” the Buddhist leader, Telo Tulku Rinpoche, said. “In a way we are a spiritual, psychological center giving people hope, moral support and spiritual guidance.”

According to Yulia Zhironki-na, director of the Moscow-based Save Tibet Foundation, Telo Tulku Rinpoche has be-come Russia’s major spiritual leader for Buddhists. “He goes to India to consult with the Dalai Lama about most of his important decisions for Ka-lmykia education and cultural programs,” Zhironkina said. Ka-lmykia is one of the 19 Russian regions introducing experimen-tal programs on basics ethics for the 4th and 5th grades at Russian state schools. “The Dalai Lama consulted Telo Tulku Rinpoche about the concept for the school history and ba-sics of Buddhism in Kalmykia,” Zhironkina said.

But there are areas where nei-ther the Dalai Lama nor his fol-lowers have power to help. On one of his visits in Kalmykia, Barry Kerzin, a Buddhist doctor from Philadelphia, said he was shocked by the problems local doctors faced. “The entire hos-pital, including the surgery rooms, had no running water that day,” he said. This year,

local activists criticized the au-thorities for not finishing the re-construction of the republic’s only children’s hospital. This month, about 300 successful Kalmyks, calling themselves “a partisan Internet movement,” wrote a letter to President Ba-rack Obama asking him to re-store the hospital, currently in disrepair. The letter was also de-signed to shame the Russian federal government and at the same time call attention to their plight.

Doctors at Kalmykia’s only children’s hospital had trouble listing the most needed medi-cine and equipment. “We need everything,” Tomara Nemchi-rova, the administrator of the hospital said. “We have kids on a waiting l ist until next spring.”

Kalmykia has not seen any bounty, nor promises of any in-frastructure from deals that Royal Dutch Shell signed this year for the exploration of oil fields on the steppe. Major dis-coveries have been made in nearby Kazakhstan, also on the Caspian Sea.

The former Kalmyk president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, was on hand for the recent ceremonies. He stepped down in 2010. The controversial former leader said that the teachings of Buddhism he supported during his rule saved Kalmykia from getting in-volved in the terrorist wars in the neighboring North Cauca-sus republics.

“The peaceful and kind phi-losophy of Buddhism is a solu-tion for Kalmyk people in the chaos and hard reality they live in,” Zhironkina said.

Buddhist Revival boosts depressed region

Tibetan monks came to Kalmykia despite China’s objections.

A Phoenix From the AshesKalmyk Buddhists were first widely repressed in the 1930s during Stalin’s Terror. Every re-ligion was persecuted under Soviet policies, but Buddhism experienced almost total de-struction. By 1941, all Buddhist monasteries and temples had been closed or destroyed; the most outstanding members of the Buddhist elite (monks of a high rank, experts on Bud-dhist doctrine) were executed or disappeared in concentra-tion camps. A second wave of repressions took place in 1943 when about one third of Ka-lmyks were taken from their homes and sent to Siberia.

duchiny. “Kalmyk people his-torically tolerated troubles,” he said, adding what could be said about a good number of differ-ent people in Russia, “to cope with difficulties is our tradi-tion.”

Khondor’s children, Aveyash, 14, and Nagaila, 13, said their dream was to leave Kalmykia,

perhaps by going to study in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Their father did not mind this goal, as he saw no future for them in the republic, he said.

Kalmyk Buddhist leaders say that today, their efforts are not about just rebuilding the tem-ples, something supported by the government, but about the

3 FACTS ABOUT BUDDHISM

1 Traditionally, Buddhism is the main religion in Republics of Buryatia,

Kalmykia, The Tyva, Altai Re-public, Zabaykalsky Krai and Irkutsk Oblast (all of them in Siberia except Kalmykia). Bud-dhism came to Russia in the 17th century; in 1764 it was of-ficially accepted as one of the state religions.

2 Today, there are ap-proximately 1.4 million Buddhists in Russia, ac-

cording to the most recent cen-sus, and Buddhists comprise 1 percent of the population.

3 In 1979, the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the Soviet Union. Af-

ter 1994, the Dalai Lama was received enthusiastically when he visited Russia’s three Bud-dhist republics. But as Mos-cow’s trade with China became increasingly important after 2004, Russia stopped giving visas to the Dalai Lama.

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Slideshow at rbth.ru/13607

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

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Letters to the editor

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ERDOGAN

There is hardly a day when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, is not doing

something that grabs the atten-tion of the media worldwide. He preaches democracy to the Egyp-tians, threatens Israel with naval action, promises the Palestinians to recognize their as yet non-ex-istent state and declares public-ly that he is no longer on speak-ing te rms w i th Sy r i a ’s not-so-strong-man Bashar al-As-sad. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, the Turkish prime minister mentioned his country’s longstanding official bid to join the European Union only by passing. He hinted that by the time the Europeans are ready to accept Turkey as one of their own, it might well become a much less accommodating and more demanding partner.

Erdogan and his team pos-sess a vision for Turkey that, al-though still a work in progress, is much more coherent, inspired and whole than anything the current European Union lead-ers, uniform, dull and indecisive as one, could ever suggest to their own people. This is a pros-pect of a country that sincerely espouses Islam and is at the same time comfortable with other faiths, opinions and mores. Erdogan’s agenda is values-based — and this makes it in-finitely more interesting and ex-citing than anything the E.U. has to offer, even if you disagree with the values themselves. If you were a young Turk (no pun intended), which vision would you espouse for your country, in all earnestness? Would you support the spread of influence, political and economic, in the Mediterranean, with Turkey making its own decisions about the future? Or would you pre-fer to join a large club of dispa-rate nations trying in vain to bail out a state with the popu-lation the size of Istanbul, and at the same time feed a sprawl-ing Brussels bureaucracy aspir-ing to dictate the shape of eggs to the farmers of Denmark and regulate alcohol sales to the in-digenous peoples of Lappland in Finland? The answer is some-what obvious.

That Turkey’s strict secularist system, guaranteed and upheld by the military was out of step with the changing times, was clear even before the former mayor of Istanbul burst onto the national political scene in the 1990s. But it is also obvi-ous that the old secular, Atat-urk-worshipping elite missed this point. And now Erdogan’s

konstantin von eggert

special To rn

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

center-right Justice and Devel-opment Party has ceased mo-mentum. In the words of a friend of mine, a professor of political science at one of Tur-key’s leading private universi-ties, “the prime minister is using democratic slogans to change the system so as to enshrine the Islamists’ leading position in Turkish politics for years, if not decades to come.” Erdogan conducts an unrelenting witch-hunt against the military — and gets applause from the E.U. for removing the “peaked caps” from politics. At times nasty, the generals kept the radicals of all hues out of politics. Will the rad-icals continue to be kept on the fringes? There is a legitimate doubt about this. Erdogan calls for direct elections of the pres-ident, preparing to slip into the head of state chair in order to continue his political career well into the future. But what should worry everyone most is his per-secution of journalists (several dozen are in jail, frequently on flimsy or obviously constructed charges). He also stuffs the ju-diciary with Justice and Devel-opment Party sympathizers. All this makes Erdogan’s proclama-tions of his commitment to de-mocracy less than convincing.

His foreign policy seems er-ratic and prone to sloganeering at best, reckless at worst. Look-ing at the footage of his trium-phant tour of the Middle East, I could not help but compare it to the documentary reels of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, working the crowds into a frenzy with his fiery appeals to “drive Israel into the sea.” Of course, Erdogan says no such thing. He knows that there are lines one should not cross as long as one wants to be taken seriously by the West.

Still, the Turkish prime min-ister’s taste for populism and popular adulation is a cause for worry. At the same time, one has to hand it to him — he knows where and when to stop. Erdogan broke his own prom-ise to visit the Hamas-run Gaza strip in solidarity with the Pal-estinians, although the Egyp-tian authorities were ready to open the border for him. He recently duly deployed U.S. ra-dars on Turkish soil in compli-ance with NATO obligations. So the jury on the maverick Turk-ish leader’s future is still out. He could yet become a reformer, who would influence not only his native country but also Mus-lim societies around the world. He may also turn out to be a power-hungry despot who would ruin Turkish democracy and destabilize the Mediterra-nean.

The prime minister is using democratic slogans to enshrine the islamists in their leading position.

opinion

a consensus is emerg-ing among Russia-watchers that Prime Minister Vladimir Pu-

tin’s return to the Russian pres-idency should have little im-pact on the country’s foreign policy and, in particular, on U.S.-Russia relations. Andrew Kuchins, of the Center for Stra-tegic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., has elo-quently summarized this sen-timent:

“The possible election of Putin as the president of Rus-sia will not signify a fundamen-tal change in the direction of U.S.-Russia relations. The main reason for this is the fact that no major decisions on foreign or domestic policy during the period of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency have been made without implicit or explicit sup-port from Mr. Putin.”

In other words, Medvedev’s foreign policy decisions were always those of the tandem, and the tandem’s decisions were always those of Putin. Or, paraphrasing the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: when we say Medvedev, we mean the

Eugene Ivanov is a Massachu-setts-based political commentator who blogs at The Ivanov Report.

Vadim Birstein was a member of the first International Commis-sion. Susanne Berger is a histori-cal researcher and independent consultant to the Swedish-Rus-sian Working Group about Raoul Wallenberg’s fate. www.raoul-wallenberg.eu

WHEN WE sAy TANDEm WE mEAN puTIN

THE FsB sHOuLD OpEN up THE WALLENBERG FILEs

new.” This comment was ap-parently intended to signal the administration’s support for President Dmitry Medvedev’s modernization agenda. In hind-sight, however, it appears that Obama’s approach, and, in par-ticular, his jab at Putin, was mis-guided, even if cultivating Putin would have had its own do-mestic repercussions.

True, Obama and Putin will have opportunities to meet face-to-face in 2012: once at the G8/NATO summit in Chicago in May and then at the APEC meeting in Vladivostok, Russia, in November. It is, however, highly doubtful that these bi-lateral mini-summits will pro-duce anything more substantial than mandatory photo-ops.

And then, in November, the presidential election in the Unit-ed States will take place. Obama has about a 50 percent chance of winning the election. But if he loses, the agenda and the dynamics of the Washing-ton-Moscow dialogue for the foreseeable future will be de-fined not by Putin, but by the next U.S. president, a Repub-lican. Incidentally, Mitt Rom-ney, currently the leading Re-publican presidential candidate — and, therefore, the likeliest new partner for Putin, remarked

recently that the reset in U.S.-Russia relations “has to end.”

Of course, Obama may still get re-elected, but his ability to conduct the Russia policy he wants will be further limit-ed by the expected loss of the

Democratic majority in the Senate, something that

the apologists of the “nothing-is-going-to change” ap-proach seem to overlook. It is no

secret that Obama invested heavily in his relationship with Medvedev on the as-sumption that sup-porting Medvedev

was a way to signal U.S. support for re-

forms in Russia and, of course, on the assump-

tion that supporting Medvedev will im-prove his chances to

be elected for the sec-ond term. Making things even worse, Senate Re-

publicans will most likely be in the majority and will

obstruct his every move vis-à-vis Russia, however benign.

In 2008, Henry Kissinger per-ceptively observed that when Putin was president, “Russian policy … [was] … driven in a

quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being

the preferred choice.” Regardless of whether Putin trusts or mistrusts the West, he has all the reasons to believe that his offer of strategic part-nership to the United States had been rejected by anti-Russian policies of the Bush administra-tion.

Naturally, any speculations on the direction of Russian for-eign policy during Putin’s third and, possibly, fourth presiden-tial term are premature, yet the very notion that nothing will change because Medvedev’s past initiatives were implicitly or explicitly supported by Putin — which is impossible to know for sure — appears a tad naïve. After all, Putin’s acquiescing to Medvedev’s decisions — or choosing not to veto them — doesn’t prove his endorsement of these decisions, much less a willingness to pursue them.

If Obama is re-elected, he may, as Kuchins and other Rus-sia watchers have suggested, pursue a course of pragmatism supported by the likes of at least one Republican, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN). It could be that all is not lost.

And, naturally, there are al-ways folks trying to find com-mon ground between optimists and pessimists. Thus, Mary Beth Sheridan of the The Washing-ton Post attempted to sound neutral: “Now, [U.S. President] Obama is going to have to get used to a new partner — Vladi-mir Putin.”

Is he really going to have to get used to Putin? Remember, if Putin is elected, as seems like-ly, he will be sworn in as the next president of Russia in May 2012. At this time, President Barack Obama will be in the middle of a tough re-election campaign; the last thing on his to-do list will be improving a perhaps personally frosty re-lationship with his what’s-old-is-new-again Russian counter-part. Not to mention the fact that any attempt to cozy up with Putin will be immediate-ly interpreted by Republican opponents as Putin appease-ment.

Obama and Putin met once, in July 2009, during Obama’s visit to Russia, and this was a tough one-on-one, according to the people present. Short-ly before the meeting, he de-scribed Putin as having “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the

The Gift of adoption

Your recent article “Fixing For-eign Adoption” had so many problems with it, one barely knows where to begin. It was outrageous that the writer blamed foreign parents for hav-ing problems with their children when it’s the Gulag-like Russian adoption system at fault.

Why have adoptions from Russia fallen in recent years? The most obvious answer is the cost: Russian adoptions cost $50,000 and more these days. Thanks to unbelievable corruption in Russia and the requirement that parents take three trips to the country, Russian adoptions are the most expensive in the world. Parents are forced to pay out

sums of money for ridiculous things such as the eight-hour “doctor’s exam” whereby par-ents have to shell out more than $1,000 to be poked and pinched by doctors.... Plus the foreign fees...run about $12,000 per child. No other country charg-es that much.

I am an adoptive mother with a child from Kazakhstan. I found it unbelievable that the piece would talk about how unfit American parents are to bring up special-needs kids when the Russian adoption authorities should be thanking these par-ents on their knees.

Sincerely, Julia duin

eugene ivanov

special To rn

Vadim birstein susanne bergerThe moscow Times

the third angLe

medvedev’s decisions were those of the tandem, and the tandem’s decisions were those of putin.

it is no secret that obama invested heavily in his relationship with president medvedev.

next year marks the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most admired figures:

Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution in World War II Hun-gary only to be swallowed up himself in 1945 by Stalin’s Gulag. Although Soviet leaders claimed in 1957 that Wallen-berg had died suddenly in the Lubyanka prison on July 17, 1947, the full circumstances of his fate in Soviet captivity have never been established.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, the current chief of the Federal Security Ser-vice’s registration and archives directorate, Lieutenant General Vasily Khristoforov, emphasized that he, too, considers Wallen-berg a hero and that FSB offi-cials are doing everything to un-cover more documentation. He strongly denied withholding any information that would shed light on the truth.

Yet it is indisputable that Rus-sian officials for decades chose

to mislead not only the general public but also an official Swed-ish-Russian Working Group that investigated the case from 1991-2001. This group included offi-cial Swedish representatives as well as Wallenberg’s brother, Guy von Dardel. Russia did not mere-ly obscure inconsequential de-tails of the case but also failed to provide documentation that goes to the very heart of the Wallenberg inquiry.

Chief among these are cop-ies of the Lubyanka prison reg-

ister from July 23, 1947. They show that a “Prisoner No. 7” was questioned on that day, six days after Wallenberg’s al-leged death. Russian officials have since acknowledged that “Prisoner No. 7” almost cer-tainly was Wallenberg. Re-searchers have yet to receive a copy of the full page of this Lubyanka interrogation regis-ter, in uncensored form, show-ing the complete list of inter-rogated prisoners and other details.

Researchers also never re-ceived important investigative material about Willy Rödel, Wal-lenberg’s long-term cellmate in Lefortovo prison from 1945 to 1947. Khristoforov states that none of the preserved statements by Rödel refer to Wallenberg. That may well be true, but re-searchers should be allowed to confirm that it is.

The mere fact that large parts of Rödel’s file survive raises se-rious questions about whether similar documentation still ex-ists for other key persons in the case, including Wallenberg. After all, where exactly did Wal-lenberg’s possessions magically come from after they reap-peared in 1989, when Russian officials returned them to his family?

But if Wallenberg’s trail indeed broke off in 1947, why this grand effort at deception?

At the moment, only one an-swer seems plausible: Both So-viet and later Russian officials did not want to complicate mat-ters, which this information un-doubtedly would have. If re-searchers had learned in 1989 or in 1991, at the start of the working group, that Wallenberg was alive six days after his sup-posed death on July 17, 1947, then an all-out effort would have followed to uncover the full truth about of his fate.

Khristoforov claims that due to extensive document destruc-tion, the full circumstances of Wallenberg’s fate will never be learned. He argues that based on his experience with similar cases, Wallenberg was most like-ly “helped to die” (read: exe-cuted) “a few days” after July 23, 1947.

He also does not explain why

document collections directly connected to the Wallenberg case in Russian intelligence ar-chives are completely inacces-sible to researchers. These in-clude important files in the archival collections of the FSB and Foreign Intelligence Ser-vice, as well as crucial corre-spondence records between the security services and the Soviet leadership from the de-cisive 1945-47 years and be-yond.

Most important, Russian of-ficials have never revealed the source of a key document in the Wallenberg case, the so-called Smoltsov note, which was presented in an official state-ment in February 1957, by For-eign Minister Andrei Gromyko. This note, supposedly authored by the Lubyanka prison doctor, Smoltsov, claimed that Wallen-berg died suddenly of a heart attack.

Why do Russian authorities not allow researchers unhin-dered access to documentation in a case that is 66 years old? Let us conduct an investigation that meets the standards of ac-ademic inquiry with original documents presented in uncen-sored form in their original file contexts — and with research findings independently con-firmed by a formal peer review. Only then can we begin to con-duct a meaningful evaluation of Wallenberg’s fate.

tandem, and when we say the tandem, we mean Putin.

Of course, not everyone is subscribing to this relaxed opin-ion, especially the most conser-vative Russia watchers on the Hill. For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Leon Aron, in an article titled “Watch out for Putin, and Russia,” points to what he calls Putin’s “profound mistrust of the West” and warns “the United States must pre-pare for…destabilizing develop-ments.” Aron predicts that no progress will be made on Eu-ropean missile defense and ex-pects that Russia will be less co-operative on Iran.

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05Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru reflectionsmost read The Flexible E-textbook of the Future

http://rbth.ru/13505

a Dystopian Future

read russia

In the mythical Riphean Mountains, gem prospectors, called rock hounds, search for precious stones. On the

streets of a Russian city, romance unfolds against the backdrop of the centenary of the 1917 rev-olution — seemingly a call to repeated violence. Olga Slavnik-ova weaves these parallel plots and settings together in “2017,” an ambitious, postmodern con-tribution to a revered literary tra-dition. Slavnikova’s strange, genre-defying novel, winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, finally made it into English in Marian Schwartz’s luminous translation. There is a great her-itage of Russian sci fi, most of it dystopian. Several recent novels have set their action a few years in the future to create a satirical alternative present: Tatyana Tol-staya’s “Slynx” and Dmitry Gluk-hovsky’s “Metro 2033” use post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Slavnikova flirts with the sci-fi genre. She winks at rejuvenat-ing nanotechnologies and flash-es a few holographic toys, but a more serious prognosis is found in ecological catastrophe, which is poisoning the Ripheans.

The anniversary of the revo-lution reinforces the idea of a re-curring national destiny. Many 19th-century Russian artists em-

braced a rebirth of folk art and Slavic heroes. For Slavnikova, this stylistic nostalgia created a “his-torical dreaminess in their weak and impressionable heirs.” His-tory becomes a virus and then an epidemic. Slavnikova imag-ines a fake but bloody civil war, as inevitable as it is inauthentic. The striving for authenticity, re-jecting the superficial sparkle of wealth and the “culture of cop-ies,” is a keynote of the novel.

The protagonist, a gem-cut-ter called Krylov, relishes the transparency of quartz; his pol-ishing is an attempt to reveal what he sees inside. Despite this background in a lovingly depict-ed trade, Krylov’s aimlessness nudges him towards the ranks of Russian literature’s famous su-perfluous men. The women in Krylov’s life are disappointingly allegorical. His wife, Tamara, is fleshy and glamorous, worldly and cynical, while Krylov’s lover, the mysterious Tanya, is slim and spiritual. Krylov and Tanya’s poi-gnant and fragile relationship re-calls that of Anna and Dmitry in Chekhov’s “Lady with a little Dog” mixed up — in this case — with a spy thriller. Tanya is a frustratingly elusive character, identified with the legendary “Stone Maiden,” one of the rock spirits who occasionally threaten to lead the novel veering off into the thickets of magic realism.

Deep-rooted paganism and folklore are just two of the fac-ets of Russian culture the book begins to explore. “2017” is packed so full of ideas and im-ages it sometimes threatens to explode under the pressure. Its strength is in its linguistic sub-tlety and ingenuity.

phoebetaplin

SpecIal to RN

nyet to tHe Brown Bag

eXpat files

HRH, my “handsome Russian husband,” puts in, on average, a 17-hour workday down at

The Difficult Start-up. He’s up at an ungodly hour in the pitch black and comes home long after what I consider cocktail time and what many people feel is past dinner time. I miss his compa-ny, of course, but what really sticks in my craw is that he’s not doing his fair share of consum-ing all the food I make, photo-graph and write about. HRH claims that he is also sorry he’s not home more since he often goes without lunch.

“You can’t skip lunch,” I said, aghast. When you work at home in your yoga pants as I do, lunch is a major highlight of the day. “You have to eat something between 7 a.m. and 10:30 p.m.”

“Sometimes the Generalniy [director] and I go for a steak,” he said, “but not every day. And I can’t go to the canteen too often.”

“Why not?” I asked.“Too political and too com-

plicated,” he said. “If I sit with one of my subordinates, I’ll have to sit with them all in a rota-tion.”

“Let me pack you a lunch,” I pleaded. “Last night I made Pasta Norma, which is even bet-ter the next day.”

“We’ve had this discussion,” said HRH shaking his head. “I’m not taking lunch to work.”

Yes, we have had this discus-sion many times, and yet I still don’t get why Russian men don’t brown bag. HRH refuses to expand beyond saying, “It would be misunderstood.” I keep at it, though. I’ve pur-chased innocuous-looking insu-lated lunchboxes and cool packs, which sit on the pantry shelf, unwrapped. I’ve suggest-

ed slim thermoses and chic metal “Tiffin boxes,” and been given a scornful look. But I was genuinely hurt when he vehe-mently rejected my attempts to get him to drink more water.

HRH definitely wears the sweatpants in our family. He swims, he fences and he’s run three marathons (a fourth, I have declared, there shall not be.) He also loves to sauna, which, like all Russians, he believes is the generic cure-all for everything from the common cold to stage four cancer. I worry HRH doesn’t drink enough water. During a recent trip to the United States, I noticed that everyone carried large stainless steel bottles, which looked sharp and seemed prac-tical. I bought a particularly manly gunmetal 40-oz. bottle for HRH with both a sports top and a sippy-cup lid so he could choose between the two.

“I cannot take that to work,” said HRH after I presented him with the water bottle. “It would be misunderstood.”

“In what way?” I wailed. “You can fill it up with ice water and lemon and just have it on your desk!”

“People would not under-stand,” said HRH again without any explanation.

“People don’t drink water at The Difficult Start-up?” I asked.

“People drink tea,” respond-ed HRH, “until lunchtime any-way.”

“And after that?” I pushed.“After that,” said HRH, as he

left for another 17-hour day, “we don’t need anything near-ly so large.”

“And how about the morn-ing after?” I prompted.

HRH looked thoughtful.

Jennifer eremeeva

SpecIal to RN

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

preparing our students for the 21st century and its demands is a global challenge. We cannot

forget the importance of pre-paring a citizenry who will be able to work across borders and join with international col-leagues in a global society, and we need teachers who are taught themselves to support intercultural understanding. This is a tall order, but these elements are at the center of the inter-national project we are conduct-ing at George Mason Univer-sity in Fairfax, Va.

This past year, we have had the privilege of working side by side with teachers and school administrators in the United States and the Primorsky Krai region of Far East Russia to ex-amine effective ways to help teachers bring international learning experiences into their teaching, enriching learning in K-12 classrooms here and in Russia. A primary goal has been to support both U.S. and Rus-sian teachers to develop new approaches that extend beyond the scope of their immediate classroom and develop ways to incorporate a more internation-al focus in their work with stu-dents.

The project, funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Af-fairs, involves both Russian and U.S. secondary school teach-ers of Foreign/World Languag-es (FL/WL) and Science, Tech-nology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Twenty Russian and five U.S. teachers engaged in specialized, hands-on professional learning while spending time in one anoth-er’s schools in both countries. The Russian teachers spent five weeks in Northern Virginia in the fall of 2010 in the foreign language, science, technology and mathematics classrooms of 16 teachers at Thomas Jef-ferson High School for Science and Technology. In May 2011, five U.S. teachers from North-ern Virginia and North Caro-lina spent time in the partner-ship schools in Vladivostok and the Primorsky Krai region of Russia.

The teachers have learned

schools, and a field-based biol-ogy project that incorporated interactive, experiential learn-ing. A panel comprised of teach-ers from both countries ended the conference; the group pro-vided additional insights into the teachers’ thinking and shared both culminating ideas and plans for ongoing collabo-ration. It was the overwhelm-ing consensus that the teachers from both countries share many more commonalities than dif-ferences: They are committed educators who are focused on their students’ learning and want them to grasp their sub-ject’s content, they want to reach beyond their classrooms to incorporate new technolo-gies in real life learning and they themselves want to keep on learning through continued col-laboration.

The Russian teachers talked a great deal about the interac-tive learning approaches in U.S. classrooms and came away with deeper understandings about student-centered, experiential learning. At the same time, the U.S. teachers remarked on the knowledge of strong content promoted in the language class-es of Russian schools. The U.S. teachers also expressed their ad-

Rebecca Fox and Wendy Frazier are co-directors of the U.S.-Russia Teacher Professional Develop-ment Program. For additional information, please visit the proj-ect’s blog at http://usrtpd.word-press.com

teacHer eXcHange For a 21st century eDucation

saving a great poet’s Legacy

Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia’s most re-markable poets of the Silver Age, took

her own life 70 years ago, on Aug. 31, 1941. In recent years, her poems and her story have emerged as a dramatic chroni-cling of the first half of Russia’s 20th century — a wrenching tale of revolution, exile, émigré life, espionage and the inevita-bly fatal encounter with Stalin’s Terror.

Two years before her death, Tsvetaeva had followed her hus-band and returned to Russia from Paris, only to find herself more or less under house ar-rest. What she may not have known is that her dashing and charismatic husband, Sergei Efron, homesick for Russia, had worked as a Soviet spy in Paris — perhaps partly to show his allegiance after being a White soldier in the revolution.

When they returned home, they were a marked family. Efron first contracted tuberculosis and then was arrested. Tsvetaeva, ancient at the age of 48, could not go on. She hung herself in August, leaving a note, “to go on would be worse.” (Some wondered if the NKVD, the pre-cursor of the KGB, forced her to commit suicide.)

As dark as her life became, recalling her has become cele-bratory, perhaps because get-ting recognition for Tsvetaeva was some sweet revenge for those who kept her light alive. Rediscovering her poems and preserving her life was a life-long project for two women —

Marina’s sister, Anastasia, and Nadezhda Katayeva-Lytkina.

I met Anastasia, the author and younger sister of Tsvetae-va, in 1990. She gave me her newly printed novel that she, as she informed me with a mis-chievous smile, smuggled out of the camp over the years on packs of cigarettes. During Sta-lin’s reign, and after his death, she sat 22 long years in deten-tion and exile, because she was the sister of the famous Marina, and also because Anastasia was an author herself.

Anastasia became friends with Nadezhda Katayeva-Lytkina. A young surgeon and member of the intelligentsia, Katayeva-Lyt-kina also lived in what was once the house where Marina lived.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Ma-rina Tsvetaeva’s poems could not be found. At that time, Katayeva-Lytkina was assigned a room in a “Kommunalka” (communal apartment) in the center of Moscow, which had one kitchen for 28 people. But the young surgeon felt quite fortunate, as she lived in the dwelling of the beloved poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose vol-umes of poetry secretly accom-panied her and fortified her spir-it. Katayeva-Lytkina vowed to bring to light the secrets sur-rounding Tsvetaeva despite all the resistance she encountered. She sought out like-minded per-sons and dedicated her life to the fight of gaining recognition for the poet.

When Tsvetaeva’s sister An-astasia was released from the prison camp, the good doctor befriended her. The struggle to save the old house, which was in total disrepair and utterly filthy, initially played second fid-dle to the task of cautiously pub-lishing the first volume of Tsve-taeva’s work.

The struggle went on for de-cades and resembled a political thriller. The Central Committee of the Communist Party threat-ened Katayeva-Lytkina: “If you publicly speak of the measures taken, your house will be de-molished.”

Then Perestroika began. Un-deterred, employing civil dis-obedience and the assistance of friends and fans, Katayeva-Lytkina finally got the museum to add Marina Tsvetaeva’s house to its exhibit. In the autumn of 1992, as the country officially celebrated her 100th birthday, the museum finally opened its doors. They were long-awaited

days of celebration for Katayeva-Lytkina and Anastasia, who died three years later.

Today, the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum in Moscow is a visual feast for people interested in the Silver Age and the abundance of prerevolutionary culture.

One room is dedicated to Katayeva-Lytkina, who took me to see Anastasia back then. The museum exudes Moscow’s col-orful past in a way that is pal-pable for every visitor; it is lo-cated on a side street off the Povarskaya, not far from the Kremlin, with the same majes-tic noble palaces that Tolstoy, among others, mentioned and descr ibed in “War and Peace.”

It is here, in the heart of old Moscow, that Marina Tsvetaeva lived from 1914 until her emi-gration in 1922, which led her to Berlin, before reaching Prague, and then her beloved Paris. Here in Moscow she had found “a house that was a world.” The three-story villa, with its robust interior design, became her “boîte à surprise” and her ship on a stormy sea. After her initial happiness with Sergei Efron came years of separation dur-ing the revolution. She overcame a revolution, subversions, chaos, cold, hunger and the death of a child all by herself, and docu-mented it all in her work “Notes from the Attic.”

All three women — Marina, Anastasia, and Nadezhda — have long since departed this life, but their spirit continues to live on in this magnificent house.

miration for the strong levels of English-language proficiency displayed in the Russian lan-guage classrooms.

Russian schools begin to teach English at a very early age and incorporate it increasingly as students progress through the grade levels, teaching it through content-rich prisms such as environmental science issues, American history, music appreciation and literature. Communication is a strong goal of their language programs. It was an amazing experience for the U.S. teachers to realize that in most of the schools we vis-ited, we were the very first Americans to visit those schools, and yet the students surround-ed us anxious to hold a conver-sation in English.

Preparing a citizenry that can meet rapid global changes will not happen with the snap of a finger. A well-considered plan calls for new opportunities in teacher professional learning that include up-to-date knowl-edge in the content areas they teach, as well as in cross-cultur-al capacity. In this project, we have explored how the realities of far-reaching geography, lan-guage and cultural differences among a group of internation-

al teachers have become posi-tive enhancements to intercul-tural exchange.

The person-to-person com-ponents in the United States and Far East Russia have pro-vided a strong foundation for the relationships that could sus-tain dialogue and explore teach-ing practices across cultures.

At this writing, new projects are emerging for groups of teachers that we hope will be sustained beyond the scope of our project. We plan to return to Primorsky Krai in fall 2012. In the meantime, we are shar-ing the current results of our work and implementing it in our work at the university. We are also using the research to con-tribute to a growing body of lit-erature focused on new ways that educators can incorporate international cross-disciplinary work into designing and imple-menting meaningful experienc-es for current and future FL/WL and STEM teachers.

the Marina tsvetaeva Museum of Moscow offers a visual feast of the Silver age and a tribute to the poet.

U.S. teachers had admiration for the english-language fluency in the Russian classroom.

rebecca fox, wendy frazier

SpecIal to RN

ruth wyneken

SpecIal to RN

from one another’s education-al practices through on-site vis-its and continued communica-tion by e-mail. They have compared effective teaching ap-proaches, conducted research in their classrooms and have begun to present the results. At the project’s International Teacher Research Conference held at Asia Pacific School, Vlad-ivostok on May 14, the U.S. and Russian teachers presented classroom research and joint projects. This conference made visible some of the results of the exchanges of knowledge and cross-cultural projects. Pre-sentations included such topics as the implementation of mul-tiple intelligences in Russian classrooms, joint foreign lan-guage communication projects between English classrooms in Russia and Russian classrooms in the United States, portfolio implementation for both teach-ers and students in Russian

Ruth Wyneken is a DAAD-Lectur-er in Dramaturgy in Moscow and an expert on Russian theater.

the struggle for the Museum went on for decades and resembled a political thriller.

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title: “2017”author: Olga SlavnikOvapublisher: OvErlOOk/DuckwOrTh PubliShing

rn launches a column, read russia, which will feature reviews of books to be presented at bookeXpo america in new york city June 4-7, 2012, where russia will be the guest of honor.

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The Hotel Ukraina, a spectacu-lar monument, anchors Mos-cow’s panorama.

Finding Your Way Among Sisters

Architecture Stalin’s skyscrapers still dominate Moscow’s skyline

The haunted icons of Soviet architecture have fallen in and out of favor, but the towers are being reinvented again.

They are no longer the only high-rise buildings in Moscow, but the Seven Sisters remain the most striking. The skyscrapers, dubbed wedding cakes by crit-ics of their neo-classic, tiered ap-pearance, are emblematic of the city’s history, at once absurd, terrible and beautiful.

Their reputations have also changed over the years from a grim representation of the So-viet era to buildings seen as an essential part of Moscow’s land-scape. And they continue to be reimagined.

The buildings were part of a post-war reconstruction of Mos-cow. The original plan, con-ceived before World War II, was to build eight buildings, an oblique tribute to the 800th an-niversary of Moscow, which was celebrated in 1947. The eighth, the Zaryadye Administrative Building, was never built.

The Seven Sisters were not the only skyscrapers planned for Moscow. The Palace of Soviets, with a quintessential utopic de-sign, was high on grandeur and low on practicality. It would

Seven Sisters Stage Comeback

GALINA MASTEROVASPECIAL TO RN

have been the tallest building in the world at that time with a massive statue of Lenin on top. The 19th-century Christ the Savior Cathedral was blown up so that construction could begin, but the project was aban-doned when the war started in 1941. That site later became an open-air swimming pool and is now the site of a rebuilt cathe-dral.

The Seven Sisters went up within the space of 10 years,

a remarkable feat for a coun-try in ruins after the end of the war. When finished, there were two hotels, the Leningradska-ya and the Ukraina; two gov-ernment buildings, the Minis-try of Foreign Affairs at Smolenskaya and the Red Gates Administrative Building; Mos-cow State University; as well as two residential buildings, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building down the road from the Kremlin and the House on Kudrinsky Square.

“It was the first large-scale construction in Europe after the

Moscow State University’s home; Chicago’s Wrigley Build-ing in the Kotelnicheskaya Em-bankment Building; and Cleve-land Ohio’s Terminal Tower in the Kudrinsky Square House. From certain angles, the Min-

istry of Foreign Affairs resembles New York’s Woolworth build-ing.

After Stalin’s death, the build-ings were seen as representa-tive of his regime and the style and the architects — who were

stripped of their Stalin prizes — fell out of favor.

Interest is growing again in the buildings. Dushkina said that she will soon supervise a Span-ish student who is writing a dis-sertation on the Red Gates Ad-ministrative Building. There have also been calls by Russian and German preservationists for the buildings to be put on the World Heritage List.

The foreign ministry building, best approached from a near-by bridge, is the most impos-ing in its Gothic appearance. Originally, the building was de-signed without a tower, but St-alin is said to have insisted that one be added. When Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev came to power, the architect is said to have asked him if the spire could be removed and the new leader reportedly said, “Let the spire remain as a monument to Stalin’s foolishness.”

The building does have its ad-vantages: There is a subsidized canteen on the 17th floor, which offers one of the best views in Moscow.

The buildings have their tales of horror, especially concerning the involvement of German pris-oners of war, as well as prison-ers from the Gulag system, in the buildings’ construction. The 22nd floor of the university build-ing was said to have been turned

into a mini-camp as prisoners worked on its construction.

French writer Anne Nivat wrote of the fear and spying that went on in the House on Kotelnicheskaya during Soviet times. Nivat, who lived in the building, quoted one resident as saying, ”Some of the resi-dents of this monster are mon-sters themselves.” The building housed high party officials and other favored persons.

Today, the apartments are some of the most sought after in the city, and if the federal government moves out of the center — as Moscow mayor Ser-gei Sobyanin promises — there will be two more Stalin Sisters open to new residents.

The hotels have managed best to adapt to the post-Sovi-et era. Opened in 1954, the Hotel Leningradskaya with its view of Moscow’s three train stations received a major over-haul in 2006-2009. Today, it is a five-star hotel managed by the Hilton chain. The number of rooms has dropped from 330 to 273. The Hotel Ukraina, built on the bank of the Moscow River in 1957, was also given a serious face-lift. Since 2010, it has been known as the Radis-son Royal Hotel, and returning foreigners stop by just to see the transformation and recall the old Ukraina.

war, and the first to bring sky-scrapers to Europe,” said Nata-lya Dushkina, a professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute, whose grandfather, Alexei Du-shkin, was one of the architects involved in the creation of the Red Gates Administrative Build-ing.

Stalin’s Seven Sisters have drifted in and out of favor over the decades. They began with Soviet fanfare and a brief hey-day when they were seen as a symbol of a country reborn after the war, Dushkina said. She said they returned a sense of scale to a city that had been hit badly by the war and by the destruc-tion of the old city under Stal-in.

American ConnectionsBefore they were built, Soviet officials famously noted in a de-cree that they were to be “orig-inal works of architecture. They should not be a repetition of the kind of multi-storeyed struc-tures found in other countries.” But anyone who has seen them can trace their lineage, or at least some of the inspiration be-hind them, to the skyscrapers of Manhattan and Chicago. Some students of architecture have even drawn direct paral-lels for each building, suggest-ing that you can see the Man-hatten Municipal Building in

For Muscovites, the Hotel Ukrai-na has always been distinct from the other Seven Sisters. Unlike the closed ministries and the res-idential buildings with their con-cierges, this hotel was open to anyone who wanted to walk in and admire the panoramas of Moscow.That was the aim of legendary cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin when he strolled into the Ukraina in 1961. There used to be an ob-servation deck on the 29th floor. Today it is gone, but on the very top floors you will now find sev-eral fashionable restaurants pop-ular with Moscow’s most discern-ing diners.

This hotel has become very used to superlatives over the years. When it opened in 1957, the Ukraina was the largest hotel not only in the U.S.S.R., but in Europe. It remains Moscow’s tallest hotel.

Renovation Take a tour through a reinvented relic of the Soviet Union, which recently re-opened its hotel doors to guests and the general public

A year ago, this much-loved skyscraper reopened after major renovations — and the new Hotel Ukraina is a five-star hotel.

The Favorite of the Sisters Gets a Facelift

ALENA TVERITINARUSSIA NOW feet is the diameter of the ceil-

ing mural in the Socialist Real-ist style with the name “Cel-ebration of Labor and the Harvest in Hospitable Ukraine.”

feet high, Ukraina was the larg-est European hotel of its day in 1957. It remains a major ar-chitectural monument among Moscow’s skyscrapers.

33

676

IN FIGURESThe spectacular views begin

unexpectedly on the very first floor. Without leaving the main lobby, I already have a bird’s-eye view of Moscow. The gold-en domes of the Kremlin churches are gleaming, tourists are sailing up and down the Moscow river on river boats, but on the horizon there are no glass Moscow City towers, and the models of cars driving along the embankments can only be seen today in galleries for old timers. This cityscape, embracing the very center of the city, from the Luzhniki Sta-dium to Zemlyanoi Val, was im-mortalized in 1977 when it was recreated as a diorama. The daylight over a toy-size Mos-cow gradually turns to dusk, and then to night, and on the tiny streets the lights shimmer to life. Following the example of other viewers, I put on a pair of headphones and learn that this impressive diorama was cre-ated for a national exhibition in the United States where it was displayed in New York City. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, wanted to buy it, but in those days Soviet Mos-

Paintings by Soviet artists adorn the corridor walls. The hotel owns 1,200 paintings altogether.

mings made of natural and tra-ditional materials remain — marble, Karelian birch, onyx. The number of rooms has de-creased, however, from the re-cord 1,000-plus. Still, the old Moscow remains.

After a brief history of the di-orama, the audio guide switch-es to an excursion through the Kremlin, which may be seen in the smallest detail. Instead of listening, I set off in search of other art objects preserved by the hotel.

Massive crystal chandeliers adorn the lobby; they are the genuine article from the Soviet period. The Stalinist era is un-obtrusively palpable every-where: in the typical shape of the swags of expensive drapes

on the tall windows, in the green glass lampshades and the hush in the library where, next to volumes of Marx and Engels, stand state-of-the-art notebooks for hotel guests. A painstaking-ly restored ceiling mural in the Socialist Realist style can be found with the name “Celebra-tion of Labor and the Harvest in Hospitable Ukraine.” (“Our Japanese guests are especially thrilled by this,” Oksana, the re-ceptionist, remarked. “One tour-ist even lay down on the floor with his camera so as to get a better shot of it.”) And, of course, there are paintings by Soviet artists hung on the walls of the corridors, halls and rooms. The Ukraina owns some 1,200 paintings.

The Ukraina’s lobby is decorated with sculptures and classic art.

cow was not for sale. It later won a gold medal at the Leipzig Fair, and in 2007 was bought at auction so that it could be based in the refurbished Hotel Ukraina, one of the oldest and most celebrated of the Seven Sisters.

Today, the diorama is locat-ed in the depths of the hotel’s main lobby and sets the tone for the entire space. The major, three-year renovation followed a change in management: the Ukraina now belongs to the Rez-idor group and operates under the Radisson Royal brand. Once Moscow’s best-known hotel, it is now an oasis of well-con-ceived and elegant luxury. The hotel’s layout and interiors have changed, although the old trim-

The buildings have their own tales of horror, especially concerning the use of German prisoners.

“Many of our foreign guests have expressed a desire to buy these paintings,” said Natalia Kalinina, who has worked with the Ukraina’s management for more than 30 years. “But they are the pride of the hotel and therefore not for sale. One day in 1991, we received a letter from England: ‘I stayed at your hotel in March 1988 and still remember a beautiful painting that hung on our floor. It showed children playing in the snow… I cannot forget that painting and would very much like to buy it from you. If you cannot sell it to me, then I would be grateful to you for sending me a photograph of it.” Natalia had the painting photographed and sent the photograph off to the English admirer. In reply, she received a letter of thanks and a family portrait taken in front of a can-vas, a copy of the painting in the Ukraina.

One complex in this skyscrap-er consists of several 11-story wings — these are residential buildings whose walls, like those of the other residential build-ings among the Seven Sisters, have seen many Russian celeb-rities — singers and writers, sci-entists and actors. In the Ukrai-na’s cozy inner courtyard in the late 1950s, they made an ice rink where the future Olympic Champion Ludmila Pakhomo-va danced on skates. The Ukrai-na’s Olympic history continues to this day: the hotel now boasts a 50-meter Olympic swimming pool and a fitness center where lessons in different sports are given by Olympic champions.

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