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RN’s Konstantin von Eggert on Middle East Geopolitics

American, Russian Educators Swap Skills and Know-How

Stalin’s Seven Sisters: Staging a Comeback

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Religions A wondrous tradition is resurrected in an economically depressed region

Buddhist Revival in Kalmykia One third of the population of Kalmykia was deported during Stalin’s terror. As the region struggles, it returns to its roots for answers. anna nemtsova special to rn

The first Ceremony of Light offering to Buddha 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 Monastery, assigned by the Dalai Lama, arrived to bless the republic’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 whispered 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 pancake. The republic of Kalmykia, with its population of more than 300,000 people, chose to revive the traditional philosophy

and culture of Tibetan Buddhism. The religion was adopted by their predecessors, the Oirat tribes in Mongolia, in the 13th century and imported to the Russian empire when Oirats migrated there in 1609. continued on PAGE 3

Russian Scientist Never Gave Up on Aral Sea special to rN

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 horizon and blending seamlessly into the surrounding desert.

This research vessel was named after a famed Russian scientist and explorer of, ironically, 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 Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, has studied the Aral Sea longer than anyone. He can take indirect credit for the recent rescue of the northern, Kazakh part that has turned the Aral from a symbol of catastrophic environmental mismanagement to one of model rehabilitation.

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

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

He first saw, or rather did not see, the Aral Sea in 1978. In need of a vacation after defending his doctoral thesis at the zoological institute, he went to Aralsk, the northern port, to go diving.

The Aral, the world’s fourthlargest inland lake, is located in the desert east of the Caspian Sea (Aral means island in Kazakh). 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.

reuters/vostock-photo

Christopher pala

Putin Proposes postSoviet “Eurasian Union” In his first article since announcing that he will run for another term as president, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proposed in the daily Izvestia a “supra-national union capable of becoming a pole in the modern world, and at the same time an effective connection between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region.”

Putin’s article mostly covered the economic aspects of developing the new body out of existing structures such as the Customs Union (which currently unites Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia) to cover more of the entire post-Soviet space.

Russia and U.S. Team Up to Prevent Armageddon

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.

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“Let all our wishes come true! Let all living creatures be free of suffering, of danger, of diseases and sadness! Let peace and happiness govern on Earth!”

More than 2,000 Buddhists chanted the mantra, kneeling on mats before the Golden Abode of Buddha temple in Elista, the capital of the republic of Kalmykia, one of three traditional Buddhist regions in Russia.

They repeated words of prayer after the Kalmyk Buddhist leader, Telo Tulku Rinpoche. Finally, the square grew quiet as the group went into deep meditation.

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 Kalmykia 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 celebrating the beginning of the international forum, “Buddhism:

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Kazakh part of the Aral Sea is thriving again.

continued on PAGE 3

In a gesture reminiscent of Hollywood’s “Armageddon,” 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 Nations.

At first glance the brave new step switches the focus of Russia-U.S. security talks from squabbles 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 Lyukanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, told Kommersant.

Tom Washington, THE MOSCOW NEWS

Russian Documentary Films Come to D.C. The Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russians Abroad, Russian-American Historical and Culture Center and Russian Way Film Studio will present the 2nd annual Festival of Russian Documentary Films November 23-30 in Washington, D.C. This year’s Festival will be accompanied by award-winning Russian directors like Igor Maiboroda, Sergei Zaitsev and Boris Sheinin, who will have the oportunity to present their films to an American audience.

More details at http://www.cinema-rp.com

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Will Occupy Wall Street come to Russia anytime soon? rbth.ru/13587

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

A Warm Climate for Investors

press service

Alexander Skripov Chelyabinsk

Recently, a delegation for the Chelyabinsk region, which included 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 representatives of Google and Bank of America. The delegation, headed by Mikhail Yurevich, governor of the Chelyabinsk region, urged American companies to invest in production in the Southern Urals.

Several important agreements were reached. The company Caterpillar, for example, decided to look into the possibility of expanding its production to the Chelyabinsk Region.

This would be the joint-production of engines for railway locomotives based in the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant. The legendary facility, which, incidentally, is one of the biggest in the world, was created during the era of Soviet industrialization at the beginning of the 1930s with the participation of American specialists. It was redesigned during the Second World War to manufacture T-34 tanks. A total of 18,000 vehicles were produced during the war, which is about one fifth of all combat vehicles rolled out in the Soviet Union. But the factory has fallen on hard times in recent years. Outdated equipment 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 entered the phase of technical talks on the joint production of industrial machinery and engines,” Simon Mlodik, general director, said. “The production of high-power diesel engines can be localized at the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant site as early as 2012.”

“Chelyabinsk is in need of a new type of industrial production. We need to attract investment and create modern production facilities. I mean not only the construction of new plants, but also the modernization of existing production facilities, because we need to catch up with advanced economies,” Governor Mikhail Yurevich explained.“I can say one thing for sure about the cooperation between the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and Caterpillar — there is no single

technological operation which cannot be done in Chelyabinsk.”

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

Largest Foreign Investors

Annual Foreign Direct Investment

same task — to convince local entrepreneurs of the Chelyabinsk region’s favorable investment climate. And the governor’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 Chelyabinsk region and the United States is still relatively small, amounting to a little more than $100 million,” Deputy Governor Yuri Klepov said. “But America is of interest to us because it’s one of the largest economies in the world, and its leading companies, as a rule, are leaders in their industries.” The region’s leadership has set itself the task of directing U.S. technology and investment to the Chelyabinsk region, which is competing with other emerging markets.

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

Governor Mikhail Yurevich explained to the members of the USRBC why he believes the market in the Southern Urals is promising for American investors. Many enterprises in the region are developing dynamically, and the region itself is demonstrating positive industrial growth. If the projected figure for the year end in the whole of Russia is around 4 percent, it is expected to reach 7.5 percent in the Chelyabinsk region. Another factor that works in the region’s favor is its advantageous geographical location in the center of

Welcoming Foreign Capital A new governor wants to attract foreigners to the Chelyabinsk region.

Alexander Skripov Chelyabinsk

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

The 42-year-old businessman, named “Man of the Year” at the tender age of 28 for the organization of industrial production in Chelyabinsk, was appointed governor by President Dmitry Medvedev last year.

Yurevich recently launched a start-up office for foreign investors in the capital. It provides assistance to newcomers to Chelyabinsk, offering anything from the provision of in-

Breaking Down Barriers

terpreters to help with registering 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 regional Ministry of Economic Development. Not all of them are focused on manufacturing.

One Italian company decided to invest $118 million in the modernization of a ski resort near the city of Miass, a twohour drive from Chelyabinsk. It is one of seven ski resorts operating successfully in the Southern 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.

Globalization

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

Nonetheless, few foreigners have heard of Chelyabinsk. To tackle the problem, local authorities created a new position: deputy governor for invesment projects. Yurevich appointed 39-year-old Alexei Ovakimyan, who had previously run a successful consulting company, to the post.

“It became clear after meetings with foreign investors that they had never heard of Chelyabinsk before,” Ovakimyan said.

“For many of them, Russia is still associated primarily with Moscow and St. Petersburg. But this is a completely misguided point of view.”

The capital of the Southern Urals, Chelyabinsk, is a city with more than one million inhabitants. It is situated more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow on the slope of the Ural Mountains, near the border between Europe and Asia, and recently celebrated its 275th anniversary.

In Soviet times, Chelyabinsk was a closed city filled with factories for the production of steel products, weapons and agricultural machinery.

The area was also home to some of the most hi-tech laboratories for the production of nuclear weapons.

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

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

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

The town now has an international 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 scrambling to develop the city’s infrastructure in time for the European Judo Championships, which will be held in Chelyabinsk for the first time in 2012.

Investing in People

With a shortage of funds in the regional budget, Yurevich is convinced that foreign investment is the key to further development. New jobs will create demand for investing in education.

That is why Yurevich is particularly proud of the agreement reached during his United States visit with the Washington, D.C.based American Councils on Education for International Education. The deal will provide internship opportunities for students of Chelyabinsk State University at leading American companies.

A Future in Education Chelyabinsk Governor Mikhail Yureyevich wrapped up a weeklong visit to the United States earlier this month following meetings in California and Chicago, where he fielded questions about Russia’s investment climate and copyright laws from representatives of major U.S. corporations like Google and Bank of America.

The official was on a mission

to convince American manufacturers to bring production to Chelyabinsk. Just as important to his region’s future, Yureyevich was also on hand to foster an internship program for Chelyabinsk State University students to intern at American companies, a program supported by the Washington, D.C.-based American Councils for International Education.

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 market. 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

institutions, as well as highly skilled engineers and scientists.

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

oping and manufacturing instrumentation and tools as a fully fledged part of the American corporation. Moreover, almost 70 percent of the engineers working in the Southern Urals are involved in international projects. The Chelyabinsk Emerson production is the largest in Russia, employing more than 1,000 people.

Recently, Metran, together with the South-Ural State University, established the Global Engineering Centre, which develops and manufactures automation equipment for the whole world.

The region also cooperates actively with the Finnish company Fortum. Corporate management 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 environment 15-fold.

interview dwight k. bohm

How’s the Climate There?

After working for Emerson in North America and Asia, American Dwight K. Bohm served as general director of Metran in Chelyabinsk from 2004 to 2010.

He is currently Vice President at Marine Business Strategy & Development in North Carolina.

Dwight spoke about doing business in Russia.

Why was Chelyabinsk chosen as the location for Emerson’s Global Engineering Center?

There was already a successful group of engineers with experience in product development that worked in the same environment as we do. We were also happy to see that their Research & Development people worked near the factory that mass-produced the final product — this is always important.

Finally, we realized that setting up a similar center in Moscow would have been too expensive. The relative costs would have made it uncompetitive.

What are the greatest challenges you faced in doing business in Chelyabinsk?

Communication and, specifically, business meetings were a huge problem in the old days.

The meetings were unproductive and usually involved someone standing and reading from a piece of paper before a large, glazed-looking audience. Moving from that to an environment where you would have people giving key messages and exchanging ideas was difficult.

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

What is the greatest misconception foreign investors hold about doing business in Russia?

The level of corruption. Yes, there is corruption. But I’ve worked in Asia and South

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his story

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Southern Ural authorities try to convince American companies of the benefits of investing in the region’s economy.

AGE: 64 education: petroleum management

Dwight K. Bohm completed degrees at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and the University of Kansas in Lawrence in Petroleum Management. In the 1990s, he served as president of Ohkura-Rosemount Japan Co. and representative director of Fisher-Rosemount Japan Co. in Tokyo. He later worked as vice president of Daniel Middle East & Africa before coming to Chelyabinsk in 2004, where he worked for the next six years.

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 investor 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 access 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 integration with Metran went was the most satisfying thing of all.

I saw some of our young leaders develop very rapidly, and being their mentor was very gratifying.

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

How has the investment climate changed since you came to Chelyabinsk?

It has improved. Carbo Ceramics, the Texas-based producer and supplier of ceramic proppant, 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.

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Russian Scientist Never Gave Up on Aral Sea CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

When the Soviet Union diverted the rivers, it made the decision to let the sea die.

Sherpa to a Sea’s Rebirth

Nikolai Aladin cared about the Aral before it was popular.

Nikolai Aladin was born in 1954 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Since 1989, he has been the head of the Laboratory of Brackish Water Hydrobiology 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 vacation after defending his doc-

All that changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost policy of openness. Aladin’s research was published and the consequences of the cotton-first policy on the health of the Kazakhs on the north shore and the Uzbeks on the south shore were widely described. The Academy of Sciences gave him his own research center, the Laboratory of Brackish Water Hydrobiology.

But while Moscow was still studying ways to reverse the disaster, the Soviet Union dissolved and what was left of the Aral Sea was bisected by the Uzbek-Kazakh border. The Russian scientific authorities became reluctant to fund expeditions, in part in deference to nationalist 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 father passed away and he fi-

“We wanted to prove that disasters made by ... man could be repaired by the hand of man,” Aladin said. nanced his Aral research by taking paying tourists 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

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, possibly the fastest rise in history. So he took samples and measurements; he decided he would make his life work the study of how the fish and wildlife adapted to the changes.

Since then, Aladin has become an expert for a variety of international environmental programs devoted to the Caspian and Aral Seas, including UNESCO and the United Nations. He has contributed to more than 200 articles in scientific publications and gone on 41 expeditions to the Aral Sea.

The Fastest Shrinking Sea REUTERS/VOSTOCK-PHOTO

FROM PERSONAL ARCHIVES

Until the 1960s, it produced 50,000 tons of fish a year. But in the 1960s, the Soviet authorities began to divert water from the two rivers to produce cotton for uniforms and gunpowder, 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 salinity had doubled to 2 percent in less than two decades, possibly the fastest rise in history.

So he took samples and measurements and decided he would make his life’s work the study of how the fauna adapted to the changes.

But back in St. Petersburg, his proposals were met with evasive replies. While the decision to sacrifice fish for cotton was not secret, the authorities discouraged 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 scrutinizing the Soviet scientific literature for details in the early 1980s.

“You’d find an occasional reference to the fact the sea level had fallen by so much, or the salinity had increased, but you never saw a whole article devoted to the desiccation,” he recalled during the expedition.

In Russia, Aladin was forced to study other subjects and to ask for his father, a naval physician, for money to fund his research on the Aral. At scientific conferences, he was sometimes allowed to read papers on his research, but not to publish them. “It was a form of samizdat,” he said, speaking of dissident self-publishing under communism.

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the dike breached repeatedly.

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 allowed for the accumulation of water into the sea and the restoration of wetland ecosystems.

Six years later, the fish biomass in the Kazakh part of the sea jumped from 3,500 tons to 18,000 tons, said local fisheries director Zaualkhan Yermakhanov. Fishermen are hauling in 6,000 tons a year using crude nets. Villages in the area boast new houses, schools and satellite antennas while a fish-processing plant in Aralsk has created 41 jobs.

“The first dam was experimental,” 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 Kazakhstan, 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 involve 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 travel to the Aral, urges that both steps be taken, one after the other.

Where Did the Water Go? Until 1960: The Aral Sea is 26,000 square miles with a salinity 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 million acres under cultivation. Aralsk is a significant port.

1960: The Aral Sea belongs to the Soviet Union. The authorities in Moscow decide to expand 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 doubled into north Small Aral and south Great Aral. Salinity has tripled and the fishery has disappeared. 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.

Buddhist Revival boosts depressed region CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

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A Phoenix From the Ashes Kalmyk Buddhists were first widely repressed in the 1930s during Stalin’s Terror. Every religion was persecuted under Soviet policies, but Buddhism experienced almost total destruction. 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 Buddhist doctrine) were executed or disappeared in concentration camps. A second wave of repressions took place in 1943 when about one third of Kalmyks were taken from their homes and sent to Siberia.

1

Traditionally, Buddhism is the main religion in Republics of Buryatia, Kalmykia, The Tyva, Altai Republic, Zabaykalsky Krai and Irkutsk Oblast (all of them in Siberia except Kalmykia). Buddhism came to Russia in the 17th century; in 1764 it was officially accepted as one of the state religions.

2

Today, there are approximately 1.4 million Buddhists in Russia, according to the most recent census, and Buddhists comprise 1 percent of the population.

3 Slideshow at rbth.ru/13607

he had built for his village, Ulduchiny, 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 ceremony. “The temple is not giv-

RIA NOVOSTI

It was violently destroyed, together with all Buddhist prayer houses, temples and holy relics, during Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. The entire indigenous Kalmyk population spent 17 years in exile in Siberia.

Today, Kalmykia is the second poorest region in Russia, after Ingushetia. Visiting Kalmykia last March, President Dmitry Medvedev called the situation “difficult,” as the 15 percent unemployment rate in Kalmykia 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 Kutsayeva, 84, said. She had tears in her eyes as she recalled Stalin’s deportations. “One October 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 platforms,” 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 peaceful today,” Alexander Nemeyev, a local businessman, said. Nemeyev pointed at the golden statue of Buddha in the temple that

FACTS ABOUT BUDDHISM

Tibetan monks came to Kalmykia despite China’s objections.

ing me food for my two child r e n , ” s a i d K h o n d o r, 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-

duchiny. “Kalmyk people historically tolerated troubles,” he said, adding what could be said about a good number of different people in Russia, “to cope with difficulties is our tradition.”

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

In 1979, the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the Soviet Union. After 1994, the Dalai Lama was received enthusiastically when he visited Russia’s three Buddhist republics. But as Moscow’s trade with China became increasingly important after 2004, Russia stopped giving visas to the Dalai Lama.

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 temples, something supported by the government, but about the

revival of Kalmyk Buddhist mentality 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 republic’s main temple, or Central 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 Zhironkina, director of the Moscowbased Save Tibet Foundation, Telo Tulku Rinpoche has become Russia’s major spiritual leader for Buddhists. “He goes to India to consult with the Dalai Lama about most of his important decisions for Kalmykia education and cultural programs,” Zhironkina said. Kalmykia is one of the 19 Russian regions introducing experimental 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 basics of Buddhism in Kalmykia,” Zhironkina said.

But there are areas where neither the Dalai Lama nor his followers 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 hospital, including the surgery rooms, had no running water that day,” he said. This year,

Real Estate: A New Bubble in the Making?

Russians buying homes at pre-crisis levels

local activists criticized the authorities for not finishing the reconstruction 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 Barack Obama asking him to restore the hospital, currently in disrepair. The letter was also designed 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 medicine and equipment. “We need everything,” Tomara Nemchirova, the administrator of the hospital said. “We have kids on a waiting list until next spring.”

Kalmykia has not seen any bounty, nor promises of any infrastructure from deals that Royal Dutch Shell signed this year for the exploration of oil fields on the steppe. Major discoveries 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 involved in the terrorist wars in the neighboring North Caucasus republics.

“The peaceful and kind philosophy of Buddhism is a solution for Kalmyk people in the chaos and hard reality they live in,” Zhironkina said.

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November 30

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Opinion

most read Is Eurasian Integration Realistic?

Russia NOW

alexey iorsh

WHEN WE say tandem we mean putin

Eugene Ivanov

special to rn

Medvedev’s decisions were those of the tandem, and the tandem’s decisions were those of Putin.

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consensus is emerging among Russiawatchers that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency should have little impact on the country’s foreign policy and, in particular, on U.S.-Russia relations. Andrew Kuchins, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., has eloquently summarized this sentiment: “The possible election of Putin as the president of Russia will not signify a fundamental 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 support 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

It is no secret that Obama invested heavily in his relationship with President Medvedev. tandem, and when we say the tandem, we mean Putin.

Of course, not everyone is subscribing to this relaxed opinion, especially the most conservative 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 prepare for…destabilizing developments.” Aron predicts that no progress will be made on European missile defense and expects that Russia will be less cooperative on Iran.

And, naturally, there are always folks trying to find common ground between optimists and pessimists. Thus, Mary Beth Sheridan of the The Washington Post attempted to sound neutral: “Now, [U.S. President] Obama is going to have to get used to a new partner — Vladimir Putin.”

Is he really going to have to get used to Putin? Remember, if Putin is elected, as seems likely, 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 relationship with his what’s-oldis-new-again Russian counterpart. Not to mention the fact that any attempt to cozy up with Putin will be immediately interpreted by Republican opponents as Putin appeasement.

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. Shortly before the meeting, he described Putin as having “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the

The FSB Should Open Up the Wallenberg Files Vadim Birstein Susanne Berger

niyaz karim

N

THE MOSCOW TIMES

ext 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 Hungary only to be swallowed up himself in 1945 by Stalin’s Gulag. Although Soviet leaders claimed in 1957 that Wallenberg 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 Service’s registration and archives directorate, Lieutenant General Vasily Khristoforov, emphasized that he, too, considers Wallenberg a hero and that FSB officials are doing everything to uncover more documentation. He strongly denied withholding any information that would shed light on the truth.

Yet it is indisputable that Russian officials for decades chose

to mislead not only the general public but also an official Swedish-Russian Working Group that investigated the case from 19912001. This group included official Swedish representatives as well as Wallenberg’s brother, Guy von Dardel. Russia did not merely obscure inconsequential details of the case but also failed to provide documentation that goes to the very heart of the Wallenberg inquiry.

Chief among these are copies of the Lubyanka prison reg-

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ister from July 23, 1947. They show that a “Prisoner No. 7” was questioned on that day, six days after Wallenberg’s alleged death. Russian officials have since acknowledged that “Prisoner No. 7” almost certainly was Wallenberg. Researchers have yet to receive a copy of the full page of this Lubyanka interrogation register, in uncensored form, showing the complete list of interrogated prisoners and other details.

new.” This comment was apparently intended to signal the administration’s support for President Dmitry Medvedev’s modernization agenda. In hindsight, however, it appears that Obama’s approach, and, in particular, his jab at Putin, was misguided, even if cultivating Putin would have had its own domestic repercussions.

True, Obama and Putin will have opportunities to meet faceto-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 bilateral mini-summits will produce anything more substantial than mandatory photo-ops.

And then, in November, the presidential election in the United 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 Washington-Moscow dialogue for the foreseeable future will be defined not by Putin, but by the next U.S. president, a Republican. Incidentally, Mitt Romney, currently the leading Republican presidential candidate — and, therefore, the likeliest new partner for Putin, remarked

Researchers also never received important investigative material about Willy Rödel, Wallenberg’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 researchers should be allowed to confirm that it is.

The mere fact that large parts of Rödel’s file survive raises serious questions about whether similar documentation still exists for other key persons in the case, including Wallenberg.

After all, where exactly did Wallenberg’s possessions magically come from after they reappeared 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 answer seems plausible: Both Soviet and later Russian officials did not want to complicate matters, which this information undoubtedly would have. If researchers had learned in 1989 or in 1991, at the start of the working group, that Wallenberg was alive six days after his supposed 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 destruction, the full circumstances of Wallenberg’s fate will never be learned. He argues that based on his experience with similar cases, Wallenberg was most likely “helped to die” (read: executed) “a few days” after July 23, 1947.

He also does not explain why

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 limited by the expected loss of the Democratic majority in the Senate, something that the apologists of the “nothing-is-goingto change” approach seem to overlook. It is no secret that Obama invested heavily in his relationship with Medvedev on the assumption that supporting Medvedev was a way to signal U.S. support for reforms in Russia and, of course, on the assumption that supporting Medvedev will improve his chances to be elected for the second term. Making things even worse, Senate Republicans will most likely be in the majority and will obstruct his every move vis-àvis Russia, however benign.

In 2008, Henry Kissinger perceptively 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 partnership to the United States had been rejected by anti-Russian policies of the Bush administration.

Naturally, any speculations on the direction of Russian foreign policy during Putin’s third and, possibly, fourth presidential 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 Russia 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.

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

document collections directly connected to the Wallenberg case in Russian intelligence archives are completely inaccessible to researchers. These include important files in the archival collections of the FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service, as well as crucial correspondence records between the security services and the Soviet leadership from the decisive 1945-47 years and beyond.

Most important, Russian officials have never revealed the source of a key document in the Wallenberg case, the socalled Smoltsov note, which was presented in an official statement in February 1957, by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.

This note, supposedly authored by the Lubyanka prison doctor, Smoltsov, claimed that Wallenberg died suddenly of a heart attack.

Why do Russian authorities not allow researchers unhindered access to documentation in a case that is 66 years old?

Let us conduct an investigation that meets the standards of academic inquiry with original documents presented in uncensored form in their original file contexts — and with research findings independently confirmed by a formal peer review.

Only then can we begin to conduct a meaningful evaluation of Wallenberg’s fate.

Vadim Birstein was a member of the first International Commission. Susanne Berger is a historical researcher and independent consultant to the Swedish-Russian Working Group about Raoul Wallenberg’s fate. www.raoulwallenberg.eu

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Evgeny Abov Editor & publisher Artem Zagorodnov executive Editor ELENA BOBROVA Assistant editor Nora FitzGerald guest editor (U.S.A.) Tara shlimowitz production coordinator olga Guitchounts representative (U.S.A.) andrei Zaitsev head of photo Dept Milla Domogatskaya head of pre-print dept Irina Pavlova layout e-Paper version of this supplement is available at www.rbth.ru. Vsevolod Pulya Online editor Lara Mccoy editor, english-language website To advertise in this supplement contact Julia Golikova, Advertising & PR director, at golikova@rg.ru or bridget rigato at rigatob@washpost.com. © copyright 2011, ZAO ‘Rossiyskaya Gazeta’. All rights reserved. alexander gorbenko chairman of the board. Pavel Nigoitsa General Director Vladislav Fronin Chief Editor Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of the contents of this publication, other than for personal use, without the written consent of Rossiyskaya Gazeta is prohibited. To obtain permission to reprint or copy an article or photo, please phone +7 (495) 775 3114 or e-mail us@rbth.ru with your request. Russia Now is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts and photos.

THE THIRD ANGLE

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ERDOGAN Konstantin von Eggert

T

Special to rn

here is hardly a day when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, is not doing something that grabs the attention of the media worldwide. He preaches democracy to the Egyptians, threatens Israel with naval action, promises the Palestinians to recognize their as yet non-existent state and declares publicly that he is no longer on speaki n g t e r m s w i t h S y r i a ’s not-so-strong-man Bashar al-Assad. 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.

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

Erdogan and his team possess a vision for Turkey that, although still a work in progress, is much more coherent, inspired and whole than anything the current European Union leaders, uniform, dull and indecisive as one, could ever suggest to their own people. This is a prospect of a country that sincerely espouses Islam and is at the same time comfortable with other faiths, opinions and mores.

Erdogan’s agenda is valuesbased — and this makes it infinitely more interesting and exciting 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 prefer to join a large club of disparate nations trying in vain to bail out a state with the population the size of Istanbul, and at the same time feed a sprawling Brussels bureaucracy aspiring to dictate the shape of eggs to the farmers of Denmark and regulate alcohol sales to the indigenous peoples of Lappland in Finland? The answer is somewhat 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 obvious that the old secular, Ataturk-worshipping elite missed this point. And now Erdogan’s

center-right Justice and Development Party has ceased momentum. In the words of a friend of mine, a professor of political science at one of Turkey’s leading private universities, “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 witchhunt 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 radicals continue to be kept on the fringes? There is a legitimate doubt about this. Erdogan calls for direct elections of the president, 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 persecution of journalists (several dozen are in jail, frequently on flimsy or obviously constructed charges). He also stuffs the judiciary with Justice and Development Party sympathizers. All this makes Erdogan’s proclamations of his commitment to democracy less than convincing.

His foreign policy seems erratic and prone to sloganeering at best, reckless at worst. Looking at the footage of his triumphant 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 minister’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 promise to visit the Hamas-run Gaza strip in solidarity with the Palestinians, although the Egyptian authorities were ready to open the border for him. He recently duly deployed U.S. radars on Turkish soil in compliance with NATO obligations. So the jury on the maverick Turkish leader’s future is still out. He could yet become a reformer, who would influence not only his native country but also Muslim societies around the world.

He may also turn out to be a power-hungry despot who would ruin Turkish democracy and destabilize the Mediterranean.

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

Letters to the editor

The Gift of Adoption Your recent article “Fixing Foreign Adoption” had so many problems with it, one barely knows where to begin. It was outrageous that the writer blamed foreign parents for having 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 parents 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 charges 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 parents on their knees.

Sincerely, Julia Duin

Letters from readers, guest columns and cartoons labeled “Comments,” “Viewpoint” or appearing on the “Opinion” and “Reflections” pages of this supplement are selected to represent a broad range of views and do not necessarily represent those of the editors of Russia Now or Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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Teacher EXCHANGE foR a 21st Century Education Rebecca Fox, Wendy Frazier

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READ RUSSIA

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.

a Dystopian Future

Special TO rn

reparing our students for the 21st century and its demands is a global challenge. We cannot forget the importance of preparing a citizenry who will be able to work across borders and join with international colleagues 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 international project we are conducting at George Mason University 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 examine 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 Russian teachers to develop new approaches that extend beyond the scope of their immediate classroom and develop ways to incorporate a more international focus in their work with students.

The project, funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, involves both Russian and U.S. secondary school teachers of Foreign/World Languages (FL/WL) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Twenty Russian and five U.S. teachers engaged in specialized, handson professional learning while spending time in one another’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 Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. In May 2011, five U.S. teachers from Northern Virginia and North Carolina spent time in the partnership schools in Vladivostok and the Primorsky Krai region of Russia.

The teachers have learned

Phoebe Taplin

Special to RN

TITLE: “2017” AUTHOR: Olga Slavnikova PUBLISHER: Overlook/ Duckworth Publishing

alexey iorsh

I

U.S. teachers had admiration for the English-language fluency in the Russian classroom. from one another’s educational practices through on-site visits and continued communication by e-mail. They have compared effective teaching approaches, 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, Vladivostok 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. Presentations included such topics as the implementation of multiple intelligences in Russian classrooms, joint foreign language communication projects between English classrooms in Russia and Russian classrooms in the United States, portfolio implementation for both teachers and students in Russian

schools, and a field-based biology project that incorporated interactive, experiential learning. A panel comprised of teachers from both countries ended the conference; the group provided additional insights into the teachers’ thinking and shared both culminating ideas and plans for ongoing collaboration. It was the overwhelming consensus that the teachers from both countries share many more commonalities than differences: They are committed educators who are focused on their students’ learning and want them to grasp their subject’s content, they want to reach beyond their classrooms to incorporate new technologies in real life learning and they themselves want to keep on learning through continued collaboration.

The Russian teachers talked a great deal about the interactive 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 classes of Russian schools. The U.S. teachers also expressed their ad-

miration for the strong levels of English-language proficiency displayed in the Russian language 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 visited, we were the very first Americans to visit those schools, and yet the students surrounded us anxious to hold a conversation 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 knowledge in the content areas they teach, as well as in cross-cultural capacity. In this project, we have explored how the realities of far-reaching geography, language and cultural differences among a group of internation-

al teachers have become positive enhancements to intercultural exchange.

The person-to-person components in the United States and Far East Russia have provided a strong foundation for the relationships that could sustain dialogue and explore teaching 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 sharing the current results of our work and implementing it in our work at the university. We are also using the research to contribute to a growing body of literature focused on new ways that educators can incorporate international cross-disciplinary work into designing and implementing meaningful experiences for current and future FL/WL and STEM teachers.

Rebecca Fox and Wendy Frazier are co-directors of the U.S.-Russia Teacher Professional Development Program. For additional information, please visit the project’s blog at http://usrtpd.wordpress.com

Saving a great poet’S LEGACY Ruth Wyneken

Special to RN

niyaz karim

M

arina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia’s most remarkable 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 chronicling of the first half of Russia’s 20th century — a wrenching tale of revolution, exile, émigré life, espionage and the inevitably fatal encounter with Stalin’s Terror.

Two years before her death, Tsvetaeva had followed her husband and returned to Russia from Paris, only to find herself more or less under house arrest. 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 precursor of the KGB, forced her to commit suicide.)

As dark as her life became, recalling her has become celebratory, perhaps because getting recognition for Tsvetaeva was some sweet revenge for those who kept her light alive.

Rediscovering her poems and preserving her life was a lifelong project for two women —

Reflections

Russia NOW

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The Marina Tsvetaeva Museum of Moscow offers a visual feast of the Silver Age and a tribute to the poet.

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

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

I met Anastasia, the author and younger sister of Tsvetaeva, in 1990. She gave me her newly printed novel that she, as she informed me with a mischievous smile, smuggled out of the camp over the years on packs of cigarettes. During Stalin’s reign, and after his death, she sat 22 long years in detention 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-Lytkina also lived in what was once the house where Marina lived.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Marina 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 volumes of poetry secretly accompanied her and fortified her spirit. Katayeva-Lytkina vowed to bring to light the secrets surrounding Tsvetaeva despite all the resistance she encountered.

She sought out like-minded persons and dedicated her life to the fight of gaining recognition for the poet.

When Tsvetaeva’s sister Anastasia 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 fiddle to the task of cautiously publishing the first volume of Tsvetaeva’s work.

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

Then Perestroika began. Undeterred, employing civil disobedience and the assistance of friends and fans, KatayevaLytkina 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 KatayevaLytkina 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 colorful past in a way that is palpable for every visitor; it is located on a side street off the Povarskaya, not far from the Kremlin, with the same majestic noble palaces that Tolstoy, among others, mentioned and d e s c r i b e d i n “ Wa r a n d Peace.”

It is here, in the heart of old Moscow, that Marina Tsvetaeva lived from 1914 until her emigration 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 during the revolution. She overcame a revolution, subversions, chaos, cold, hunger and the death of a child all by herself, and documented 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.

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

n 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 revolution — seemingly a call to repeated violence. Olga Slavnikova weaves these parallel plots and settings together in “2017,” an ambitious, postmodern contribution to a revered literary tradition. 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 heritage 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 Tolstaya’s “Slynx” and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s “Metro 2033” use postapocalyptic scenarios.

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

The anniversary of the revolution reinforces the idea of a recurring national destiny. Many 19th-century Russian artists em-

braced a rebirth of folk art and Slavic heroes. For Slavnikova, this stylistic nostalgia created a “historical dreaminess in their weak and impressionable heirs.” History becomes a virus and then an epidemic. Slavnikova imagines a fake but bloody civil war, as inevitable as it is inauthentic.

The striving for authenticity, rejecting the superficial sparkle of wealth and the “culture of copies,” is a keynote of the novel.

The protagonist, a gem-cutter called Krylov, relishes the transparency of quartz; his polishing is an attempt to reveal what he sees inside. Despite this background in a lovingly depicted trade, Krylov’s aimlessness nudges him towards the ranks of Russian literature’s famous superfluous 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 poignant and fragile relationship recalls 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 facets of Russian culture the book begins to explore. “2017” is packed so full of ideas and images it sometimes threatens to explode under the pressure. Its strength is in its linguistic subtlety and ingenuity.

EXPAT files

NYET TO THE Brown Bag Jennifer Eremeeva

Special to RN

H

RH, my “handsome Russian husband,” puts in, on average, a 17hour 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 company, of course, but what really sticks in my craw is that he’s not doing his fair share of consuming all the food I make, photograph 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 complicated,” he said. “If I sit with one of my subordinates, I’ll have to sit with them all in a rotation.”

“Let me pack you a lunch,” I pleaded. “Last night I made Pasta Norma, which is even better 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 discussion 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 purchased innocuous-looking insulated 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 vehemently 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 practical. 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 understand,” said HRH again without any explanation.

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

“People drink tea,” responded HRH, “until lunchtime anyway.”

“And after that?” I pushed.

“After that,” said HRH, as he left for another 17-hour day, “we don’t need anything nearly so large.”

“And how about the morning after?” I prompted.

HRH looked thoughtful.

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.

06

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The Hotel Ukraina, a spectacular monument, anchors Moscow’s panorama.

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Architecture Stalin’s skyscrapers still dominate Moscow’s skyline

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

GALINA MASTEROVA SPECIAL TO RN

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 critics of their neo-classic, tiered appearance, 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 Soviet era to buildings seen as an essential part of Moscow’s landscape. And they continue to be reimagined.

The buildings were part of a post-war reconstruction of Moscow. The original plan, conceived before World War II, was to build eight buildings, an oblique tribute to the 800th anniversary 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 design, was high on grandeur and low on practicality. It would

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 abandoned when the war started in 1941. That site later became an open-air swimming pool and is now the site of a rebuilt cathedral.

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

The buildings have their own tales of horror, especially concerning the use of German prisoners. a remarkable feat for a country in ruins after the end of the war. When finished, there were two hotels, the Leningradskaya and the Ukraina; two government buildings, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Smolenskaya and the Red Gates Administrative Building; Moscow 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

war, and the first to bring skyscrapers to Europe,” said Natalya Dushkina, a professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute, whose grandfather, Alexei Dushkin, was one of the architects involved in the creation of the Red Gates Administrative Building.

Stalin’s Seven Sisters have drifted in and out of favor over the decades. They began with Soviet fanfare and a brief heyday 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 destruction of the old city under Stalin.

American Connections Before they were built, Soviet officials famously noted in a decree that they were to be “original works of architecture. They should not be a repetition of the kind of multi-storeyed structures found in other countries.”

But anyone who has seen them can trace their lineage, or at least some of the inspiration behind them, to the skyscrapers of Manhattan and Chicago.

Some students of architecture have even drawn direct parallels for each building, suggesting that you can see the Manhatten Municipal Building in

Finding Your Way Among Sisters

Moscow State University’s home; Chicago’s Wrigley Building in the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building; and Cleveland Ohio’s Terminal Tower in the Kudrinsky Square House.

From certain angles, the Min-

istry of Foreign Affairs resembles New York’s Woolworth building.

After Stalin’s death, the buildings were seen as representative 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 Spanish student who is writing a dissertation on the Red Gates Administrative 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 nearby bridge, is the most imposing in its Gothic appearance.

Originally, the building was designed without a tower, but Stalin 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 advantages: 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 prisoners of war, as well as prisoners from the Gulag system, in the buildings’ construction. The 22nd floor of the university building 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 residents of this monster are monsters 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 Sergei Sobyanin promises — there will be two more Stalin Sisters open to new residents.

The hotels have managed best to adapt to the post-Soviet era. Opened in 1954, the Hotel Leningradskaya with its view of Moscow’s three train stations received a major overhaul 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 Radisson Royal Hotel, and returning foreigners stop by just to see the transformation and recall the old Ukraina.

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

The Favorite of the Sisters Gets a Facelift ALENA TVERITINA RUSSIA NOW

For Muscovites, the Hotel Ukraina has always been distinct from the other Seven Sisters. Unlike the closed ministries and the residential buildings with their concierges, 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 observation deck on the 29th floor.

Today it is gone, but on the very top floors you will now find several fashionable restaurants popular with Moscow’s most discerning 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.

The spectacular views begin unexpectedly on the very first floor. Without leaving the main lobby, I already have a bird’seye view of Moscow. The golden 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 Stadium to Zemlyanoi Val, was immortalized in 1977 when it was recreated as a diorama. The daylight over a toy-size Moscow 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 created 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-

IN FIGURES

33

feet is the diameter of the ceiling mural in the Socialist Realist style with the name “Celebration of Labor and the Harvest in Hospitable Ukraine.”

676

feet high, Ukraina was the largest European hotel of its day in 1957. It remains a major architectural monument among Moscow’s skyscrapers.

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

RUSLAN SUKHUSHIN

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

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 located 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 Rezidor group and operates under the Radisson Royal brand. Once Moscow’s best-known hotel, it is now an oasis of well-conceived and elegant luxury. The hotel’s layout and interiors have changed, although the old trim-

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mings made of natural and traditional materials remain — marble, Karelian birch, onyx.

The number of rooms has decreased, however, from the record 1,000-plus. Still, the old Moscow remains.

After a brief history of the diorama, the audio guide switches 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 unobtrusively palpable everywhere: in the typical shape of the swags of expensive drapes

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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 painstakingly restored ceiling mural in the Socialist Realist style can be found with the name “Celebration of Labor and the Harvest in Hospitable Ukraine.” (“Our Japanese guests are especially thrilled by this,” Oksana, the receptionist, remarked. “One tourist 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.

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“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 canvas, a copy of the painting in the Ukraina.

One complex in this skyscraper consists of several 11-story wings — these are residential buildings whose walls, like those of the other residential buildings among the Seven Sisters, have seen many Russian celebrities — singers and writers, scientists and actors. In the Ukraina’s cozy inner courtyard in the late 1950s, they made an ice rink where the future Olympic Champion Ludmila Pakhomova danced on skates. The Ukraina’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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