This pul l-out is produced and publ ished by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia) and did not involve the news or editorial departments of The Washington Post

Wednesday, April 27, 2011Distributed with

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Nuclear Power: Danger or Savior?

From tycoon to artists’ muse

Russia to stick to its guns

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National Health CareMajor investment for a broken system

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NeWS iN Brief

iN tHiS iSSue

The first major private Russian art fund was launched on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange this month. With approximately 300,000 orig-inal prints, partially composed of Soviet prints, it is worth an estimated $467 million. Called “Sobranie.PhotoEffect,” the fund is expected to appeal to the investor seeking steady but slow returns, according to a recent Reuters re-port. There is only one Russian art fund, Atlan-ta Art, currently listed on the exchange.

The 12th Annual Nutcracker International Television Contest for Young Musicians, sched-uled to take place at the beginning of Novem-ber, has launched its application process. Spon-sored by state-owned TV network Russia Kultura, the event brings together talented clas-sical musicians under the age of 14 from all over the world to compete against one anoth-er. The jury includes highly acclaimed Russian virtuosi such as Vladimir Spivakov and Yuri Bash-met.

The winners perform before a live audience with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra in Moscow.

See the Nutcracker website at www.tvkul-tura.ru.

New Art fund enters russian Stock Market

Search Begins for New Musical talent

OPiNiON

Explaining Russia’s Reaction to the Libyan Conflict

refleCtiONSWill russian-Polish relations recover?Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski

Expecting the rest of the world to speak Eng-lish is no longer acceptable, said Dan Davidson, president of the American Council of Interna-tional Education (ACIE). He was speaking to a group of high school students participating in the Olympiada of Spoken Russian at Geroge Mason University in Virginia. The Olympiada, which began in the era of Khruschchev and Kennedy, has experienced a resurgence. This year it was combined with the World Festival of Russian Language, which featured a high-powered delegation from St. Petersburg, in-cluding Ludmila Verbitskaya, an educational ad-viser to President Dmitry Medvedev.

russian language gets a boost

Business Breeding commercial cattle in hopes of reducing beef imports

In 2006, Yana Yakovleva was an ambitious co-owner of a chem-icals company called Sofex. By all accounts a savvy executive, she was no neophyte to the ways of Russian business. Still, she was shocked when a special drug po-lice unit came to her offices with a scheme to get kickbacks from her company. The police seemed to think they were taking what was “legally” theirs.

Yakovleva, young and prin-cipled, refused to pay up. That noble move got her arrested and thrown in jail. Before she knew it, she was teaching ex-ercise classes to down-and-out women in a female detention center.

“There’s a war going on against businesspeople in Rus-sia by government officials who consider them to be criminals in the first place,” Yakovleva said. “They can approach any busi-

Prison Turns Executive Into ActivistCorruption Activists join with the authorities to protect small businesses

She lived in a woman’s de-tainment center where condi-tions were rough. “There was no shower, no refrigerator; we kept groceries on the window-sill, boiled water on a heater and made a TV antenna out of it. The approach to prisoners has not changed since the 1930s,” Yakovleva explained.

Her case drew the attention of human rights activists in and outside of Russia, as well as the attention of President Dmitry Mevedev. The anti-drug police unit had tried to extort her on the basis that the industrial sol-vent her company manufac-tured could be considered a controlled substance, according to Yakovleva. The charges were dropped when a court struck down the rule that had made it a controlled substance. Yak-ovleva filed a complaint, and the police denied wrongdo-ing.

Yakovleva fights BackFive years later, Yakovleva is

probably the most prominent business activist working against corruption, cooperat-

ing with start-up businesses and working with the Russian government. There are tens of thousands of people in pre-tri-al detention charged with white-collar crimes, according to activists, though no official statistics are maintained. Few are acquitted. “It’s an assem-bly line,” Yakovleva once quipped to the Western press.

It is not only foreign inves-tors worrying about rogue of-ficials demanding bribes or raid-ers taking over businesses. According to recent research conducted by the Russian gov-ernment, 17 percent of Russian businessmen intend to emi-grate, while 50 percent would not rule out such a move. (See “Why the Brain Drain,” page 5.)

Even the possibility of such an exodus jeopardizes the pres-ident’s plans to modernize the country. Medvedev has repeat-edly said that business must be supported and protected to boost the economy.

CONtiNueD ON PAge 2

Half a dozen cowboys sit around a long table in a newly built bunkhouse, waiting for lunch. They spent the morning in the usual routine — the herd of 1,500 cattle is calving and it has been a busy month — but when the food arrives it is a stark re-minder they are not at home in Montana.

“We’re not bashful about it. We eat beef and we eat a lot of beef,” said Darrell Steven-

Peter vAN DYKSPeciAl To RuSSiA NoW

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Montana rancher teams up with russian businessmen to set up the Stevenson-Sputnik ranch, a new agro-business, in southern russia.

Yana Yakovleva spent seven months in jail and now fights corruption on behalf of vulnerable small businesses.

CONtiNueD ON PAge 2

Putin’s Pragmatism

turN tO PAge 5

turN tO PAge 4

Yana Yakovl-eva, once an unlikely ac-tivist, helps businesses outwit cor-ruption.

40,000-50,000 live cattle per year, according to U.S. statis-tics. The government wants to bring that figure down, and a Food Security Doctrine signed by President Dmitry Medvedev a year ago demands Russia pro-duce 85 percent of its meat do-mestically by 2020.

Sergei Goncharov, one of the Russian partners in the joint ven-ture, said cutting imports is so important to the government that subsidies cover one out of every four dollars the partners put into the project. The part-ners believe the prices the cat-tle will command mean the proj-ect will make money quickly.

u.S. Cowboys Join russian ranch With true grit

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of Manned Space Flight 50th Anniversary

the Ameri-can cowboys said that cattle im-ported from Montana found south-ern russia’s climate sur-prisingly hospitable, even in win-ter.

nessperson, launch a criminal case and begin extorting money. And the entrepreneur has to un-derstand that he will have to fight the bureaucratic machine to the death,” she added.

Yakovleva, now 39, spent seven months in jail awaiting trial. She languished in prison, she told Russia Now, because

she refused to take part in the scheme concocted by drug en-forcement officials. “I could not believe what was happening to me. Everything I worked for, my reputation, everything was sud-denly threatened. Instead, I sat in a detention center. I have never been so frightened in my life.”

son, the U.S. rancher who teamed up with two Russian businessmen to set up the Ste-venson-Sputnik Ranch in the Voronezh Region of southern Russia. “One of the most diffi-cult transitions for these cow-boys has been the change in diet.”

Lunch is soup followed by spaghetti and a meat patty. On the table in front of these men, the plates look small. The cow-boys have all lost weight, but they didn’t sign up for a vaca-tion.

“Challenging is the best word,” Dan Conn said, halfway through a two-month stay. “Ev-erything has been different from the food to the culture to the

facilities. The weather is the one thing that is the same.”

The weather may be the same as in Montana, but the land — about a two-hour drive south of the city of Voronezh — is very different. “Some of the most fer-tile soil in the world is in this re-gion... We’re talking about or-ganic matter that is in excess of 12 percent,” Stevenson said. “That’s unheard of where I’m from. We fight rocks, these peo-ple fight mud. Where we’re sit-ting right now would be about 60 days more growing season than at home.”

Now the quality of the cows matches the quality of the land. Stevenson says his partners’ am-bitions included importing “one

of the top sets of Angus cattle in the world,” with full pedi-grees going back several gen-erations.

The imported cattle cost roughly $7 million, and total in-vestment in the ranch has been about $19 million, with around $15 million coming from a state-subsidized loan from Sberbank, Russia’s national savings bank.

“What Russia demands is live cattle, and with that they are very forward thinking and very aggressive,” Stevenson said. “Moving forward, this will be the nucleus for establishing a commercial beef cowherd in this region of Russia, and hopefully to extend further than that.”

Russia consistently imports

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most read02 Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.rueconomy U.S.-Russia Move Forward With “Commercial Reset”

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business in brief

After being ranked among the heaviest drinkers in the world, largely thanks to a palate for vodka (see Alcohol, page 3), new data suggests Russians may be gradually shifting loy-alty in favor of whiskey.“Gin is down, tequila is down, cognac is static, but whiskey imports are growing,” Erkin Tuzmukhamedov, a leading sommelier and whiskey lover, told The Moscow Times. “It was the only spirit to contin-ue to grow during the crisis, and it accounts for about two-thirds of all spirit imports.” Whiskey imports steadily in-creased in recent years, while vodka sales have dropped.However, Russia remains the world’s largest spirits market, consuming 275 million nine-liter cases in 2009, according to the Scotch Whisky Associa-tion. Domestically produced vodka accounted for 229 mil-lion of those cases.

Moscow jumped up a spot in real estate agency Knight Frank’s Global Cities Survey to 21st place. The survey mea-sures cities’ importance to wealthy individuals from across the globe.It compares metropolises by economic activity (Moscow took 16th place), political power (31st), quality of life (19th) and knowledge and in-fluence (21st).New York, London and Paris topped the survey, while seven of the top 10 spots went to cities in Western Europe, North America or Australia.However, the fortunes of de-veloping countries (and the so-called BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China) in the survey are expected to rise over the next decade, with Moscow predicted to take 10th place by 2020.San Francisco and Paris were the biggest losers of this year’s survey, dropping from 16th to 20th and third to ninth plac-es, respectively.

russians slowly turning to whiskey

moscow doesn’t top global cities survey

After a recently signed $370 million deal with the United States to supply 21 Russian-made helicopters to Afghani-stan, state-owned Russian He-licopters has decided to float a $500 million initial public of-fering on the Moscow and London stock exchanges.The company was formed last year from 11 regional helicop-ter manufacturers in an effort to streamline production and development. The company produces a broad range of he-licopters that serve as the back-bone of both Russia’s military aviation and oil and gas indus-tries. One of its models, the Mi-26, is one of the largest and heaviest helicopters in the world currently in service. It weighs an estimated 50 tons.With the Russian armed forces expected to replace around 1,000 Mil-family helicopters in the next decade, Russian He-licopters hopes demand for its IPO will be high. The compa-ny plans to use the money to pay off debt and purchase smaller manufacturers, Chief Executive Dmitry Petrov said in a statement.

russian helicopters Launches ipo

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced into an em-barrassing about-face after all six of Fukashima’s nuclear reac-tors showed signs of trouble in the days after their supporting infrastructure was washed away by the tsunami. Merkel ordered seven of Germany’s oldest re-actors to be shut down for ex-tensive tests, even though six months earlier she forced through a plan to increase the amount of nuclear power Ger-many generates. That decision resulted in some of Germany’s biggest public protests in a de-cade.

Most of western Europe’s leaders find themselves in a sim-ilar position, but Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was quick to affirm that his country will continue to build new power stations. However, fol-lowing Merkel’s decision, he also ordered a comprehensive safe-ty review of Russia’s nuclear as-sets.

Putin’s comments were fol-lowed by similar statements from the leaders of Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey, all of which recently purchased Russian-made nuclear power stations. During Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Mos-cow in the middle of March, Russian President Dmitry Med-vedev said that Russia will en-sure Turkey’s nuclear power plant, planned for the southern town of Akkuyu, will be able to withstand powerful earth-quakes.

“The plant that will be built

energy Even after Japan’s tragedy, most of the world is not willing to part with nuclear power quite yet

russia and most of the emerging market countries have reasserted their commitment to using more nuclear energy.

will be an example for the rest of the world,” Erdogan said dur-ing a press conference follow-ing talks with Medvedev.

On the same day, Russia and Belarus signed off on a $6 bil-lion agreement to cooperate in building a nuclear power plant in Belarus. Construction is due to start in September. Russia and Hungary also opened talks on the possible participation of Rus-sian companies in a project to modernize Hungary’s Paks nu-clear power plant. And on March 1, ITAR-TASS reported that Russia signed a new deal to build a nuclear power plant in Bangladesh at the cost of $2 billion, citing officials in the Ban-gladesh government.

Public opinion in western Eu-rope remains wary of Russian-made nuclear power stations following the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. Rus-sia abandoned the Soviet-era RMBK class of reactors follow-ing the Chernobyl disaster, al-though there are still 11 RMBK reactors operating in Russia today.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that Russia would continue selling Russian nuclear technol-ogy to its allies, and claims that the next generation nuclear power plants are safer than ever.

“We now have a whole arse-nal of progressive technologi-cal means to ensure the stable and accident-free operation of nuclear power plants,” Putin said in the middle of March.

Russia has the youngest nu-clear reactors in the world—they have an average age of 19 years, compared with 26 years in western Europe and 30 years in the United States, Bloomberg reported. The Fu-kashima reactor is 38 years old, making it one of the oldest re-

actors in the world still in op-eration. It was scheduled for decommissioning this year, but its license was renewed for an-other 10 years.

“Until now, countries in emerging markets were well out in front of the nuclear industry revival, accounting for a dispro-portionate share of the expect-ed growth in nuclear energy use. Out of the 62 reactors cur-rently under construction, 48 — or 77 percent of the total — are being built in China, Russia,

sticking to nuclear power

workers examine the reactor hall of the smolensk nuclear power plant in western russia.

ben arisbusinEss nEw EuropE

has a vocal environmental lobby, which might lead to the delay or even cancellation of some projects, in turn leading to high-er prices.”

However, as Russia’s econo-my returns to strong growth, the government has little choice but to build new nuclear facili-ties. Prior to the crisis, the sup-ply and demand for power were evenly matched, so further eco-nomic growth would be con-strained by blackouts.

At a conference in March,

Vasily Nikonov of Russia’s Ener-gy Ministry said that the coun-try plans to cope with increased energy needs by constructing 18 nuclear power and hydro-power plants with a combined installed capacity of 11.2 giga-watts.

“It is impossible to speak about a global energy balance without the nuclear power in-dustry,” Putin said at a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Com-munity’s (EurAsEC) intergovern-mental council.

“Cattle like we have cost from three to four thousand dollars for cows, and for bulls, six to eight thousand,” he said, in part because they have to be flown or shipped in from Europe, Aus-tralia or the Americas. “At those prices, we can comfortably pay the bank and even make a prof-it [after selling the cattle].”

Goncharov’s company, Sput-nik, which is based in the Len-ingrad Region around St. Pe-tersburg, is already involved in cattle embryo transfer and in vitro fertilization. The company, it turned out, needed some management expertise as well. Some of the basics were miss-ing, Stevenson said.

“They wanted the best of technology and resources, but what I felt that they needed was management, maybe more so than the live cattle itself,” he said.

“The short-term goal at this point in time is for full Ameri-can support for two years through every season of the year, with the anticipation that we can hand this off on a daily or yearly routine in that amount of time over to the Russians and this place can be functional,” Stevenson added.

There are three fully qualified veterinarians on the ranch, but some of the farmhands have never worked with cattle be-fore. But they aren’t letting that hold them back — after just a month on the job, a Russian named Leonid is calling himself a cowboy.

“It’s the first time I’ve done this work,” he said. “I’ve only done it for a month, but it’s not bad work; it’s a good team.

“When they start to give birth, we bring them in and help them if they are having a hard time, and look after them. If the calves are outdoors and get sick, we bring them in, warm them up and just generally take care of them.”

The head vet, Alexander Na-ritsyn, admits that taking care of 1,500 cattle on the half-fin-ished ranch would have been impossible without the import-ed help. After all, at the start of

December there was almost nothing there. Now, more than 900 calves have been born on the ranch.

“A big ‘thank you’ to the Americans, who brought us their horsemanship and lasso skills,” he said. “If not for them, we’d be chasing one cow for half a day — they can get them back in 10 minutes.”

Stevenson recalled that the handlers at Sheremetyevo Air-port could have done with that kind of expertise when one ship-ment of cattle was flown in from Chicago. One cow got free when they were being trans-ferred from the 747 to the truck for the drive to the ranch. The airport was closed to planes for almost an hour until the run-

away was corralled into a truck.

Some of the locals on the Ste-venson-Sputnik Ranch may have started with little more knowl-edge of cattle farming than the Sheremetyevo cargo handlers, but Stevenson said they are keen to learn.

“When the opportunity came...there were two or three of them on horses within min-utes,” he explained. “We had to show them how to saddle the horse — I’m not sure if any of them had actually rode be-fore then. Well, consequently, one of them got dumped on his head pretty good the sec-ond day around, but he prob-ably deserved it.”

Teaching their Russian col-leagues how to take care of the cattle is the hardest part of the job for the cowboys. Conn, from Avon, Mont., said not all of the farmhands will have what it takes.

“All of us here are genera-tional ranchers, cattlemen, and to teach somebody who’s rela-tively new, who’s never been around more than a milk cow or a few pigs or sheep, is a big challenge,” he said. “The few that do work will be very good, because they’ve had to over-come great boundaries.”

“This has really become about more than cowboys and cat-tle,” Stevenson said. “This has really become about two coun-tries, two cultures. It’s the op-portunity to educate, it’s the ability to stimulate a local econ-omy, the opportunity to expand a cowherd in order to feed a region, a nation, a portion of the world that has the natural resources, that is completely ca-pable of it.”

Montana Cowboys Head to Voronezh

fifteen hundred cattle were brought to Voronezh

continued from page 1continued from page 1

“All of us here are generational ranchers...to teach [a novice] is a big challenge,” Dan said.

Instead of leaving Russia alto-gether, Yakovleva created her own organization, called Busi-ness Solidarity, to support en-trepreneurs who suffer as a re-sult of illegal actions by the authorities. She was also ap-pointed to chair an anti-cor-ruption center, which just began working with Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia), a large association of compa-nies.

The center’s mission is to as-sist entrepreneurs in the fight against bureaucratic raids. “This is a union of two forces — the authorities and business,” said

Delovaya Rossiya Chairman Boris Titov, who chairs the anti-corruption center jointly with Yakovleva.

a company taken awayThe center took on the case

of Galina and Yevgeny Kon-ovalov, husband and wife en-trepreneurs (both 49) from Kras-nodar whose company was taken away by local officials.

“In 2008, we learned that the company’s owner had been mysteriously replaced and, when we went to court, my hus-band was illegally arrested on fabricated criminal charges,” Galina Konovalov said.

The lawyers told her the case was hopeless, but this year the

couple had two major victories: One court ruled that there had been several breaches in the criminal case against Yevgeny, while another court returned the company to the Konovalovs. “This is an instance of typical raiding, and we are trying to help them get their property back now,” Yakovleva said.

Titov said the center is essen-tially the first attempt by busi-nesses to fight corruption, whose grip, as Medvedev stat-ed, “is not weakening and has the entire economy by the throat.”

“Each year, approximately 70,000 enterprises throughout the whole country are targets of raider attacks,” Titov said. “It is effectively a fully developed racket on a government-wide scale.”

Criminal law is currently the main channel for seizing busi-nesses. “It used to be arbitra-tion courts, but the quality and independence of the judges in-creased there,” Yakovleva said.

More amendments to the criminal procedure code, effec-tively softening the penalty for economic crimes, took effect last month. “With Dmitry Med-vedev, a lot of good laws have been passed, but the problem for now has been enforcing them,” Yakovleva said.

These days, Yakovleva keeps a diverse set of confidantes, from oil CEOs to Lyudmilla Alex-eyeva, a Soviet-era dissident who now heads the Moscow Helsinki Group. Said Yakovleva: “I see my calling in trying to help people from my own ex-perience and change the situ-ation somehow.”

Prison Turns Executive Into Activist

“Each year [about] 70,000 enterprises throughout the whole country are targets of raider[s].”

India and South Korea,” said Sergei Bubnov, who heads Re-naissance Asset Managers’ util-ities fund.

Among emerging markets, Russia is the most reliant on nu-clear power. Nuclear energy al-ready accounts for 16 percent of the country’s produced power, and Russia is planning to double its nuclear capacity over the next 20 years.

“Inevitably, some of these plans might have to be recon-sidered,” Bubnov said. “Russia

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03most read Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru politics & societyProtecting Russia’s Orphans

http://rbth.ru/12692

Better Neonatal Care, One Text Message at a Time

Russia has experienced a baby boomlet, thanks in part to the 2007 legislation introducing the “moth-er’s capital”— a cash payment to women who have more than one child. Russia’s birth rate has in-creased 21 percent since 2005, and in 2009, the population increased for the first time in 15 years. The government also launched an ini-tiative to modernize maternity hos-pitals. It is clear that encouraging more births is an important part of the government’s plan to com-bat the country’s falling popula-tion.

What happens, however, when the baby comes home?

Enter Text4Baby. This program, pioneered in the United States, tar-gets women who might otherwise not have access to the best health-care information. Mothers who sign up for the text message ser-vice receive three texts per week containing information on topics such as pre-natal care, immuniza-tion and car seat safety.

The program has been hugely successful, with more than 135,000

subscribers in the United States in the first year alone. This success has led to a bilateral collaboration bringing the program to Russia. Text4Baby is scheduled to launch in Russia this September.

Russia proved an attractive mar-ket for the program’s organizers because it has some of the great-est levels of mobile phone pene-tration in the world, and the proj-ect has attracted strong support from inside the Russian govern-ment. Experts from the Kulakov Center—part of the Ministry of Health and Social Development—

will take a leading role in develop-ing the text messages.

Judy Twigg, an expert on health and healthcare reform in Russia and a professor at Virginia Com-monwealth University in Rich-mond, Va., stressed that education and communication are crucial for better care in Russia. “Public health information, education and com-munication are the critical things — important, if not more impor-tant, than just changing the health-care system in isolation,” she said.

Organizers said that Text4Baby

underscores that direct communi-cation with mothers, who often make health decisions for the en-tire family, increases the likelihood that they will make healthy choic-es.

There are challenges to imple-menting the program. Coordinat-ing the involvement of governmen-tal and non-governmental organizations has been difficult. Language experts were also need-ed to reduce long and complicat-ed Russian phrases into short but coherent text messages. Elena Dmi-trieva from the Health and Devel-opment Foundation (HDF), which is heading up Text4Baby in Rus-sia, stressed that one difficulty was trying to encourage Russian doc-tors to improve their counselling skills and to take a more “hands on” approach. Patients also need to change the way they approach the doctor’s office. The HDF hopes Text4Baby “will open a new era of patient-doctor relationships where the client is no longer a si-lent patient who sits passively lis-tening to a wise doctor, but will come with questions,” Dmitrieva said via e-mail.

Text4Baby also has the poten-tial to bring Russians and Ameri-cans together. In the words of Judy Twigg, the project “is one of co-equals discussing a common chal-lenge.”

pregnant mothers can now receive advice via sms.

already a success in the united states, text4baby comes to russia in hopes of improving care through mothers’ mobile phones.

emma burrowsspeCial TO Russia NOw

When Yevgeniya Ivanovna’s mother went into the hospital recently, her daughter, Zoya knew intuitively that she should pay the nurse an unofficial fee in cash — even though the hospital is not private.

She handed over $18. It is not the size of the fee that is the problem, according to so-ciologists, but the nature of it.

On paper, Russians have a health system that is free. That paper is the constitution, writ-ten in 1993, which guarantess universal health care.

In reality, Russia has a split system with a mix of private medical care and a state sys-tem that lags far behind. Years of underfunding has left the healthcare system in a precar-ious state with decrepit hospi-tals staffed by demoralized and woefully underpaid staff, many of whom encourage patients to make ad-hoc payments.

One of the great contradic-tions in Russian society is the fact that some of the best doc-tors and scientific researchers come out of a country where,

health Doctors and nurses are underpaid and take unregulated fees in facilities that lag behind western standards

russian doctors and their patients wait for new reforms to help them get the medical care and facilities they deserve.

a few hundred miles outside Moscow, patients’ families can be expected to buy their own gauze, needles and bags of sa-line and other needs for a hos-pital stay. Magazine stories de-sc r ibe hosp i ta l s where instruments are sterilized in soup pots on electric coils.

Quality caretakers expect a daily struggle

The Russian government is embarking on a huge reform which will see an influx of cash, over $28 billion, to outfit the country’s hospitals with new high-tech equipment, better sal-aries and, it is hoped, improved care by 2013, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced at the All-Russia Medical Workers’ Forum this month. The spend-ing boost should see Russia in-crease its healthcare spending from 3.9% to 5% to approach EU levels.

The dire state of Russia’s health care and its precarious mortality rate have acted as catalysts for the reform. “Rus-sia has a birth rate character-istic of developed countries — low — and a death rate of a developing country — high,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Center in Mos-cow. “There are several causes for the death rate, and one of them is an inferior quality of

health care.” The most dire warnings by demographers predict that Russia’s population could drop from 142 million to 100 million by 2050.

But no trend is irreversible: Russians who anticipate lon-ger and healthier lives may want to have more children.

The government is building a series of health centers around the country with a focus on cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Dmitry Pushkar, 47, is Rus-sia’s chief urologist and an ex-perienced surgeon with a world-class reputation. He has done groundbreaking work in bring-ing cancer-curing technologies and experience to Russia, and is a pioneer in the field of pre-ventative medicine for men. After successfully obtaining funding from the Ministry of Health and Social Development to import life-saving robotic sur-gery equipment to hospitals in four Russian cities, Pushkar felt the problem goes deeper than financing.

“Society itself must deliver a message,” Pushkar said. “What does it mean to be a doctor? Society means everyone, the president, the prime minister, workers. A united society must say that we understand what it means to be a good doctor and how important it is.”

health care you could Live with

neonatal surgery is expected to save thousands of children per year in russia.

gaLina masterovaspeCial TO Russia NOw

“The only way you know how much to pay is by asking people around you,” Lipman continued, emphazing the in-formality of the process.

The reforms will raise doc-tors’ salaries by up to 30 per-cent, but with wages so low, the medical profession is not yet impressed with that, said Kirill Danishevsky, an indepen-dent health expert.

Pushkar, the urology chief, said that part of the solution is moral as well as financial.

“It’s impossible to reform in a month or a year, but we can start by saying that there are good doctors and bad doc-tors,” Pushkar said. “We should provide the good with total support.”

growth in private insuranceBut for now, Russians have

little confidence in their health-care system, and some are opt-ing for private insurance. In fact, the insurance industry is pre-dicting double-digit growth. The rich, meanwhile, often head abroad for top medical treat-ment. Israeli hospitals, which are often staffed by emigre Russian doctors, advertise for patients in Russian newspapers.

As Zoya found out, it is stan-dard practice to pay this vague tax that has no price list and no official recognition.

“The minute you arrive you pay everyone: You pay nurses, the people who clean the floor, the doctor and the surgeon,” Lipman said.

The reforms will place an emphasis on preventative care and will include the retraining of doctors, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova stated in a government report.

The Soviet system, which was free for everyone, concen-trated on specialist and hospi-tal care, ignoring preventative care. In Russia, cancer is still often diagnosed when the dis-ease has spread to a late stage, Golikova said.

One of the programs in the new reforms will set up nine high-tech perinatal centers around the country. Golikova said that the use of neonatal surgery will be expanded and is expected to save the lives of 1,000 children each year.

of Russians die of cardiovascu-lar diseases, 24.4% from can-cer, 10.2% from accidents, mur-er or alcohol.

The year in which Russia’s gov-ernment hopes to stop the country’s population decline.

51.6%

2015

in numbers

Russia will allocate $159.7 mil-lion to provide citizens with state-of-the-art medical equip-ment at polyclinics spread across 55 of Russia’s regions.

The largest chunk of the money, some $16.2 million, will be spent on the Krasnodar re-gion; with Moscow and St. Pe-tersburg, the two most popu-

russian hospitals are famously run down and underfunded, but reform has taken a front seat for both putin and medvedev.

lous cities in Europe, receiving the next largest sums of $12.5 million and $12.8 million, re-spectively.

The reform of the entire healthcare and pharmaceutical sector has been moved to the top of the political agenda as the Kremlin extends its attempts to improve the lives of Russia’s citizens and diversify the econ-omy.

During a recent inspection trip to the city of Bryansk, lo-cated on Russia’s border with Ukraine, Prime Minister Vladi-mir Putin said that the devel-opment of domestic hi-tech

launched a stick-and-carrot campaign to encourage major international pharmaceutical companies to increase their in-vestment in Russia. The stick is the increase of import tariffs on medical products, and the car-rot gives those companies with domestic Russian production tax breaks. And the market is not one the global industry wants to ignore: Russia import-ed $9.2 billion worth of pills and other medicines in 2010.

The scheme has already scored two big successes. The multinational pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca started build-ing a new $150 million pro-duction plant and R&D facility in Kaluga, while Finland’s Orion said it is in advanced talks to enter the market via acquisi-tion. The two companies fol-low the likes of Novartis and GlaxoSmithKlein, which already have production facilities in Russia.

Hi-Tech and pharmaceuticals Take Front seat

ben arisBusiNess New euROpe

medical equipment production should be a priority for the Rus-sian government and regional governors. He said that the gov-ernment was planning to spend a total of $4.8 billion on the de-velopment of hi-tech medical treatment in 2008-2013.

Progress has already been made in some sectors. The poly-clinic management system has been overhauled, doctors’ sala-ries have been hiked and a new ambulance fleet was purchased. The number of Russian citizens who received hi-tech medical care had increased fivefold to 290,000 people over the last

five years, Putin said. But there is still much to do.

“To reach the EU level by 2020, Russia needs to increase healthcare spending by around 15 percent a year,” said Lev Ya-kobson, first prorector of the Higher School of Economics’ National Research Institute.

One main thrust of the re-form is to develop the domes-tic pharmaceutical and medical equipment production indus-tries. The state has already ear-marked $1.4 billion to support the development of the domes-tic manufacturers of medical equipment. The Kremlin has

Last call for alcoholIt is by now well known that Russian men are considered a dying breed. There was much fanfare when their lifespan in-creased a little, recently, to the age of 60. But their lives are still much shorter than their Western peers. There are many reasons these lives are cut short, from heart disease to smoking, but one of the big-gest contributing causes of death is alcoholism. The con-sequences of this addiction are deadly and spikes Russian mortality, said Igor Beloboro-dov, the head of the Institute for Demographic Studies.International researchers re-ported two years ago that the effect of alcohol may have been underestimated and that half of deaths among Russians aged 15 to 54 were due to al-cohol.

The problem is well identified, but the solutions are not. In Russia, alcoholics often go un-treated. Techniques for sober-ing up included “coding.” Cod-ing involves convincing people that if they drink after tak-ing an anti-alcohol drug they will get sick and could even die. Some treatment programs have begun to use American-style 12-step programs to treat alcoholics.The Russian government is try-ing to limit consumption. Vod-ka prices have risen as a result, and although they still remain low by Western standards, ob-servers note that it is a step in the right direction. There is al-so an effort to fight counterfeit production — responsible for most alcohol deaths — by reg-ulating surrogate fluids like co-logne and antifreeze.

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

most read Working Past Smolenskhttp://rbth.ru/12682opinion

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aleh tsyvinski,sergei guriev

The moscow Times

moving government officials from the boards of state-owned companies, ensuring access to corporate documents for minor-ity shareholders and develop-ing a way to respond to whis-tleblowers on corruption.

Medvedev made a simple and convincing argument:

president Dmitry Medve-dev has moved against some of the most pow-erful men in the gov-

ernment, including Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who is perhaps the closest figure to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — and who until recently was chairman of Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil firm. Medvedev signed a decree to strip Sechin and others of their chairman-ships of some of Russia’s big-gest state-owned companies. The stated purpose of the de-cree was to improve the coun-try’s investment climate, but the purge may reflect other, more important goals.

Medvedev has, in the past, rec-ognized both the need to attract Russian and foreign investment and the country’s dismal invest-ment climate. But this time, his actions truly matched his rheto-ric as he outlined specific mea-sures to be taken and set dead-lines for implementing them. And with some of the measures bound to face stiff opposition by powerful interest groups, the re-forms are set to be a major test of Medvedev’s real strength — and of his plans to run for an-other term as president. Even partial success would allow a Medvedev reelection campaign to be built around themes of an-ti-corruption and transparency.

Those who fear transparency are those who have something to hide. This is not an abstract accusation. Navalny’s repeated requests for the minutes of sev-eral state-owned companies’ board meetings generated huge resistance. Two companies even tried, unsuccessfully, to change

the law to reject shareholder re-quests for information.

The most controversial of Medvedev’s measures is the re-moval of key bureaucrats from corporate boards. His orders list 17 state-owned companies and the powerful ministers and dep-uty prime ministers to be re-moved from board chairman-ships by July 1.

The president’s logic is straightforward: A government official in charge of an oil com-pany or a bank faces an inher-ent conflict of interest. The chairman of a board must serve the interests of the company, but a government official must pursue public interest, which in-cludes preserving a competitive environment in the oil or bank-ing sector.

Yet board chairmanships re-mained the domain of the bu-reaucracy. Not a single state-owned company has an independent chairman. And the chairmanship is a vital position, as its occupant sets the agenda and controls discussions.

It is difficult to talk about stan-dards of corporate governance in Russia’s state-owned compa-nies since most do not even have regularly scheduled board meetings, owing to the unpre-dictability of government offi-cials’ schedules. This may seem little more than an annoyance, but it has a key implication: When there is no regular sched-ule for board meetings, many

independent directors — espe-cially foreigners — often can-not attend. If the board chair-man is not a government official and can commit to an annual schedule, highly skilled indepen-dent directors from around the world could be attracted.

It is not clear who will replace the bureaucrats as board chairs. Given their importance, the new chairs must have the necessary skills and integrity.

It is uncertain whether the new board chairs will actually run the companies. Russia’s legal system is imperfect, and even serious violations of corporate governance are difficult to pun-ish. It is not unthinkable that management will simply ignore the boards.

Finally, while some board members are truly independent, others receive “directives” from the government; it matters whether the new board chairs run their boards independently or according to the Kremlin’s orders. In the latter case, the new — and quite expensive — chairs would be treated as gov-ernment proxies, making a mockery of the entire exercise. The good news is that Medve-dev’s chief economic adviser, Arkady Dvorkovich, has said government directives “will be reformed” as well.

We will know soon — cer-tainly before July 1 — whether Medvedev can implement his agenda and whether he is will-ing and able to build his own power base in the process.

While Russians remained di-vided over the causes for the unrest in Libya (19 percent be-lieved it was a stuggle against authoritarianism, 14 percent blamed low living standards), a whopping 62 percent felt the international community shouldn’t intervene in favor of allowing Libyans to decide their own fate.

russians against interventionmost russians support ordinary Libyans, but oppose action

the poLLs

Putin bets on Pragmatism

Down in the mouth

prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s comparison of the coalition bombing of Libya to medieval

crusades has been reasonably criticized as the latest example of a confused Russian oppor-tunism. It seems rather cynical to bash a coalition that has been so careful to present the right kind of image, even though its primary purpose is protecting a population from a dictator. It is also disingenuous given that the Kremlin gave implicit sup-port for the bombing of Libya through its abstention as a per-manent member of the United Nations Security Council.

The critics of Putin’s comment might be operating from the moral high ground, but they are also missing the point. Putin did not criticize the West be-cause he wishes to side with

Tim Ash and his col-leagues at Royal Bank of Scotland were in Mos-cow for a look-see. Rus-

sia is the “flavor of the quarter”: The economy is doing far bet-ter than expected, and the bud-get deficit could disappear com-pletely this year, four years ahead of schedule. And it is one of the few places in the world taking in new money, with some even suggesting it could emerge as a possible safe haven in the face of instability in the Arab world and Japan’s woes.

But Ash said he was surprised to find the locals so pessimistic about their prospects. “In terms of overall impressions from the trip, we were actually taken aback by the generally down-beat views of locals on the econ-omy. While accepting that high oil prices would provide a short-term boost to the economy, there was concern that this would likely just discourage pol-icymakers from addressing deeper seated structural weak-nesses revealed through the cri-sis over the past three years,” Ash wrote in a note on the trip.

Ash’s comments on the pes-simism among locals is poi-gnant. I have often noticed this: Russians in general tend to be a lot more downbeat about the future of their country than the foreigners who live and work here.

I’m not sure exactly what the cause of this is. One factor is surely war-fatigue. Russians have literally been battling to build a new life/country for two de-cades now, and it has been re-ally hard work. What little prog-ress was made in the 1990s was almost all knocked down in the ruble crisis of 1998, and most had to start again and rebuild their businesses. (They did, and the upshot was that there was a lot less conspicuous consump-tion and a lot more investment after that crisis: Who talks about New Russians these days?).

Under Vladimir Putin, stabil-ity and an economic boom ap-peared, and in 2007 there was some real optimism about the future (look at all the children in Moscow — everyone’s kids here are the same age: 4 and 7). But the 2008 economic cri-sis knocked everything down again.

Russians are simply tired of struggling, if you ask me. The foreigners love the dynamism

of Russia and the opportunity it presents, as it stands in sharp contrast to the ossified social hierarchy of home.

However, as one of my Rus-sian colleagues said to me the other day: “You are already an adventurer simply because you are here, so this all suits you. And you have the option of leav-ing anytime you want. Me, I have to put two kids through Russian schools. I rely on the

Russian medical system. And I will be dependent on the Rus-sian pension system. That is a total ly different deal to yours.”

The recent crisis depressed everyone, and in 1998, it took four years for moods to lighten. I was surprised at how well most of my friends took this crisis compared to the black pall that fell over Russia in 1998. But that’s not to say they are happy.

Moreover, with Duma and presidential elections looming, there is more uncertainty on the near horizon. The crisis undid Putin’s implicit promise — “don’t meddle in politics and I will fix the economy” — and people are angry because they can see that the state is only pretending to listen to them. When profit margins were fat and wages soaring, it didn’t matter. But now the opposite

is true: They are thinking more about politics and feel betrayed by the government.

For the country’s oligarchs, the situation is slightly different, al-though they are also thinking about politics. Everyone is ner-vous because of the anti-graft campaign. Members of the mon-eyed elite are assuming that someone big—either from busi-ness or the administration—is going to be arrested to serve as an example. This would help the

roland nashThe moscow

Times

Libyan leader Moammar Gad-hafi or even because he finds it amusing to annoy the United States. Instead, his comments reflect an evolving pragmatism in foreign policy based on eco-nomic self-interest.

After two decades of trying to define itself with regard to the West, Russia is finding a role for itself on the international stage. One of the main difficul-ties that Russia has faced since the Soviet collapse is that the country has been at the bot-tom of several peer groups si-multaneously. It has been the defeated superpower, the slow-growth member of BRIC, the odd man out in the Group of Eight and the black sheep of Europe. Consequently, when-ever Russia has attempted to define itself as any of the above areas, it has been perceived as a laggard at best and a failure at worst.

The foreign policy that has emerged in recent years at-

tempts to avoid confining Rus-sia to any particular classifica-tion. A combination of improved economics, a period of relative stability at home and the epiph-any in 2008 that much of the Western model wasn’t sustain-able in the West — and all the more so in Russia — seems to have generated a new strategy both domestically and abroad. There are several components to this strategy.

The first component is a gold-en rule: Make no enemies — or at least as few as possible. Russia is building relationships across a wide spectrum. The im-provements in relations with the United States and Europe have tended to attract most of the headlines. Treaties on nuclear weapons reductions, better co-operation with the West on Iran, progress on World Trade Orga-nization negotiations, steady gas supply into Europe and the less-confrontational abstention vote in the UN all reflect significant

improvements in relations be-tween the West and Russia.

The growing ties with the emerging world have been just as significant. Russia is develop-ing ties across Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. Yekaterinburg hosted the first BRIC conference. The emerg-ing countries are providing sig-nificant investment into Rus-sia.

Russia’s national champions are being encouraged to step out onto the international stage — particularly into India, Ven-ezuela, Brazil, the Persian Gulf states, across sub-Saharan Afri-ca and, most notably, in China.

In 2010, China became a larger trade partner for Russia than Germany. Compare that with trade with the United States, which now accounts for less than 4 percent of Russia’s trade turnover. Asia and the Per-sian Gulf determine the price of Russia’s major exports. The

anti-graft program, which is not doing well at the moment (ev-eryone started paying taxes after former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003), but it would also play ex-tremely well to the gallery ahead of elections. So, many rich Rus-sians have been sending money abroad and diversifying their businesses internationally.

Personally, I think this is a temporary thing and that ev-eryone will cheer up again after the elections are over and the economy is moving again. After all, things are getting better in Russia pretty quickly, despite the big bumps in the road. (And spring will help, as everyone is very depressed this time of year as the snow turns to slyakot, mountains of slush.)

And Russians don’t give up—ever, regardless of how down in the mouth they are. They have this Herculean ability to deal with suffering. One of my favorite Winston Churchill quotes is from a trip to Mos-cow in the depths of winter dur-ing World War II: As he was being driven to see Stalin, a large group of Russians stood in the snow eating ice cream. As this was pointed out to him, he quipped: “These people will never be defeated.”

Roland Nash is chief invest-ment strategist at Verno Capital.

Sergei Guriev is rector of Moscow’s New Economic School. Aleh Tsyvinski is an economics professor at Yale University.

no more minister chairmen

in 2007, there was some real optimism about the future; look at all the children in moscow.

competing on price competitiveness according to western rules is not russia’s strong suit.

foreigners love the dynamism of russia and the opportunity it presents, in contrast to home.

tus quo and is ready to vote for an alternative.

The success of leading anti-corruption activist Alexei Naval-ny is another wake-up call for Medvedev. Notably, many of the measures proposed by the president are similar to those recommended by Navalny: re-

West is no longer viewed as a reliable source of long-term fi-nancing.

Competing on efficiency and price competitiveness accord-ing to Western rules and insti-

tutions is not Russia’s strong suit. But once politics and eco-nomics are employed togeth-er, Russia’s position becomes much improved. Russia is happy mixing international trade agreements with politics, just as it has mixed together politics and business domesti-cally. This approach may not be particularly welcome in the United States or Britain, but it is more consistent with the ap-proach to business in much of the rest of the world where the delineation between the

state and the private economy is less defined.

It is against this backdrop that Putin’s unhelpful comments should be taken. Russia never got very far by defining itself as either pro- or anti-Western. It is now at-tempting to be more pragmatic. It may look cynical in London or Washington, but it might reflect the recognition in Moscow that the world has changed.

ben arisspecial To russia

now

Corruption and government accountability are probably the most important issues for Med-vedev’s electoral base among the country’s rising middle class and “protest voters.” United Russia’s recent poor performance in re-gional elections shows that the electorate is fed up with the sta-

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05Russia NOWsection sponsored by rossiyskaya gazeta, russia www.rbth.ru reflectionsmost read Looking Beyond the Reset

http://rbth.ru/12690

THE QUEEN OF HORROR

bibliophile

Anna Starobinets ex-plores children with disturbances so deep-ly horrifying that only

her stunning talent for suspense and her elegant prose can coax a faint-of-heart reader to finish the compelling but revolting lead story in her collection, “An Awkward Age.”

Starobinets, doe-eyed and di-minutive, has emerged as Rus-sia’s “Queen of Horror,” though her literary prowess has also el-evated her to the elite category of “intellectual fantasy.” Born in 1978, she is also a well-known journalist.

She is indeed a singular tal-ent, though it is unclear that the translation of her first col-lection can bring her a foreign audience. The central character in “An Awkward Age,” Maxim, metamorphoses into something demented, and even darker than Frank, the child in Iain Banks’ controversial book, “The Wasp Factory.” Just as mental illness explains Maxim’s evil deeds, the story veers into visceral horror focusing on molt and decay and hideous rebirth.

Still, Maxim’s wretchedness is not utterly unsympathetic. Like other Starobinets characters, he is spawned in an oppressive and unhappy atmosphere: His par-ents appear to at least enable his metamorphosis. His mother stands by haplessly as he turns inward except to threaten oth-ers. Maxim gets fat and ugly. Insects travel up his nose. He eats other kids’ lunch. He hoards sugar. He sews things into his pillow. He tracks his sister’s men-strual cycle. His mother finds his diary, a revelatory piece of po-etry tracking the sickest of minds

and the disintegration of a per-sonality.

The story “The Rules” starts out simply enough with a child who has obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Again, Starobinets shows a deft understanding of the plodding, day-to-day strat-egies and reasoning of the men-tally ill.

Many kids have times when they have to count or repeat words, believing if they don’t something awful will happen. But something awful does hap-pen to this little boy, and a voice in his head tells him that “the rules” are about to get much more complicated. It is a voice to chill a reader’s heart.

Mental disorders and illness are a motif for the author. At first it allows the reader to ex-plain some of the misfortune, tragedy and evil of these sto-ries. But there is something else that smells bad in the fridge (in one story, the main character falls in love with bad food from the refrigerator). In other words, illness does not explain the depths of the hideousness.

There is a theory that all of the anxiety and helplessness and anger of a family can stow away and fester in one vulnerable fam-ily member, the one who gets sick, or even becomes a mon-ster. It is this way that Starobi-nets looks at society itself.

So is Starobinets more than a horror writer? In Russia, she has been compared to Stephen King and even Kafka. Her sto-ries communicate something urgent, if elusive, through schizophrenic characters in an-ti-fairy tales. The reader does not always understand what is real or imagined, only that neglect is never benign, in a family or society, and that all monsters come from some mother’s womb.

noraFitzgerald

SpeciAl to RN

LONg LivE THE impERiaLs!

eXpat Files

As excitement over this month’s Royal Wed-ding reaches fever pitch, it seems appro-

priate for Russia to seriously con-sider a strategic return to mon-archy. There are those who will feel that this is a complicated and expensive move, but it is clear to me that properly con-stituted, the return to monar-chy could go a long way to mit-igating a number of Russia’s current issues. Sure, it’s expen-sive, but surely not as expen-sive as the Sochi Olympics, and a far superior long-term invest-ment. I won’t reveal which of the candidates I think should wear the Cap of Monomakh (not in this month’s column any-way), but I will pose this ques-tion: What is a Stabilization Fund for if not to create stability? The best way to do that is to get “The Imperials” back to work as heads of state in Russia.

Here’s why:1. Russia Already Functions

Like a Monarchy: It’s hard to impose hereditary monarchy on countries that are used to hun-dreds of years of representation-al government, but, happily, Russia doesn’t have that prob-lem. The mindset is primed for a seamless return to Tsar Alex-ander III’s trifecta of “Autocra-cy, Orthodoxy, and National-ism.” The Church would be the first to sign up and lend the new monarch their not incon-siderable influence and support to get the populace on board. It’s a no brainer.

2. Russia Has the Equipment: Russia has all it needs in terms of regalia — crowns, orbs, scep-ters, thrones, carriages, palaces, crown jewels and a coat of arms — all tucked up in the Diamond Fund, no doubt more than ready for an airing. The exist-ing real estate just needs minor

renovations such as indoor plumbing.

3. Monarchy is Great Public Relations: It goes without say-ing that the Imperials would do wonders for Russia’s PR, both at home and abroad. At home, they could handle things like charitable causes, visit factories and open sports events. This would free up the people who run the government to run it. Abroad, the Imperials could spearhead things like bids for major global sporting events. Or, better still, they could just have the occasional wedding at home. Monarchy, of course, is to tourism what honey is to flies. And while the KGB/FSB is an admirable school of man-agement for many aspects of government, PR isn’t one of them.

4. More Fun at Home: An acute problem with Russian so-ciety today is that everyone wants to go and have fun else-where. The Imperials would fos-ter and encourage fun at home by creating a social calendar and thereby an axis around which the socially ambitious would re-volve. They could make unlike-ly backwaters fashionable, just as Prince Albert did for Scot-land. Imagine boating week in Volgograd, winter sports in Kras-nodar, and the elk-shooting sea-son in Omsk.

5. A Shot in the Arm to the Military: Monarchy is always a boon for the military, the only profession considered suitable for the male members of any Imperial dynasty. The army will become a competitive profes-sion. Families will stop paying money to keep their sons out and start paying money to get their sons in. Total rehabilita-tion.

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.

Anton, 25, has a close eye on his suitcase. Though already an economic manager at

a major oil company’s Moscow headquarters — a position he admits would take him years to reach in a Western country — he is considering taking a less-er-paying job or continuing his education in London. “Russia is just so depressing sometimes, especially in winter,” he said.

For many educated young Russians, Western countries seem to have an intractable al-lure, whether there are more work opportunities, a better ed-ucational system, or simply nicer weather. While this last reason may seem trivial, many students are beginning to wonder if the grass is literally greener on the other side.

“Each year, I ask my master’s students where they see them-selves three or four years from now,” Alexander Auzan, a Mos-cow State University econom-ics professor, said at a confer-ence in the Polytechnic Museum this year. “In September 2010, roughly half said they envisaged themselves working abroad: not just anywhere but quite specif-ically in Germany, Britain, Ire-land or Argentina.”

Uncomfortable truths are part of any world leader’s job, but few could have been more so-bering than the one facing Rus-sian President Dmitry Medve-dev before his first G8 summit in July 2008. Just as he began his ambitious program of eco-nomic “modernization,” the white-collar professionals so cru-cial to it were prepared to jump ship — a staggering 57 percent of them, according to a Levada Center survey.

Medvedev’s response was characteristic of the optimistic Western-style rhetoric he has employed throughout his pres-idency. “We have to create fa-vorable conditions for our citi-zens,” Medvedev said. “When there’s a lack of such conditions, people want to go somewhere else.”

But Russian professionals re-main unconvinced. At least, that’s the conclusion it is pos-sible to draw from the latest mi-gration figures. More than 1.25 million Russians have left the country in the last few years, according to Sergei Stepashin,

Audit Chamber head. Emigra-tion, combined with low birth rate and high mortality rate — average male life expectancy is 63 — have contributed to a plummeting population. (Today there are about 143 million peo-ple living in Russia, a decrease of approximately 3.5 million overall since 2002.)

At first, this seems the latest in a long line of emigration waves stretching back to the October Revolution, when thou-sands of entrepreneurs and in-tellectuals fled Lenin’s Bolshevik government. Since then, Rus-sians have left the country in droves whenever circumstanc-es forced them. Some did so to avoid state-sponsored persecu-tion, as during Stalin’s purges or the anti-religious campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. Oth-ers, particularly in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, left in search of civil liberties in Europe, Israel and the United States. Most, however, did so in search of better material con-ditions, as with the “sausage emigration” that accompanied production shortages during perestroika, or the 6 million Rus-sians who left in the turbulent 1990s.

Max Seddon is a writer and editor specializing in Rus-sia.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was se-curity advisor to former president Jimmy Carter.

wHy THE bRaiN dRaiN?

OpTimism FOR RUssiaN-pOLisH RELaTiONs

max seddonSpeciAl to

RuSSiA Now

april 10 marked one year since the terrible tragedy near smol-ensk that resulted in the deaths of dozens of top polish officials. do you believe that russia’s outreach after the plane crash was sincere? what was the im-pact of this tragic accident on overall relations between mos-cow and warsaw?

I think that Russia’s outreach was more than an outreach. I think it was a spontaneous and genuine reaction of compassion and sympathy, which was very much appreciated by many people in Poland or by people like myself who have family con-nections to Poland, but who are obviously rooted in America. In that sense it was a very positive indication that some of the his-torically enduring hostility be-tween Russians and Poles is be-ginning to wane on the Russian side and also on the Polish side. I must say that I personally was touched by it.

do you think that the russian-

polish reconciliation process is irreversible?

No, I don’t. I think processes such as the ones that have been experienced by the French and the Germans or the Germans and the Poles were reversible, but fortunately both sides in those two cases persisted, were patient and in the end created a much more enduring and comprehensive reconciliation. This still is not yet the case be-tween the Poles and the Rus-sians. This reconciliation is still vulnerable, and I think both sides ought to be cautious of that.

given the fact that relations be-tween russia and poland have been poisoned for centuries, will the two nations be able to move beyond this “historic trap” and what should be done for that?

I think it is possible to move beyond that. But one has to be also cautious of the fact that re-ciprocal hostility is not neces-sarily the correct definition of the relationship at different stag-es of history. What I mean by that is that at certain stages of history, the hostility involved Polish supremacy, which led to the occupation of Moscow, and that was centuries ago. In more recent centuries, it involves much more Russian supremacy and domination of Poland, in-cluding, for example, such hor-rible acts as Katyn. So one has to be aware of the fact that the wounds are a little more sensi-tive still on the Polish side than on the Russian side. One also has to recognize that in any rec-

onciliation there is some distinc-tion, which should not be ex-aggerated in importance, but is a distinction nonetheless be-tween the stronger side and the weaker side. These realities have to be taken into account in the

very difficult and psychological-ly complex process that recon-ciliation truly is.

I was in Moscow last year and I made a speech right after Ser-gei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign min-ister, spoke. We talked about reconciliation, and I said that I am really committed to the idea of reconcilation, and I made a point of emphasizing some-thing. The real reconciliation is something that goes beyond government, it has to be root-ed in the physiology and mem-ory of the people. A reconcili-

ation between governments is much more fragile than recon-ciliation between people.

there are some fears that after the case of the smolensk plane crash is closed and out of the spotlight, russian-polish ties may worsen again. it’s not a se-cret that there are some coun-tries that are uncomfortable with improving ties between russia and poland. what is your personal forecast on both the future of bilateral relations be-tween moscow and warsaw and relations between the two countries in a broader europe-an context?

I am cautiously optimistic on both accounts. I think there is some genuine momentum in the Polish-Russian reconciliation that should be maintained and can be maintained. And I do think that if it is maintained, the concerns that some of the coun-tries in the proximity of Poland and Russia have will be relieved in the sense that they will see some genuine benefits for them-selves.

what role, if any, should the united states play to facilitate the normalization of the pol-ish-russian relationship at this point?

I think just be sympathetic, engage, try to reduce irritations that can surface on the one or the other side. Even in regards to the question of deployments of defensive missiles, Poles need to understand that this is not some sort of an alliance against Russia, and Russians need to un-derstand that if it takes place, it is not going to be some threat to Russia. I think America can play a constructive role, but ul-timate responsibility rests on the countries — and especially the two peoples — involved in this process.

It’s the relative absence of those force-majeure situations that worries so many about the current trend. Indeed, Russia is coming off a decade of unprec-edented growth. Under Vladi-mir Putin, GDP increased six times, poverty was cut in half and the economy rose at an average of 7 percent a year.

Many liberal commentators see the change as something primarily atmospheric. “The sys-temic explanation for the [cur-rent] wave of emigration is the same one that Blok once gave for Pushkin’s death: not enough air,” journalist Dmitry Oreshkin wrote in a recent article for Novaya Gazeta, an opposition-minded newspaper. “It’s hard-er and harder for a free, self-sufficient person to breathe in Putin’s Russia. There’s no place provided for him here.”

What remains to be seen is where that atmosphere comes from: In a poll accompanying Oreshkin’s article, 62.5 percent of Novaya Gazeta readers chose “all of the above” from a list of reasons explaining the increase in emigration. Most cases seem to depend on an individual’s personal issues: their line of work, their age, the languages

they know, their family status and their cultural images. Live-Journal, a blogging site enor-mously popular with Russians, has a community called “Time to go?” where users keen to emigrate seek advice from like-minded Russians.

more opportunities for those who stay

However, some professionals have suggested that emigration makes it easier for those who stay to advance in their careers. Anna, 32, a senior curator at a major Moscow art institution, has ap-prenticed at several prestigious organizations in Europe, but as-cribes her success to her return to Russia once and for all.

“Paradoxically, there are more possibilities for a career here, as long as you’ve got the desire to have a career,” she said. “The fact that leaving Russia for a pe-riod of time is unambiguously helpful, in terms of getting some fresh air, is another matter en-tirely — but then, in the major-ity of cases, it’s worth coming back.”

Real reconciliation has to be rooted in physiology and the memory of the people.

“we have to create favorable conditions for our citizens,” president Medvedev said. ”when there’s a lack of such conditions, people want to go somewhere else.”

“each year, i ask my students where they see themselves in three or four years,” professor Alexander Auzan said. Half saw themselves working abroad, he said.

The one-year anniversary this month of the Polish president’s tragic plane crash over Smolensk brought renewed attention to re-lations between Moscow and Warsaw. Alexander Gasyuk, Washington, D.C., correspondent for Rossiyskaya Gazeta and con-tributor to Russia Now, spoke to Zbigniew Brzezinski, former na-tional security advisor to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, for-eign policy expert and Polish-American, about diplomacy after the crash that killed the president and 96 members of the political elite.

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“Enjoy the metro, it is fast and cheap. Do not like smelly crowds and violent pushing? Learn to catch a car by stretching out your hand in an about 45 to 50 degree angle and state your location and price. If he nods, you won. If not, of-fer more or hail another car.”

“I have often noticed this: Russians in general tend to be a lot more downbeat about the future of their country than the foreigners who live and work here. ”

On an intimate black-box stage, actors read their parts from the scripts in their hands. Slowly, the reading turns into performance, tension building as the actors transform into characters — four young and aimless drunkards. The audience appears shocked and amused by the crudeness of “Life Smiled At Me,” which employs lan-guage unheard of in Russian theaters.

A cluster of young Russian playwrights armed with razor-sharp tongues and a penchant for realism is bringing a new dynamism to the country’s the-atrical reputation with its move-ment called “New Drama.” Their themes are gritty, and they are attracting daring talents and lively audiences.

Theater.doc, which produced “Life Smiled at Me,” is best known outside Russia for per-forming a play about the life and death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — who died brutal-ly in a Moscow Detention Cen-ter last year — giving a voice to civil discontent. The group also performed a play based on Internet reaction on chats and message boards to the school siege in Beslan.

“Life Smiled at Me” has been awarded a Golden Mask Award. The Golden Mask Theater Fes-tival is Moscow’s premier the-ater event and runs each year from March to April, closing with a showcase for cutting-edge work, called the Case Fes-tival.

Some foreign theatergoers are under the impression that the nation that gave the world Chekhov and Gogol may be resting on its laurels. Whatever collapse of creativity occurred in the 1990s has been replaced with an emerging theater scene worthy of Konstantin Stanislav-sky himself.

Contemporary is a word that reappears like a leitmotif with these playwrights. Ukrainian playwright Natalia Vorozhbit of-fered her definition of New Drama: “These are people who write about the contemporary world with a contemporary out-look and language. We are not afraid of provoking. Our writ-ing must be emotional.” While it seems Russian actors are often criticized for overacting, there’s nothing like that here.

Not About the PoliticsDon’t go looking for politics

in most of these dramas, how-ever. The Magnitsky play is more the exception than the rule. In

Drama Shock theater in Moscow

spite of the dissent at the core of the movement, its writers so far reject open confrontation with the establishment.

“Politics doesn’t interest me, I’m a woman,” Vorozhbit said awkwardly. Then, after a pause, she acknowledged: “Some part of me feels ashamed for not writing on this subject. In fact, without having really discussed it between ourselves, I think we consider the topic too dirty to mention.” The idea seems par-adoxical, given New Drama’s fearless treatment of taboos (at least in Moscow’s theaters) such as drugs, prostitution and ho-mosexuality.

New Drama has increased its productions at an astonishing rate of one to two new produc-

tions per week, carried out with absolutely zero financial back-ing. New Drama observers be-lieve that the movement is growing at a fevered pitch.

A Cult FollowingEvery night, roughly 30 the-

atergoers enter the tiny base-ment of “Theater.doc,” which already has a cult following in Moscow. There is a bit of a con-spiratorial feeling inside, and a chemistry occurs between the actors and the the audience in the spare atmosphere. But they could use larger venues.

Marat Gatsalov is one of the movement’s leading directors. “Theaters [in Moscow] are suf-focating under the old plays,” he said. “But they slam the door in our faces.”

“The Golden Mask Festival understands we are the future,” Mikhail Uganov, New Drama director, said. “We don’t have access to big state theaters in Moscow for one reason: Their directors are old. In the prov-inces, our plays, my plays are already on the stage of the big theaters.”

Theater Comes Up From the Underground

Alexandra Rebebok and Danil Vorobyov in “Life Smiled at Me.”

Marat Gatsalov is one of New Drama’s leading directors.

Moscow’s theater movement, “New Drama,” challenges Russian audiences with gritty realism and gains a cult following.

EMMANUEL GRYNSZPANSPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

“Theaters are suffocating under the old plays. But they slam the door in our faces.”

During the first few moments of the movie “Khodorkovsky,” the screen remains black. Then a narrow blue band widens, re-vealing two oil pumps in the middle of a snowy desert in Si-beria, arms swinging like a huge clock, ticking off the inevitable minutes.

The film, which was a sleep-er hit warmly received at last month’s Berlin Film Festival, got much bigger play after it was stolen from the director’s office before a small screening, caus-ing an even greater sensation.

It has been seven years since the richest man of Russia, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in Novosibirsk Air-port for fraud. His fate has in-trigued creative minds and in-tellectuals all around the world.

Long-term imprisonment has turned Khodorkovsky from a Russian businessman into an iconic subject.

While many of Russia’s oli-garchs ignored or broke poorly enforced laws to amass their riches in the 1990s, only Khodor-kovsky was arrested, his advo-cates said, because of his grow-ing interest in the political opposition.

Fate has also transformed this one-time oligarch into a philos-opher and writer; he has been accepted by Russian artists not only as a subject but as a col-league. His prose, published in magazines and a few opposi-tion newspapers, explores the meaning of justice, the decay of corruption and endurance during what seem to be hope-less moments.

Director Cyril Tuschi spent five

Arts Film and literature focus on fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s fate

Directors and writers have turned their eyes to Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a subject, inspiration and, more recently, colleague.

years traveling and speaking to Russians, and he said he is “over-whelmed by the aura of a mar-tyr” surrounding Khodork-ovsky.

The German documentary was released soon after a Rus-sian court sentenced Khodork-ovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, to six more years in prison. The trial added to the relevance of the recent proliferation of Khodorkovsky-themed literature and art.

In Russia, where history is sat-urated with stories of political repressions, exiles and arrests for several generations, many writers have personal associa-tions and motivations for get-ting involved in or staying out of politics.

For acclaimed Russian novel-ist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Khodor-kovsky’s fate has become en-

twined with her own. They jointly received a literary prize for their letters to each other, which were published in inde-pendent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Ulitskaya’s grandfathers spent more than 20 years in jail be-tween them; her friends from the sixties were imprisoned as well. She approached Khodor-kovsky as a subject emblemat-ic of the throes of Russian soci-ety and an archetype of its literature.

One of the most published Russian writers, Boris Akunin, once compared Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment with Andrei Sakharov’s arrest and exile in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, in 1979.

Nobody then would believe in positive changes in the U.S.S.R., where an academic

was kept in exile, the writer re-called. But all it took was one phone call from Mikhail Gor-bachev for people to believe in the fresh wind of change.

“Until Khodorkovsky is out of jail, all the beautiful words about civil society, independent courts and the struggle against corruption will be taken as empty,” Akunin said.

Soon after 22 months of hear-ings and the court’s new guilty verdict, the most famous Rus-sian prisoner had his own liter-ary debut, a collection of his articles, interviews and dia-logues.

Back in the 1990s, a popular satirist and playwright, Victor Shenderovich, associated Khodorkovsky with a long list of Russia’s richest men. “As soon as he went to jail, his real fate began to lead him,” Shen-

derovich said. “Today, Khodor-kovsky is our barometer of change: The day he is free, the world will know that new, bet-ter times have come to Rus-sia.”

In Russia, the price for explor-ing injustice and corruption can be high, the writers say: The journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the human rights activist Nata-lya Estemirova and the lawyers Stanislav Markelov and Sergei Magnitsky are becoming ac-cepted among writers as sym-bols of people who lost their lives in the struggle for truth and justice.

Perhaps out of respect for Anton Chekhov’s traditional idea that the main character of any play based on a real person has to either leave Russia or die, nei-ther Shenderovich nor any other Russian writers have so far made Khodorkovsky the hero of a play.

Nevertheless, his fate contin-ues to bring more activists from Russia’s most prominent cultur-al elite into a tight community. Writer and internationally rec-ognized artist Yuri Rost said he went to Khodorkovsky’s trial to look at the man in the glass cage and see “real courage.”

Tuschi, the German filmmak-er, said he was intrigued by the story of Khodorkovsky’s defi-ance, the courage of a man who could have chosen political asy-lum in the United States, but instead returned to Russia, on his private jet, knowing he would go to the gulag.

The German film looks at how money and prison can trans-form a personality.

In an animated scene of Tuschi’s film, Khodorkovsky swims across a pool full of oil and golden coins. He seems to be sinking. As he approaches the pool’s edge, there are fewer coins and the water begins to clear: Khodorkovsky appears to swim again.

From Oil Tycoon to Imprisoned Muse

A still depicting a young Mikhail from “Khodorkovsky.”

ANNA NEMTSOVASPECIAL TO RUSSIA NOW

Seated at an oak table in an English pub in Moscow, Denis Matsuev is just as charismatic as he is in tailcoats at a concert grand piano. Matsuev said he is excited about getting back in front of an American audi-ence as he prepared to do yet another tour. “I am always happy to play in the States. Walking onto the stage turns into a huge celebration.”

The 35-year-old pianist per-forms 160 concerts per year and cannot even remember how many albums he has released — 18 or 19. Critics call him “a virtuoso in the grandest of Rus-sian traditions” (the Gramo-phone) and “the new Horow-itz” (the Times).

The story of this global tri-umph began 33 years ago in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, when

Music World-famous Russian pianist launches American tour

Denis Matsuev, a virtuoso among pianists, recalls life as a young student from Siberia before there were opening nights.

the 3-year-old Matsuev walked up to a piano for the first time, reached up to the keys and, still unable to see them, repeated the melody he had just heard from the weather forecast on television with a single finger.

“The atmosphere at home was entirely musical,” Matsuev recalled. “Mother taught at the pedagogical institute and the music school. Father, a pianist and composer, was head of the music section at the drama the-ater and also worked at a music school. We constantly listened to music.”

Matsuev is also proud that he managed to tear down all notions about what a wunder-kind should be. “Sure, I have an amazing ear for music. I can pick up any song in a second and learn any sonata in a few days, but I’ve never practiced for 10 hours. I was a totally nor-mal boy — I played hockey, football and broke my arm a few times,” he added.

In fact, soccer almost inter-fered with the musician’s career. At 14, Matsuev was seriously

training for the Irkutsk junior football team and didn’t hurry to the New Names auditions. The charitable organization was in search of musical talent in Ir-kutsk.

“I had an awful row with my parents about this,” Mat-suev laughed. “They said, ‘Come on, go and play some prelude by Rachmaninoff... and then you can move on with your football.’ And they per-suaded me in the end.”

Six months later, Matsuev also managed to pass an audi-tion at the central music school in Moscow. “There were absolutely no prospects for a musician in Ir-kutsk... Moving, however, was a tragedy for m e . I t w a s

The Charismatic Virtuoso from Irkutsk

ALENA TVERITINARUSSIA NOW

1991, a terribly wet and windy autumn, the August Coup had just occurred, the stores were empty, there was total uncer-tainty and fear.”

But Matsuev cheered for the Moscow football club Spartak: “When my parents told me that we could go to football games in Moscow, it all changed for me.”

If you ask Matsuev what the secret to his success is, he im-mediately replies that 80 per-cent of the credit belongs to his parents. “Think about it, they left everything in Irkutsk and moved into a rented one-room apartment in Moscow, where they washed, cooked and prac-ticed with me! Naturally, there

was no guarantee at all that I would suc-ceed... My grand-mother secretly sold her apart-

ment in Irkutsk and gave me $18,000 ‘to get settled.’ We rented our apartment in Mos-cow with this money.”

Matsuev and his talented peers at the New Names foun-dation began to tour extensive-ly. He played for the Queen of England and the Pope. “That’s when I understood that music really could become my profes-sion.”

Matsuev became convinced he could make a career of music after winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1998. Among those congratu-lating the youth was legendary British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. “He sent me a fax say-ing, ‘I had no doubts.’”

MASTUEV’S UPCOMING CONCERTS

May 6, 2011 Strathmore Hall, Music Center at Strathmore North Bethesda, Maryland

May 8, 2011 Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 15, 2011 Davies Symphony Hall, San Fransisco, California

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