RBTH for The Telegraph in November

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issue ourselves. These leaders said this by themselves without a hint from our side.”

Key topics on the agenda of Brics leaders were the need to reform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the development of joint financial institutions. In a statement after the summit, they expressed disappointment that scheduled IMF reforms had yet to be implemented, chief among them the failure of the US to ratify a decision to revise quotas by the end of the year.

Quotas are a central feature of the IMF that determine a country’s voting power, access and maximum financial contribution to the international trade, monetary and exchange regulatory body.

“The Brics meeting in Brisbane confirmed that within the G20 we have the G7 representing the West on the one hand, and the Brics five on the other,” said Vladimir Davydov, deputy chairman of the research council of the National Committee on Brics Research and director of the Institute of Latin America at the Russian Academy of Science. “The US is sabotaging a decision on new quotas at the IMF. The US tends to support a vision of a unipolar world, though it does it no favours,” he added.

The tacit confrontation between Brics and the IMF is not new. At the G20 summit in St Petersburg in September 2013, heads of the fast-growing emerging economies expressed hopes that the IMF would complete its 15th quota revision by January 2014, which would mean boosting the share of capital from Brics countries in IMF funds, giving them a greater say in the way the organisation works. China is third in terms of quotas after the US and Japan, with India in eighth place and Brazil 10th. Reforms would reduce the US quota and weaken its influence in the body, which may explain why Congress has yet to ratify the changes. Delays in ratifying the reforms have been drawn out since G20 leaders adopted them as a joint commitment in 2009.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Challenge to the G7 Heads of the developing countries group are increasingly co-operating in ways that challenge the hegemony of the G7. Last July, at the sixth Brics summit in Brazil, they agreed to establish a New Development Bank and reserve currency pool that “brought co-operation within Brics to a fundamentally new level.” At the G20 meeting in Brisbane, the group announced the creation of a temporary board of directors for the bank, the head of which will be appointed prior to the organisation’s seventh summit, to be held under Russia’s chairmanship in the central Russian city of Ufa next July. Mr Putin told the group that Russia would prepare “draft strategies for economic partnership and a roadmap for investment co-operation” in time for the summit.

Mr Davydov said the Brics countries were currently working on improving their collaboration and co-operation.“They have a number of practical projects, the New Development Bank and the reserve currency pool chief among them,” he said. “At $200bn, their combined financial capital is impressive. New opportunities for joint lending will make it possible to expand trade and investment ties within Brics. This is why both Russia and the other Brics members are interested in moving forward.”

The group is increasing joint work in other areas, too. According to Mr Putin, Brics members are fast improving industrial and technological co-operation and creating new joint projects in energy, mineral extraction and refining, agriculture, and hi-tech.

Members of the group have helped prepare a project to protect the Russian internet. The project is less concerned with cyber espionage than with fears that the Russian section of the internet could be closed down or subject to cyber attacks intended to disrupt it. The project has been given added impetus by proposals from British officials in August that sanctions could lead to Russia being disconnected from the international payments system, Swift.

Sergei Katyrin, president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has high hopes for joint Brics rail projects in Africa. He said the chamber had been asked to represent the interests of Russian businesses at next year’s Brics summit in Ufa, for which Russia was planning to present more than 30 industrial projects of interest to partner countries.

This supplement is sponsored by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which takes sole responsibility for its contents and is wholly independent of The Daily Telegraph.

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ension is mounting between the world’s top five emerging economies, known as Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – and the wealthy nations of the G7, led by America, Britain, Germany, France and Japan, over the Ukrainian crisis and the way that global financial rules work.

The world faces growing instability and the formation of new competing blocs of countries unless more is done to challenge a“unipolar”ap-

Russia to build second gas pipeline to China after Beijing agreement rbth.co.uk/41393

proach to international relations, said Russian president Vladimir Putin before this month’s G20 summit in Brisbane. He believes that Russia’s role among emerging world economies is key to striking a new balance.

The shifting landscape was evident in comments made on the summit sidelines by Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov. Leaders of the Brics countries considered western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine a violation of international law, he said. “We were not raising this

St Petersburg libraries creating an ‘alternative Wikipedia’ about Russia rbth.co.uk/41589

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This month’s G20 summit in Australia showed international relations are changing fast, as leaders of the emerging economies questioned the influence of the wealthy nations and the idea of a ‘unipolar’ world. Yuriy Paniev reports

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The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor hits a snag

Brics leaders in Brisbane said sanctions against Russia violated international law and the UN charter

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So far, there are a total of 23 forums for joint work within the Brics countries. These include regular ministerial level meetings, including the heads of diplomatic and financial departments, as well as the leaders of national security councils and ministries responsible for general economic development, industry, agriculture, health care and education.

The annual Brics summit is preceded by an academic forum where members of think-tanks formulate priorities for the group, later presented to national leaders. There are councils representing commercial interests in Brics markets.

A parliamentary forum may also be set up. Cooperation at political and commercial level is influencing cultural links, with a sister cities movement and youth and women’s organisations.

There is a wide range of Brics initiatives, but the gulf between ideas and implementation is wide.“The Brics model is in flux and is still searching for stability,”Mr Davydov said.“It is clear the political will of the participating countries’ leadership has yet to converge. But something else is also clear – without institutionalisation, without acquiring a certain legal status, it will be hard for Brics to harmoniously establish constructive interaction with key international structures and other countries, let alone implement its own largescale plans successfully.”

Appeals to self-interest It would be naïve to think the G7 will not test the Brics’ strength, through appeals to self-interest and internal conflicts within the group. Still, as Igor Bunin, head of Russia’s Centre for Political Technologies noted, when Mr Putin was heading to Brisbane the Russian head of state understood that he was “flying into a cage with tigers, only a few of which – Brazil, India, China, and South Africa – would be kindly toward him.”

In Brisbane, Mr Putin received many minor snubs – Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott failed to meet him on landing in Brisbane, sending a couple of regional politicians instead.

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Bringing peace to Ukraine GALIYA IBRAGIMOVA RBTH

Common ground It was the first time Germany had backed the Minsk accords publicly since they were signed on September 5, when Ukrainian government representatives, led by former president Leonid Kuchma, met separatist leaders from the self-proclaimed Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR) republics to sign a ceasefire agreement in the presence of Russian and OSCE monitors. Despite what the OSCE last week called “bleak”prospects for peace, the Minsk accords remain the only realistic starting point for progress in resolving Ukraine’s bitter civil conflict, encouraging both sides to adopt more moderate positions and find common ground.

Daily breaches of the ceasefire by both sides remain a major obstacle to creating peace. Russia blames Ukraine for shelling rebel positions in the east, killing its own citizens, while Kiev makes similar accusations against what it says are Russian-backed forces. The US supports Kiev and blames Russia, accusing it of sending tanks and military hardware to the rebels.

Russia’s envoy to Nato, Alexander Pushkov, says the situation is not helped by the silence from most European Union countries since the Minsk accords were signed. Russia has been consistently calling for the peace agreement to be implemented, but there has been scarcely a word on the subject from Europe.

After rebel regions boycotted Kiev’s presidential elections last month, both self-pro-

‘Most advanced’ spyware

AP/EASTNEWS

Russian and Saudi Arabian telecom companies are among the key targets of the world’s most advanced hacking spyware, Regin, the Financial Times has reported.

The bug, which cyber security firm Symantec said had probably been developed and run by a western intelligence agency, is more advanced in engineering terms than Stuxnet, which was designed by

claimed republics held their own polls on November 2. Neither the EU nor the US recognised the elections. Russia made it clear that it respects the results, but does not recognise them officially. The Kremlin’s foreign policy aide,Yury Ushakov, says: “The official position of Russia is expressed in a short but succinct statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs following the results of the elections. The words ‘we respect’ are used there.”Asked whether that means Russia recognises the results, Mr Ushakov says bluntly: “Those words are different.”

Price of war: a woman stands by the ruins of her shelled home in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine

Prospects for peace Before arriving in Moscow, Mr Steinmeier flew to Kiev, where he held talks with Ukrainian government leaders on the prospects for bringing peace to the east of the country. The German foreign minister reiterated the EU’s willingness to offer economic and political support to Ukraine and to help identify the best format for Kiev to end the conflict.

ArseniyYatsenyuk, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, expressed Kiev’s desire to resume the Geneva format, a formula that does not include the leaders of the rebel republics. However, in Moscow, the foreign ministers and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, concluded that the Minsk format was the most effective way to solve the crisis.

Russian foreign policy experts agree this is the best way forward. Timofei Bordachev, director of the Centre for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, told RBTH:“The strongest point of the Minsk accord is that it is based on direct negotiations between the parties to the conflict. The Geneva format has exhausted itself because Russia is not a party

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GALIYA IBRAGIMOVA RBTH

On November 10, Russia’s international news agency, Rossiya Segodnya, unveiled a new multimedia international news service, Sputnik. Sputnik combines a news agency, the Sputniknews.com website, press centre and a network of radio stations in 34 countries, broadcasting in 30 languages.

Content will be produced locally, rather than from Moscow. Sputnik bureaus have already been set up in 17 countries in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) and neighbouring countries. Sputnik radio went on the air in Georgia on November 11.

Sputnik aggregates dozens of websites and uses the resources of the radio station Voice of Russia, an international service set up in 1929. The station was taken off the air last December after a major government

shake-up designed to improve the quality and performance of Russia’s state-owned international media. RIA Novosti, the state news agency founded in 1941, has been incorporated into Rossiya Segodnya, where it will continue to be known as RIA Novosti in Russia, but as Sputnik abroad. Rossiya Segodnya’s mission is not only to broadcast news about Russia to an international audience, but to cover international events in a way that factors in the Russian perspective, according to its director Dmitry Kiselyov and editor in chief Margarita Simonyan, who is also head of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin’s 24-hour international television news network.

The new international news agency’s mission is, Mr Kiselyov says, “to restore a fair attitude toward Russia as an important country with good intentions”. Ms Simonyan says that Sputnik “will offer analysis, expert interviews, and entertainment shows that will stand out for their choice of topics and coverage and an alternative view of the world.”

Mr Kiselyov, one of Russia’s best-known television presenters, and Ms Simonyan have

to the conflict.” Andrei Kortunov, general director of the Russian International Affairs Council, says that the focus of the Minsk agreement, both on ending the violence and economic regeneration of the war-torn regions, is key.

“It is important for Kiev to solve socio-economic problems, as well. Against a backdrop of escalating internal political tensions, I would argue that new negotiations on the status of the Donbass are premature.”

Political analystYury Fedorov of the Russian independent security think-tank, PIR Centre, said that Moscow hoped Kiev would recognise the results of the November 2 elections in the east and negotiate with the Donbass authorities as the legitimate representatives of the region’s population.

Political lever Russia has indicated that, in the long term, it would like to see the rebel regions remain within Ukraine but be afforded special legal status

by Kiev. Moscow reasons that, sooner or later, leaders from the Donbass will become part of the Ukrainian political establishment, which will then give them a platform to debate the possibility of a federal structure. The EU is likely to go along with any format that brings peace to Ukraine that avoids the necessity of imposing further sanctions on Russia. The future status of the Donbass remains a secondary issue for EU leaders.

However, the most complex part of the puzzle is the position of Kiev. Ukrainian leaders understand how challenging it is to keep the Donbass under its rule. Months of war and killing have created a hostile population in a region where billions will be needed to rebuild and modernise.

both been branded Kremlin propagandists by western media. Earlier this year, Mr Kiselyov gained international notoriety when, during a TV broadcast, he claimed that Russia was the only country in the world “capable of turning the US into radioactive ash”.

Media message: the new international news service is launched at RIA Novosti in Moscow

Broadcasting International media service aims to give a Russian perspective on global affairs

Refugee camps for 36,500 More than 36,500 people who have fled the violence in Ukraine are being cared for at refugee camps in Russia, according to Alexander Drobyshevsky, a Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman.

“A total of 789 temporary settlements are operating across Russia now, providing shelter for more than 36,500 refugees from Ukraine, including more than 11,400 children,” Mr Drobyshevsky told the news agency Interfax, although he said numbers were dropping as people returned home.

Some 30 temporary camps have closed in the past week after more than 3,000 refugees returned home.

Ukraine crisis Backing from German foreign minister helps Russia revive Minsk agreement as a solution to the conflict

On November 18, on the eve of the anniversary of the first anti-government protests on Kiev’s Maidan (Independence) square, which would eventually lend its name to a revolution, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister was in Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Both sides acknowledged that the Minsk accords agreed in September, which established a ceasefire and roadmap to end the violence, remained the only effective plan for bringing peace to Ukraine.

The two pledged to do their best to stop the fighting and ensure that urgently needed humanitarian aid gets through to regions that remain blighted by combat. Daily clashes continue. The security watchdog OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) says more than 700 people have been killed since the ceasefire was agreed.

Bringing peace to Ukraine depends on the open exchange of all prisoners of war, disbanding “illegal armed formations, military equipment, fighters and mercenaries in Ukrainian territory”, an amnesty for combatants and the launch of comprehensive political dialogue, where the personal safety of negotiating parties is guaranteed, the foreign ministers say.

Independent observers from the OSCE should be drafted in to monitor Ukraine’s border with Russia, and Kiev must adopt measures to ensure economic recovery in Donbass.

NEWS IN BRIEF

Tass, Russia’s oldest official news agency, was founded in St Petersburg in 1904.

During the Second World War, the agency set up a frontline editorial office, and many correspondents reported from the battles.

In 1992, the agency was renamed Itar-Tass, but in September this year it reclaimed its old title after a rebranding campaign. The agency covers domestic Russian and international issues and relies on a wide network of correspondents in 70 regional centres and editorial offices in Russia and 63 countries around the world.

Tass media content is available in six languages: Russian, English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic. The agency has a picture library of several million photos and negatives.

Nominated for awards The new agency also draws upon the editorial resources of RT, which broadcasts around the clock from Moscow to a potential audience of more than 700 million viewers in more than 100 countries in English, Arabic and Spanish. The TV channel has two foreign bureaus, in Washington and London.

Although RT has been repeatedly nominated for international journalism awards, its reputation has been tarnished by accusations of bias. On November 10, the UK’s media regulator Ofcom accused RT of bias in its coverage of events in Ukraine. Mr Simonyan dismissed the accusations as an “attempt to influence the channel’s editorial policy”.

Some western analysts see the closure of the Voice of Russia and RIA Novosti and the creation of Rossiya Segodnya as a move that confirms Kremlin plans to position Russia as the world’s main anti-American voice. This has prompted debate in Europe about whether international Russian language services that many countries ran during the Cold War should now be revived.

Quality journalism Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) is the international project of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, (Russian Gazette). Founded in 2007, RBTH prints supplements in local languages in 29 leading newspapers in 23 countries around the world, including The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Le Figaro and El Pais. It also has 20 websites in 16 languages.

RBTH covers Russian issues and international events of concern to Russia.

With a focus on quality journalism, more than 70pc of its content is original; articles from leading Russian news outlets are also specially adapted and translated for RBTH and its partner newspapers.

RBTH publisher Yevgeny Abov says: “Stories from Russian print media are seldom reproduced in the foreign press. We have persuaded our international partners that propaganda is nothing more than the equivalent of bad journalism. At RBTH we strive to tell the world about Russia using the language of quality journalism, which does not tolerate the promotion of just one position while ignoring others.”

US and Israeli government hackers in 2010 to target Iran’s nuclear programme.

“Nothing else comes close to this,” said Orla Cox, director of security at Symantec. It was one of the most “extraordinary” pieces of hacking software ever and probably took “months or years” to develop.

Regin is capable of hacking email and phone networks.

Brightman’s stellar aim Sarah Brightman is in Russia on a world tour but besides music, the singer has been thinking about her forthcoming flight on the Soyuz spacecraft as a cosmic tourist to the International Space Station.

The singer plans to return to Russia in January for training before the flight. In an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, she said she hoped to gain inspiration for her next album. She said: “What do I expect from the flight? We all have a need to explore. I love travelling to unknown countries and getting to know new things. And I’m convinced that the universe is filled with the unknown.

“I don’t know if on this flight I’ll be able to touch one of the mysteries of space, but I’d really like to.

Well, at least this flight will be important for me as an artist, for creativity and my future albums.”

KSENIYA EGOROVA/RG

Bolshoi on the big screen The Bolshoi Ballet is returning to cinemas worldwide with the release of seven ballets, including four live satellite broadcasts from Moscow and three recorded shows.

The world’s leading ballet company offers a spectacular new 2014-15 season on the big screen, with five classics including live screenings of lavish productions of The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and the previously unreleased ballet Ivan the Terrible.

Once again, a global audience will be able to enjoy cinematic versions of outstanding performances from the Bolshoi’s principals, soloists and corps de ballet. In the UK, tickets are available from picturehouseentertainment.co.uk.

CO N V E RT I N G M O N O LO G U E S I N TO D I A LO G U E

Russia Direct is a forum for experts and senior decision-makers from Russia and abroad to discuss, debate and understand issues in geopolitical relations from a sophisticated vantage point.

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November Monthly Brief: What’s Next for the G20 The members of the G20 recently met in Brisbane, Australia. In this monthly report, RD experts examine this meeting and consider what could be achieved by the participants. The memo takes a look at the role the G20 can play in the creation of a new, multipolar world and how the group is acting as a foil to the G8.

December Monthly Brief: Year in Review Never before have postCold War relations between Russia and the United States been surrounded by such pessimism and uncertainty.

Bilateral contacts in almost all areas and at all levels are either frozen, suspended or stagnant at best. Where do we go from here? What lessons should we come away with for the a new year?

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Fusion project drops off pace Nuclear power International reactor has bright future once snags are ironed out

IVAN SAFRONOV

ALEXANDER RETINGER

KOMMERSANT

SPECIAL TO RBTH

Russia is planning to launch its own high-altitude orbital space station. The Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) plan will end its co-operation with the International Space Station (ISS).

The scheme could become reality within two years. Russia will stop developing its section of the ISS, although officials say it will meet all current obligations in the programme until 2020. Some modules previously intended for the ISS will be incorporated into the new station.

A source close to the administration of the leading space industry body, the Central Research Institute of Machine Engineering, said that creating a Russian high-altitude orbital station is one of the key provisions in Russia’s manned space programme up to 2050.

“The initial configuration will be developed on the basis of the multi-purpose laboratory and nodes of the OKA-T spacecraft,” the source said, citing the group’s proposals. “The station will be powered by Soyuz-MS and Progress-MS spacecraft. By 2020-24 it may be possible to test the energy and the node module used in the lunar programme.”

The plans do not mean that Russia’s co-operation with the International Space Station will end early, sources insist.

In May this year, as relations between Moscow and Washington soured in the wake of international sanctions, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister who oversees the national space industry, said Russia would not extend operation of the ISS by four years until 2024, as had been proposed by the US, but would use the savings for other space projects.

In early November, Roscosmos head Oleg Ostapenko told Nasa chief Charles Bolden that a final decision on this would be made by the end of the year.

Space industry sources say that the need for a new, independently operated Russian orbital station is driven by technical and security issues.

Using two launch pads in Russia, rather than Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, offers better launch vectors and greater security, they say. It should not lead to additional costs. Roscosmos spends just onesixth of the amount Nasa spends on the ISS.

Building work on the world’s first International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), a fusion-driven power station, is falling behind schedule. Researchers, including Russian and British experts, blame the setback on the unique nature of the project, the future of which was discussed in St Petersburg last month at the 25th Fusion Energy Conference.

At the Iter site in Cadarache, France, construction of the main building is an estimated 30 months behind schedule. The foundations have only recently been completed and work on the walls begun.

Anatoly Krasilnikov, head of Iter Russia Design Office, speaking to RBTH at the St Petersburg conference, attributed the delay to the fact that no facility of this kind had ever been built and it was difficult to anticipate every eventuality. Delays are frequently caused by the need to source special-purpose materials, which in some cases have had to be developed from scratch.

“Sometimes this causes the project to progress slower than originally envisioned,” Mr Krasilnikov admitted. The Iter Council will decide on a new time frame and schedule for the project in June 2015.

The international experiment to build the reactor is a collective effort by the European Union (all 28 EU member states are contributing to the project), Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the US. The EU is funding 45pc of the project with non-EU partners contributing just over 9pc each. The countries are actively engaged in developing prototypes of certain reactor components.

Russia and Japan have made prototypes of the gyrotron (a device for plasma heating; the Iter design includes 24 of them), proving more successful in this area than other partner countries. “The EU and India were also expected to develop these devices but failed. Presumably, they will be buying gyrotrons from Russia or Japan,” said Mr Krasilnikov.

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Innovative technology The UK is also making a major contribution to the project: it is home to two tokamaks, a magnetic confinement system used by fusion systems – the British Mast and the Joint European Torus (JET). Both these facilities are proving grounds for testing process solutions for the Iter. According to Mr Krasilnikov, the JET tokamak is the principal facility for test-

PRESS PHOTO

Russia goes it alone with a new space station

ing operating modes the facility will use, one of which is a plasma-burning mode, expected to be used in the final fusion reactor.

At the Fusion Energy Conference, the UK delegation reported on the latest results of tokamak experiments. Russian scientists also made an announcement at the forum, unveiling a new international project.

Power hungry: a worker makes laser measurements on the tokamak at the Iter site in Cadarache

QUOTE

"

The key objective of FEC international conferences is to take stock of our thermonuclear physics achievements to date.

I believe that we have accomplished this task during the time spent in

Demonstration facility Academician Evgeny Velikhov, president of Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute National Research Centre, wants to build a demo facility with a so-called hybrid thermonuclear reactor combining the features of a regular nuclear reactor (fission of heavy nuclei) and a thermonuclear reactor (synthesis of heavy nuclei from light atomic nuclei). This should reduce safety risks, radioactive waste and harmful emissions.

“This kind of reactor would make maximum use of regular fuel while generating much less waste. Hybrid systems can honestly be called ‘green’, as they rule out the risk of catastrophes on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima,” Mr Velikhov said.

“Combined with the experimental Iter reactor that is already being built, a hybrid demo reactor of this kind could serve as a basis for building a commercial thermonuclear reactor.”

The Kurchatov Institute says that the project is open to international colleagues, primarily China. The project is part of a previously announced Russian“state programme to build a demo version of a commercial thermonuclear reactor”.

St Petersburg. We have made significant progress in understanding the process and scientific aspects of thermonuclear physics.”

FRANCESCO ROMANELLI MEMBER OF THE ITER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

GLOSSARY

The science explained

Tokamak A fusion device for containing a plasma inside a torus chamber through the use of two magnetic fields — one created by electric coils around the torus; the other created by intense electric current in the plasma itself. The tokamak was invented in the Fifties by the Soviet physicists Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Sakharov.

A thermonuclear reactor is a device generating energy through reactions of the synthesis of light atomic nuclei, which occur in plasma at very high temperatures. The principal requirement for such reactors is that the release of energy from thermonuclear reactions must far exceed the amount of energy from external sources needed to maintain the reaction.

The International Fusion Energy Conference takes place under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency every two years. The first was held in 1961 in Salzburg, Austria. Three have taken place in the US: in Baltimore (1982), Washington (1990) and San Diego (2004).

St Petersburg hosted this year’s milestone 25th conference.

St Petersburg As part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture, business and culture missions from Russia’s second largest city have descended on London and Manchester for a series of high-profile events to proudly showcase its economic and cultural potential to British partners SPECIAL TO RBTH

It is no accident that St Petersburg, of all Russian cities, has received so much attention during the UK-Russia Year of Culture. It is one of three Russian federal-status cities endowed with a whole range of functions that are normally the privilege of a capital city.

St Petersburg is the second largest metropolis in Russia and third (behind Moscow and London) in Europe.

Seen as the “Northern Capital’’ by Russians, St Petersburg is home to five million people, 8,500 cultural heritage sites including more than 4,000 sites of federal importance, amounting to nearly 10pc of all protected monuments in Russia. With its historic city centre listed

by Unesco as a World Heritage site, St Petersburg ranks among Russia’s top 10 most popular tourist destinations.

Cultural attractions The city is world famous for its cultural institutions – the Mariinsky Theatre, the Hermitage and the Russian Museum. The city is a magnet for enthusiasts of live and contemporary arts, and is creating the infrastructure to promote them. Projects like the Tkachi creative space, Etazhi loft project, and Erarta contemporary art museum are especially popular with creative young people. These and other sites were promoted during the St Petersburg… Take Another Look festival, staged as part of the city’s cultural and business mission to the UK in an attempt to show the city in a fresh light.

Business links Aimed at promoting trade and economic co-operation and know-how exchange, the business aspect of the programme involved the St Petersburg delegation meeting with representatives of innovative British hi-tech and IT companies. These included a tour of Daresbury Park in Manchester and a visit to the Siemens innovation centre, The Crystal, in London.

St Petersburg ranks among the top three biggest innovation hubs in Russia and the top 100 innovation centres in the world (84th in the Australian ranking 2thinknow).

Home to more than 320 research institutions and 90 colleges and universities, the city boasts vast human resources and intellectual

The UK is among the city’s top 10 biggest trade and economic partners. Last year trade between St Petersburg and the UK totalled £1.5bn, making the UK the seventh biggest trade partner of the Northern Capital. City businesses have shipped £1.14bn worth of goods to the UK, or roughly 9pc of the city’s total exports. The Russian side mostly supplies machinery,

A chance to enjoy the glories of St Petersburg, at home and abroad November 19-28 Two well-established British groups – Sadler’s Wells and Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance – will take part in the the Diaghilev PS Festival of Arts V in St Petersburg.

December 6, 2014February 25, 2015 The GRAD gallery will host an exhibition titled

Forbidden Avant-Garde.

The Bolt ballet by Dmitri Shostakovich, will be staged by St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music Arts.

October 18, 2014January 25, 2015 Exhibits of the St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music Arts will

equipment, components, and precious metals, which account for 64pc of all exports. Copper and value-added copper products and various minerals also make up a substantial share of exports.

In 2013, British imports totalled £957m. St Petersburg buys mostly vehicles, mechanical products and electrical equipment. Last year the city did business with 193 countries and had a foreign trade turnover of £35bn.

The UK also ranks in the top 10 by volume of investments in St Petersburg’s economy: last year British nationals invested £249m.

Cumulative investments amounted to £1.18bn as of January 1, 2014.

British presence Trading partners

GETTY IMAGES/FOTOBANK

ANTON SVESHNIKOV

potential. To promote innovation, the city authorities are creating special infrastructure, such as the Ingria and Crystal business incubators.

The city is also one of the Russian pioneers in implementing cluster policy for encouraging manufacturing and industrial development, and has thriving automotive, pharmaceutical, radio electronics, shipbuilding and IT clusters.

More than 730 major and mid-sized companies form the backbone of St Petersburg’s manufacturing industry, including leading Russian firms. A further 22,000 small businesses are also involved in manufacturing.

More than 150 British companies have a presence in Russia’s north-west. UK businesses have interests in virtually all sectors: legal and financial consulting, construction, pharmaceuticals, tourism and other areas.

British firms are involved in the design and expansion of the new terminal at St Petersburg’s Pulkovo 2 airport and project management of the construction of the Nevskaya Ratusha office and business centre.

One recently completed major project is the Tensar plant producing geogrids that was launched in February 2014 by the Princess Royal and Georgy Poltavchenko, the city’s governor. Direct St Petersburg-London flights launched by Transaero last month will help boost tourism, adding a second direct connection between the two cities.

Previously, only British Airways provided a direct service.

Hospitality beckons be featured at the exhibition entitled Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution, and Design, 1913-1933, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

December 7, 2014March 8, 2015 The State Hermitage Museum will display works by the prominent British artist Francis Bacon.

Additional hotels are also opening: the boutique Hotel Indigo, part of InterContinental Hotels Group, opened in March 2014. Seeking to ensure the systemic development of all sectors of the city’s economy and high living standards, following extensive public consultations and with the help of leading academics and experts, city officials adopted an Economic

PRESS PHOTO

Northern Capital assets: culture and trade

New strategy: St Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko is backing emerging industries

and Social Development Strategy for St Petersburg until 2030, more commonly known as the 2030 Strategy. The strategy is expected to help significantly boost foreign investment in the city.

Attractive perks are offered to businesses looking to invest in the region. These include a preferential land tax for businesses and tax breaks for information technology and travel companies.

Strategic vision “The 2030 Strategy of St Petersburg systematises all methods and tools that the government uses to manage the economy, along with mechanisms for supporting emerging industries.

From January 1, 2015, we will begin implementing the new strategy as part of the economic policy we have put in place,” Mr Poltavchenko told RBTH. As a result, by 2019 the share of hi-tech and scientific output of regional gross product in St Petersburg is expected to increase to 20pc, while investment in fixed assets will go up by 70pc.

Prepared in association with the St Petersburg administration.

Year of Culture P4_Tuesday, November 25, 2014_www.rbth.co.uk_THIS SUPPLEMENT IS SPONSORED BY ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA

Building a brave new world with art Constructivism A translation of Alexei Gan’s utopian art manifesto showcases the revolutionary fervour of the Russian avant-garde ALEXANDR RODCHENKO

PHOEBE TAPLIN SPECIAL TO RBTH

In 1922 the Russian art theorist Alexei Gan published a manifesto for an unprecedented, utopian form of creativity. Christina Lodder, who has produced a new translation of Gan’s extraordinary book, Constructivism, told RBTH:“Constructivism is a radical document and a vivid testament to one of the most experimental periods in the history of art, when political revolution generated a complete reevaluation of the role of art.”

Tribute to unsung hero “Gan is one of the unsung heroes of constructivism,”Ms Lodder, a specialist in Russian modernism and lecturer in the history of art at the University of Kent, writes in her introduction.

He formulated new ideas,“which he was convinced would ultimately lead to a better world”, and argued for them as “agitator, publisher,

activist and promoter”.Constructivism explains the movement’s aims, says Ms Lodder,“elaborating its principles, justifying its positions, relating it to socialist theories of art and trying to promote its acceptance by the government”.

In March 1921, Gan teamed up with other theorists and artists, including Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, to form the first Working Group of Constructivists. The group’s ideas about the synthesis of tectonics (structural architecture) with factura (materials) were central to Gan’s theories. According to Ms Lodder:“Alexei Gan’s book... is the most complete statement of constructivist aims and intentions during the early phase of its development in post-revolutionary Russia.”

Culture of organised work This new English edition of Gan’s Constructivism preserves, so far as possible, the original typography and layout with its slanted underlinings and bold, capitalised slogans. The

Gan was one of the first theorists to write about postrevolutionary architecture and criticise the government’s cultural policy

volume combines the aesthetic qualities of a historical artefact with the academic overview of Ms Lodder’s informative introduction.

“Meaningful artistic work will emerge under conditions of purposeful activity,” wrote Gan. He attacked traditional art as bourgeois and championed instead“the first culture of organised work and the intellect”,constructivism. He helped to forge links between art and architecture, photography and printed texts.

Ms Lodder describes Gan as “a cultural and political activist, an eclectic and talented figure, who had a finger in a whole range of avant-garde pies.

“Gan was one of the first theorists to write about post-revolutionary architecture and criticise the government’s current cultural and artistic policy,” she says.

“The constructivists rejected the idea of producing works of art for the delight of a few people. Instead, they wanted to use their artistic expertise to design useful objects that

would help to create a new and better environment for the ordinary working mass of humanity to enjoy.”

Structural elegance Ms Lodder is something of a pioneer herself when it comes to bringing these artistic experiments to a wider audience. She first became interested in Russian art in 1968, when she saw Vladimir Tatlin’s flying apparatus, Letatlin, being reconstructed by two young sculptors in Newcastle.

“The elegance of the structure and the ideas that prompted its creation fascinated me,” Ms Lodder says. She tried to learn more about Russian art in general and Tatlin in particular, but found that“very little detailed information was available in English at that time”.

Her desire to know more and understand the whole context of Russian art led her “to learn Russian, study in the Soviet Union, and write my book, Russian Constructivism”(pub-

Book reviews Great Russian reads sparkling with wit, humour and drama that should be on your Chrsitmas gift list

Five of the best, from subtle words to space dogs PHOEBE TAPLIN SPECIAL TO RBTH

Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky

Black Snow Mikhail Bulgakov

An Armenian Sketchbook Vasily Grossman

Subtly Worded Teffi

Soviet Space Dogs Olesya Turkina

Penguin Classics Translation by Oliver Ready

Alma Classics Translation by Roger Cockrell

Maclehose Press Translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

Pushkin Press Translation by Anne Marie Jackson and others

FUEL Translation by Inna Cannon, Lisa Wasserman

Hailed by AN Wilson in The Spectator as a “truly great translation” that captures the novel’s “knife-edge between sentimentality and farce”, Ready’s new translation of Crime and Punishment is thoughtful and elegant.

Dostoevsky’s moody, murderous, handsome, penniless ex-student Raskolnikov has become a byword in many languages for an immoral protagonist feverishly obsessed by his own crimes. Ready shows us once again why this novel is one of the most intriguing psychological studies ever written.

His translation also manages to revive the disturbing humour of the original, just as Harry Lloyd’s recent stage version of Notes from Underground did. There is a poignant comedy in the tavern speeches of Marmeladov (father to Sonya, the goodhearted prostitute) as he drunkenly tells Raskolnikov “the story of my life”.

There have been at least 11 English translations since St Petersburg-born historical novelist Fred Whishaw’s version in the late 19th century. In some places, Ready’s version echoes Pevear and Volokhonsky’s prize-winning Nineties version, but he often renders Dostoevsky’s text more lucidly while retaining its deliberately uncomfortable feel.

In the epilogue, Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation had the sentence: “There had been little difficulty about his trial;” Pevear and Volokhonsky wrote: “The court proceedings in his case went without great difficulties;” while Ready has simply: “The trial went smoothly enough.”

There are thousands of similar examples.

Ready’s colloquial, economical use of language gives the text a new power.

Bulgakov’s final, unfinished, theatrical satire is another book that exists in multiple translations, although it hasn’t yet reached Dostoevsky’s power to spawn proliferating English versions.

Michael Glenny, who translated The Master and Margarita in the Sixties, first had a go at rendering this novella in English; Andrew Bromfield translated it for Penguin Classics as A Dead Man’s Memoir in 2007 and now Roger Cockrell has produced a new version for Alma Classics. Each translation has its virtues but Cockrell’s light touch often lifts the text on to a playful plane. “It’s just an attack of nerves,” the narrator tells his cat after a bad dream (Glenny called the same episode “the onset of neurosis”).

After failing to commit suicide, Sergei Maxudov, a “lowly proofreader on the Shipping Gazette”, is asked to adapt his novel Black Snow for the stage. Maxudov’s Kafkaesque journey through the theatrical world is full of surreal details. The business manager’s office has “a hellish red light emanating from beneath a rosewood desk on which stood three telephones”.

The narrator’s experiences are based on Bulgakov’s own, as he turned his novel The White Guards into a play. Black Snow presents “a slightly unsettling alternative reality that characteristically intermingles fact and fiction”, writes Cockrell in his introduction. The founders of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko, appear as caricatures and there are dozens of memorable cameos, whose real-life counterparts are listed with the conscientious notes in this useful edition.

Robert Chandler brought Vasily Grossman’s work to western audiences with his version of Life and Fate. His recent translation, written with his wife Elizabeth, of Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook is out in paperback and presents the Soviet author in a new light.

This travelogue, written in 1962 after two months in Armenia, is in sharp contrast to his epic novel about war and totalitarianism.

“The Armenians are an ancient nation, with thousands of years of culture and history,” writes Grossman, giving us glimpses of the “crazed hearts of women who passed away long ago,” or the “wild passion of soldiers intoxicated by victory”. Chandler’s painstaking translation reflects Grossman’s observational details and philosophical depth. From his train-window glimpse of stony fields to his impressions of a village wedding, Grossman’s memoir celebrates “kindness, purity, merriment and sadness”.

This book is “unlike anything else Grossman wrote,” says Chandler in the introduction. “It is deeply personal and has an air of spontaneity.”The translation captures this conversational style. Arriving disorientated in Yerevan, Grossman writes powerfully about the “first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city”, the smells and faces, “the colour of the sky”. In these minutes the visitor, “like an omnipotent God”, mentally creates the city.

Grossman says: “When a man dies, there dies with him a unique, unrepeatable world.”

The idea is especially poignant in hindsight: Grossman had cancer when he made his journey, and died two years later.

Another ideal stocking-filler is Anne Marie Jackson’s elegant new translation of the entertaining storyteller, Teffi.

Born Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya in 1872, Teffi was a literary star in turn-of-thecentury Russia, with fans ranging from Tsar Nicholas II to Vladimir Lenin. The pocket-sized volume Subtly Worded is arranged chronologically, from Teffi’s early days in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg to her life and death in Paris.

The title story satirises letters to Parisian émigrés from friends in Soviet Russia, describing people who “died from appetite” or led “a secluded life”. Correspondence is reduced to a nonsensical code, conveying the horror of a world turned upside down. In another story, My First Tolstoy, a woman recalls her teenage infatuation with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a character in War and Peace. “My heart ached. I couldn’t do my homework,” she says. She even visits Tolstoy (“shorter than I’d expected”) to ask him to change the plot of his novel.

Teffi’s “last stories” are intensely moving.

The Blind One opens with a woman sitting, bored and wealthy, on a grey seashore. “It was clear”,Teffi writes, “that she was mentally composing unpleasant comments.”

When the man she has been waiting for turns up late and puts a daisy in his buttonhole, she loses her temper. As she weeps at her own self-destruction, the voices of the blind girls singing nearby float “into the bitter fog”.Teffi’s compassion is reminiscent of Chekhov’s and there are echoes in this story of Sonya’s “We shall hear angels,” speech at the end of Uncle Vanya.

A great little hardback from the innovative FUEL publishing house (which brought us the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia), this is dedicated to the stray dogs of Moscow who were trained and sent into space. Laika’s pioneering space flight in 1957 brought her global fame and an untimely death, while Belka and Strelka were the first to come back alive. Celebratory international and Soviet artefacts, stamps, sweet wrappers and matchboxes, children’s books and cartoons, illustrate this account of the canine voyages.

The FUEL team started collecting space dog images three years ago and commissioned Olesya Turkina, senior researcher at the Russian Museum and member of The Russian Federation of Cosmonautics, to write the story. Turkina describes the dogs as “simultaneously real and fantastical beings”, characters in “a new kind of fairy tale”.They became part of the collective memory of a promised Soviet utopia. “It is not the fault of the space dogs that such hopes were never fulfilled,” she says.

Turkina devotes a chapter to the “unknown heroes” of experimental flights in the Fifties, before analysing how Laika’s “valiant little face with its pointy ears” became the first iconic image of space exploration. Belka and Strelka, whose story had a less tragic ending, are the first “space pop stars”, she writes. There are some touching images, such as scientists chewing bits of sausage to feed to the ageing, toothless dogs. Finally, she uses Milton’s Paradise Lost to explore the “final stage of the space odyssey”.

Oliver Ready

Roger Cockrell

Robert Chandler

Anne Marie Jackson

Damon Murray

Ready told RBTH he was inspired to become a published translator in Moscow, soon after he graduated, when the then editor of Moscow News, Sergei Roy, encouraged him to translate a short story every week for the newspaper, and “then showed me how to improve it”. A year later, working in Poland, Mike Mitchell (formerly of Dedalus Books) “asked me to translate Yuri Buida's stunningly atmospheric novella, The Zero Train”. Since then, Ready has become a central figure in the anglophone exploration of Russian literature. Why should Brits read Crime and Punishment? “Because Dostoevsky is interesting for any audience,” he says.

The head of Russian at Exeter University for many years, retirement has enabled Cockrell to devote more time to literary translation. He has completed five books by Bulgakov for Alma Classics, including The White Guard, which gives an “apposite historical perspective to current events in Ukraine”. Cockrell is currently working on four late Tolstoy stories, due to be published in April 2015, and has also produced an English-Russian Dictionary of Cultural Terms. Readers familiar with The Master and Margarita, will be surprised by “the extraordinary range of Bulgakov's talent” and “appreciate the wit and irony to be found on practically every page of Black Snow”, he adds.

One of Britain’s most celebrated translators, Chandler told RBTH: “Perhaps the greatest joy in translating is that it is the most intense form of reading, the way of engaging most deeply with a work of literature.” Chandler says Grossman “wrote better and better throughout his life”.

An Armenian Sketchbook gets close to the near-perfection that he achieved just before his death. One of Chandler’s most important recent projects has been editing The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, which is due to be published in February 2015. “I now see the poetry of 20thcentury Russia as a golden age for poetry,” he says.

Jackson worked with a team of translators including Robert Chandler on the book. She told RBTH her interest in literary translation was kindled when she attended a 2011 summer school in London, with Chandler leading Russian workshops.

“Literary translation brings together my greatest loves: the Russian language, literature and writing,” she says, adding: “bringing new writers to English-language readers has been an ongoing thrill.” Teffi is an astounding writer, she says: “Immensely humane. Extraordinarily observant.

Extremely precise… Reading her work reminds me what it means to be human.”

The book’s co-editor, Murray recalled that the FUEL team first visited Russia in February 1992, prompting a long-standing obsession with Soviet culture, from street signs to gulag drawings. “With our Russian books we’ve been continually trying to recapture, and make sense of, the exciting alien landscape we experienced at that time. With every visit to the country we’ve returned with new stories that have intrigued us and that we knew would do the same for a wider audience.” British people are interested in Soviet Space Dogs, he says, “because we are such a dog-loving nation in general… Britain has always been at the forefront of animal rights.”

TRANSLATORS’ VOICES

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RUSSIAN LITERATURE O N R B T H .C O. U K ALEXANDR RODCHENKO /VOSTOCJPHOTO

ALEXANDR RODCHENKO /VOSTOCJPHOTO

AN EXCERPT FROM PAVEL BASINSKY’S BOOK LEO TOLSTOY: FLIGHT FROM PARADISE rbth.co.uk/35701

Alexander Rodchenko was the most prominent representative of Russian constructivism in photography. His images, such as the portrait of Lilya Brik, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s lover, main picture, are world famous. His wife Varvara Stepanova adopted a similar style in her photography, above left, in Students in sports clothing. The two are pictured together, above, in 1923. Rodchenko strove to show life from a different angle, reflected in his working methods, left.

Tatlin’s constructions made with ordinary materials began a ‘reassessment of the nature and role of art’

ALEXANDR RODCHENKO

lished in 1983). Ever since, Ms Lodder has been researching and writing about the history of Russian creativity, especially “the extraordinary period of the 1910s to the Thirties, when artistic experimentation often went hand in hand with revolutionary developments and radical ideals”.She is the author of several related works, including exhibition catalogues, and is considering future translations of Russian books about the history and theory of art.

Vladimir Tatlin’s work still fascinates Ms Lodder, nearly half a century after she first encountered it. Tatlin’s 1920 Tower or Model for a Monument to the Third International “acted as a paradigm of new possibilities”, she says, “indicating how art, sculpture and architecture could be synthesised and harnessed to utilitarian, social and political objectives”.

Tatlin’s three-dimensional constructions made with ordinary materials began a“reassessment of the nature and role of art that ultimately led to the emergence of constructivism”.

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Searching for jewels: a life under the masters’ spell Interview Peter Kaufman, the founder of Read Russia, talks to RBTH about his mission to promote Russian literature ILYA KROL RBTH

Pinning down Peter Kaufman, the American activist on Russian literature who has devoted much of his life to promoting works

by Russian authors, was no easy task. In constant demand for his work championing fiction dear to so many Russians, he travels frequently. Catching up with him on a train from New York to Boston, though far from Russia, was a fitting venue to discover why the nation’s literature casts such an enduring spell over the world.

When did you first encounter Russian literature and what affect did it have on you?

It’s hard to remember the first moment I fell in love with Russian literature, but I recall a sequence of events in my teenage years that ruined me forever. The first was in high school. My school, Choate Rosemary Hall – which counts John F Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, John Dos Passos and US assistant state department secretary, Victoria Nuland, among its alumni – was home to the finest high school Russian-language programme in the United States.

The headquarters of the Russian Studies Centre for Secondary Schools was housed in its library. I discovered the poets Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky in that library. Through their poetry I was drawn into studying Russian history.

Working the summer after high school at the Strand Book Store in New York, I came across a volume by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky called Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, which took my breath away.

When I got to college, at Cornell, my first course in Russian literature included reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and listening to the Beethoven score that inspired it. My professor pointed out that you could hear both the violins and train in the text. After that, forget it.

How did you become the world’s leading advocate of Russian literature?

I studied Russian for many years and, after graduate school at Columbia, I worked at think-tanks in New York devoted to the study and advocacy of foreign policy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I decided to learn more about publishing in central and eastern Europe, and took a trip to Romania to write about publishing there after the fall of the country’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. When my story was published in the Times Literary Supplement, I was given assignments in

Our attendance at the London Book Fair this year was highly productive, but I think we should be doing much more in the UK

Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – and began to create a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping promote literary cultures marred by decades of totalitarian thought control. After 1991, I expanded those efforts to include Russia and the former Soviet Union. After I moved away from that world, friends in the world of Russian literature asked me to set up Read Russia and continue to promote ties between publishers and cultures.

What are you now doing to promote Russian literature?

Read Russia, founded in 2012, is a new initiative based in Moscow, New York, and London that celebrates Russian literature and culture. Through innovative programmes, projects, and events supporting the English-language translation and publication of Russian works, Read Russia gives international audiences fresh opportunities to engage – in person, on screen, and online – with Russia’s literary leaders and heritage. Our work includes the Read Russia Prize for translation, the Russian Library of translations in English, Russian Literature Week in New York, and many other activities in bookstores and online.

Do you have UK-based activities related to this project?

Read Russia promotes Russian works in English wherever they may be. The UK is one of the most fertile markets and home to many of the best English-language translators and publishers. Our attendance at the London Book Fair this year was highly productive, but I think we should be doing much more in the UK.

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Your latest venture is a new series of books, a ‘Russian library’. What’s the main idea behind this?

The Russian Library is a series of books that will be published in English in the US, the UK, and throughout the world. Each title will be a translation from Russian literature.

We shall have more details about this initiative after all the arrangements have been made with our partners and the initial list, chosen by an international advisory board, is ready. The books will begin appearing after that.

What incentives are there for foreign readers to delve into the world of Russian writers?

Russian literature for a foreign reader is like a driveway full of sapphires and emeralds – the greatest areas of excitement lie in polishing off gemstones that may become future classics.

Which books offer the best way to understand Russia?

Gogol’s Dead Souls. But sometimes a little Kharms still works wonders.

‘A word is an act’ LEO TOLSTOY

Year of Culture P6_Tuesday, November 25, 2014_www.rbth.co.uk_THIS SUPPLEMENT IS SPONSORED BY ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA

FROM PERSONAL ARCHIVES

When is a goat not a goat? When it’s a linguistic confusion Q&A Scientist, professor, TV host, interpreter for Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin: Russia’s most famous polyglot Dmitri Petrov talks about political stereotypes, big markets, Tony Blair, learning Russian – and the character of horned animals very important to have general knowledge, to know about world events. Because three-quarters of the translation’s correctness comes from knowledge of political events happening in the world. This helps avoid imprecision.

ILYA KROL RBTH

He says of his talent: “I am familiar with 50 languages; I can speak 30 to various degrees; I teach eight.” But he adds: “It’s impossible to know a language perfectly, even if you are a native speaker.” Dmitri Petrov, however, has the necessary knowledge to teach languages all over the country. The Polyglot reality show, which he hosted on the state Kultura (Culture) channel, had incredible ratings for an educational program. Teaching millions of viewers the tricks of English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Hindi, Mr Petrov did not peek into a dictionary and parried the cunning questions of studio participants with ease.

Teaching is just one of his talents. He has been an interpreter for heads of state and is an entrepreneur, having opened his own language centre. Mr Petrov also has his own publishing house, which this year published a textbook for foreigners wishing to learn Russian.

We didn’t start speaking about this immediately. “First, I would like to say that I have never been a public official,”says Mr Petrov.“I interpreted for Gorbachev and Putin during international events. I sat in a cabin and they didn’t even see me.”

There was no visual contact between you, but there was verbal contact. You, probably, like no one else, know the way the top officials speak, the particularities of their speech. Did you ‘tune into the wave’ of each official beforehand?

It is not difficult to translate politicians because as a rule their statements, let alone their speeches, are well calculated and verified. There is hardly any improvisation. However, it is obviously very important to translate certain nuances correctly. Because a situation or political event can be interpreted from various angles, it is very important to translate the correct angle. For example, when Gorbachev spoke about the collapse of the Soviet Union he spoke about it differently than, let’s say, Yeltsin did. Gorbachev spoke with bitterness, describing the dissolution of the union as a lost opportunity to preserve a big country. He used words that in English would be translated as “disintegration” or “collapse”, while his opponents spoke of a peaceful separation. It was vital not to put the word “collapse” into Yeltsin’s speech, and vice versa, because the emotional aspect would have changed.

How do interpreters prepare for these meetings? Did you, for example, reread the history of Gorbachev’s presidency on the eve of interpreting for him?

I teach interpreting at the university and I always tell my students that it’s not enough to know and understand the language. It is also

I always tried to translate the meaning, not the words.

When you feel someone wants to praise or offend, you must never repeat the words driven by emotion.

It’s important to convey the sense

Familiarity with political realities, as I understand, is only the tip of the iceberg. If Putin, for example, uses an obscure term or a Russian proverb, knowing politics won’t help. Have you ever been in such situations?

If you remember, there was an episode in Switzerland, a conference in which Putin spoke. He was asked a question about Islamist groups and Russia’s relationship with Islam. But the interpreter couldn’t translate the word “circumcision”. He made a mistake and instead of circumcision said excision.

There was a similar case, when someone from Putin’s entourage was speaking about terrorists and said:“They consider us goats,”(in Russian, this is kozlami). In English, as you know, the word goat does not have any offensive overtones; it just signifies an animal. While in Russian kozel (goat) is a rather offensive term. Tony Blair, who was British Prime Minister at the time and taking part in the discussion, did not understand the meaning of the phrase because it had been translated literally.

Were there any similar embarrassing moments in your professional experience?

If there had been any, I don’t think I would have been invited to collaborate with such important international organisations as the European Union and the European Commission.

I always tried to translate the meaning, not the words. When you feel someone wants to praise or offend someone else, you must never repeat the words that are driven by the emotion or judgment. It’s important to convey the sense.

That is the principal art of an interpreter.

Is you interest in foreign languages something that you’ve inherited? If I’m not mistaken, your parents also knew several languages.

First, at home we always had many books in many different languages. My grandmother, who had finished the Gymnasium in 1917, having received her education before the October Revolution, absorbed the zeitgeist of the era.

It was forever preserved within her, even during the communist period. She instilled an interest in languages in me, just an interest, without the aim of learning them. It was just part of everyday life: reading fairy tales to children in the original language. She would read the Brothers Grimm in German and Charles Perrault in French. I grew up in a little town in the Moscow Region, though, where there wasn’t even a sign of a foreigner. But I felt the need to be surrounded by foreign languages. I felt that it was my natural habitat.

In the USSR, English, not to mention other languages, was not used very much. There was basically no one to speak English with and there was no one who could be heard speaking it. But everyone spoke Russian – in the Baltics, in Georgia, in Ukraine. Today everyone knows English. How is the situation with Russian in today’s world?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some former Soviet Republics stopped using the educational system in which Russian was a mandatory subject. But then interesting things happened. First, western companies that opened their branches and established themselves in the former Soviet republics, such as the Baltics, and also Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, hired local experts. Later, knowing Russian became a requirement for landing a job with the companies in many of these countries. For example, the western company that came to Lithuania was not satisfied with a local collaborator who just spoke Lithuanian.

The aim of every business is to enter a big market, which means Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, that is, countries where Russian is the predominant language. The second factor is tourism. There was the birth of mass tourism from Russian-speaking countries, and not only to eastern European countries, but also to resort countries such as Turkey, India, Thailand and so on. And today we see the urge to learn at least the fundamentals of Russian in many of these countries.

Finally, there is another factor. Native Russian speakers actively started doing business and acquiring real estate in various parts of the world, including western Europe. A new market emerged, one related to bilateral economic ties, one that required the knowledge of Russian from a big number of people.

And that is why in the past few years we’ve seen an increase in the number of students who wish to learn Russian not only in the countries where Russian tourists come to “bask in the sun”, but also in eastern European countries, such as Poland. Therefore, even if we exclude the simple interest in the Russian language as the language of Russia and Russian culture, we will still see that its popularity is growing. No wonder last year Russian was rated second after English among languages used on the internet.

This year you published a textbook for foreigners wishing to learn Russian. Is this your attempt at conquering the ‘big market’?

Since I am connected to the education system, I know that there has always been a problem in assisting foreigners in their study of Russian. There are certain academic difficulties related precisely to the teaching of Russian. Since I have my own education centre, which has a publishing structure, I decided to assist those studying Russian in a print and electronic form.

What kind of a textbook is it?

We have already published Russian for Anglophones and Russian for German-speakers. We are preparing Russian for Francophones and for speakers of other languages. In April, I visited the London Book Fair and presented the textbook, explaining why it is different. It is not good to frighten students with complicated charts. I emphasise combinatorics, that is, I try from the very beginning to get students to develop the skill of combining. Create as many combinations as possible even from a small quantity of elements, that is, words. After the London Book Fair this textbook sold many copies in Moscow and we are now looking for a distributor in the UK. We will try to promote it for those who would be interested.

Why do you publish Russian for Anglophones and Russian for German-speakers separately?

Why not create a common textbook for everyone who doesn’t know Russian?

I try to explain the theoretical part of Russian as clearly as possible. This must be done in accordance with each individual language. Each language – English, French, German and so on

PHOTOXPRESS

Language lesson: Dmitri Petrov hosts the Russian television reality show Polyglot, shown on the Kultura (Culture) channel

Russian for Anglophones

Russian in 16 Lessons for Anglophones was launched during the London Book Fair in July. Although it is not currently available in the UK, it can be purchased through the Dmitri Petrov language centre.

Email: info@centerpetrova.ru

– has its own explanation of, let’s say, a Russian verb. For example, in German there is the category of gender, which can be useful for creating interesting examples for Germanspeakers, examples that are similar in their language. If the explanation is for the English, who don’t have a grammatical case, or a gender, then the explanation must be more precise: what is a gender and a grammatical case?

Why do they exist? What function do they have in Russian? and so on.

Many people say that Russian is extremely difficult to learn. Do you agree?

It depends. Russian has declensions but there are no articles; Russian has conjugation, but there are fewer tenses than in English; Russian is based on the Cyrillic alphabet, yet the spelling is less different from the phonetic side of the language in respect to other European languages. For every minus there is a plus.

If you were to compare Russian with English, what conclusions would you make?

These are two great languages, which each have similar patterns of evolution. English has become a universal language, though at a cost: it is becoming more and more technical. The same fate awaits the Russian language. According to statistics, English is used about 90pc of the time when people socialise. But this happens mostly among non-native speakers. English can be spoken between a Spaniard and a Chinese, a Frenchman and an Arab. English has become a universal and a very pragmatic way to communicate among people of very different nationalities.

But pragmatism inevitably leads to simplification, even to a certain impoverishment of forms when a language stops being the weapon of culture and becomes a weapon of business. This is what is happening to English, unfortunately or not. We are seeing a similar process, though to a lesser degree, in the Russian language. It is important to understand that Russian, just like English, is not a property of the nation. In the modern world, Russian is not an attribute of the Russian Federation or of ethnic Russians.

As with the mobile phone system, which is valued for the quality of the signal and the quantity of callers, language is an instrument of communication that helps us communicate with millions. We have stopped perceiving language as cultural heritage, as a way to read Dostoevsky in the original or watch a Russianlanguage film. For most of us who study the language, it is a way to obtain an edge on the labour market or get access to information resources. Whether this is good or not, it is so.

If Barack Obama or David Cameron asked you to teach them Russian, what would you say to them?

I would support their initiative, since even the basic knowledge of a foreign language helps us understand the mindset of the natives who use it. And this is extremely important for politicians. I can remind them of Ronald Reagan, who always had a book of Russian proverbs on his desk.

Analysis P7_Tuesday, November 25, 2014_www.rbth.ru_THIS SUPPLEMENT IS SPONSORED BY ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA

PLUNGING OIL PRICE WILL MEAN AN ECONOMIC DIP FOR ALL Bryan MacDonald

ART OF DIPLOMACY

Brisbane shows we need a new geopolitics in a time of crisis

VOX POP

INTERNATIONAL ANALYST

The last time Russia faced financial ruin was in August 1998, when the rouble collapsed against the dollar after President Boris Yeltsin’s administration defaulted on domestic debt payments and froze repayment due to foreign creditors. Within the space of a few weeks, the rouble exchange rate against the dollar had collapsed from around six to 21. Ordinary people, who kept their savings in roubles or who had dollar-denominated mortgages and loans, faced ruin.

And yet, in a country that is no stranger to crises, within a few years the Russian economy was booming as never before with annual growth in double digits.

When Vladimir Putin took over in 1999, he was faced with a state that was out of control, struggling under the weight of a failed neoliberal economic experiment. Already humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, poverty-stricken Russia was in an execrable state.

Putin stopped the rot with a simple yet effective 13pc flat-rate income tax that went a long way to tackle a culture of mass tax avoidance.

Later, he renationalised key industries and broke the backs of the Nineties oligarchs.

Right on cue, due to external factors, oil prices began to rise and the Russian phoenix spread its wings. Just as it looked like goodnight Moscow, the country stepped back from the brink.

Is it now possible that the Kremlin’s attachment to the wonders of black gold could be its undoing? Are outside players exploiting the country’s dependence on oil revenues to break it? Neither notion is convincing.

Rouble in freefall

What RBTH readers think about current hot topics. From facebook. com/russianow

Maryellen Haueisen on talk that Russia is increasingly isolationist " With Brics having 40pc of the world's population, isolation sounds a bit of a strange word to use about Russia right now."

Daphne Randal on Forbes dubbing Putin the world’s most powerful man For sure, Putin is the world’s most ethical leader in power today. Oh yeah, and Uruguay’s José Mujica – he’s just not as powerful as Putin, but probably more ethical."

" TATYANA PEREGYLINA

A side-effect of a protracted collapse in oil values would be the pricking of the shale bubble

First, the bad news: Moscow-Washington relations are at the lowest point since the Brezhnev era of the Seventies. Capital flight from Russia is at record levels and is forecast to reach $128bn (£82bn) this year. Economic growth has stalled close to zero. That’s sobering for a country that once had double-digit growth and was recently stable at around 4pc while rivals stood still or declined. And the rouble is in freefall against foreign currencies.

Europe is also suffering and will probably eventually be forced to insist on the lifting of sanctions that barely affect the US, but are damaging EU economies almost as much as they hurt Russia. Britain's robust mid-summer rhetoric over Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian crisis has mellowed. David Cameron has more to be worrying about right now than Ukraine and Putin. His Tory party is pulling itself apart over Britain's relationship with the EU and the rise of the right-wing anti-Europe party Ukip is spooking him. Not to mention lingering tensions in Scotland and a British public jaded by austerity.

The rouble collapse scares Russians. The new middle class have become accustomed to their annual foreign holidays, unthinkable not so

long ago.Thailand,Turkey and Spain are among the top destinations for Russians, mirroring British and German tourist colonisation of Spanish and Greek beaches 30 or 40 years ago.

The public are understandably distraught at the prospect of swapping Alicante for Crimea’s Alushta or Nimmanoradee for Primorsky Krai’s Nakhodka. And it is a two-way street: tourist resorts will be reeling at the shock of losing Russian custom.

Justifiable alarm Many top British public schools, expensive feesupported institutions, depend on Russian students to cover costs. Contrary to popular opinion, not all scholars are scions of oligarchic families. The vast majority have middle-class, professional parents. With the rouble over 70 against sterling and weakening, the British private education sector is justifiably alarmed.

As for oil prices, the idea that it is a nefarious US/Saudi conspiracy to bring down Putin’s Kremlin is nonsense. Plunging prices for crude are a consequence of a boom in shale oil in the United States and falling demand in China and Europe. If the Saudis were scheming, Isil would be their target and Russia’s turmoil would be a lucky side-effect from their perspective. Riyadh has sufficient cash reserves to keep the price of a barrel around $80 for some years to come. As Isil sells its oil at a large discount, low prices mean it can’t cream off a profit at the wells it controls in Syria and Iraq.

Less revenue means less firepower for the group’s “holy war”.

Russia’s problem is that Urals Crude has dived from $115 to $83 a barrel since June.

Deutsche Bank claims that, due to sharply increased spending in recent years, Moscow needs $100 per barrel to balance its budget.The Kremlin’s failure to diversify the Russian economy could be coming home to roost now. However, there are reasons to believe that to a certain extent Russia can dodge the oil bullet.

Healthy cash reserves A falling rouble may be a disaster for ordinary households, but it has a positive impact on the Russian government’s budget because income from oil is in dollars and domestic expenditure in roubles. This eases the pressure on the Kremlin’s coffers.

And the Saudis aside, other Middle Eastern oil producers can’t sustain lower yields over a period of years. Russia has healthy cash reserves and can bear the economic pain for a while yet. The US shale boom, which is keeping unemployment there in check, can’t cope with prolonged exposure to sub-$90 prices.

In the UK, the average household currently spends £2,256 a year on petrol for the family car. Even a short-term drop in costs at the pumps would free up enough cash to spark a consumer boom there. Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is also keen to bring fracking for shale oil and gas to England’s northern regions. A side effect of a protracted collapse in oil values would be the pricking of the shale bubble – good news for environmentalists; utterly unwelcome for domestic energy firms.

Alejandro Rodriguez on the food embargo from the West as a response to sanctions Hunger! It's going to grip Russia!

Poor people... it’s going to take the country back 70 years."

"

John Hansen on Russia’s plans to build a new space station Good for Russia.

Space has plenty of room for all civilised players. Well, it sure did, last time I checked."

"

Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist who focuses on Russia and international geopolitics.

UK-RUSSIA CROSSVIEWS Journalists see their countries through the eyes of the other’s media

Going the distance for diplomacy Aliya Sayakhova RUSSIAN ANALYST

The G20 summit has dominated headlines for the last couple of weeks, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role in it a key focus. Mr Putin, who left the summit early, seems to have found it both constructive and exhausting, personally excusing himself in front of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, explaining he had to undertake an 18-hour flight to get home. “I came to Tony and told him about it; he understood this.

There are no other considerations,” The Guardian reported him saying.

It’s pointless speculating on the reasons for Mr Putin’s early departure, but as every Russian learns from childhood, vast distances are an everyday reality for those born in the world’s biggest country. The challenge of long journeys is well known to travellers in Russia, but few people realise what it means in real terms for people who live there. It’s always funny to see Londoners’ reaction when told my town of birth is not too far from Moscow, just a two-hour flight away.

In Europe, where it takes two hours by car or train to cross a border, the concepts of distance and proximity have a completely different meaning to those in Russia with its Kaliningrad in the west, Chukotka in the east, and 5,600 miles in between.

People in the West often talk about their dream to take the Trans-Siberian railway. It’s a 21st-century equivalent of the Grand Tour their great-grandparents might have taken.

For those who live in Russia, however, spending a week on a train can be an expensive and tiresome necessity, far from a Brit’s notion of the pleasures of an exotic journey. Crossing eight time zones sounds like a transatlantic journey to most, and yet it is possible within one country.

While that is impressive, one has to bear in mind that the costs associated with such a trip are enormous. How to journey across thousands of miles of steppes and mountains, tundra and taiga, rivers and deserts, industrial cities and small dying villages is a seminal question not just for Mr Putin flying in from the summit, but for the whole of the country every day. The social, political and economical costs of “commuting” from the Far East to European Russia present a multi-faceted challenge and one that explains a lot of peculiarities of Russian political and social order.

It is not only long-distance travel that poses a challenge to Russians across the country. In the remote Siberian region of Yamalo-Nenets, reindeer could soon be used by police tackling crafty crooks adept at escaping across its frozen winter wastes, where snowmobiles fear to go. “Machines break down, but deer run at all times,” as a local interior ministry spokeswoman cheerfully explained, the BBC reported.

Digging the dirt on the ‘Old Prince’ Nick Holdsworth BRITISH ANALYST

For Russian readers, much like British ones, The Prince of Wales is a tragicomic figure.

The eccentric environmentalist has provided a rich source for millions of column inches of print since the day he was born, November 14, 1948. Argumenty i Fakty, Russia’s intelligent and respected tabloid, a bit like The Daily Mirror only in Cyrillic, used the occasion of Prince Charles’s 66th birthday to devote a double-page spread to question whether the Prince of Wales would ever become king.

For those Brits who don’t know the Russians, it may come as a surprise to learn that Britain’s royal family is revered as much in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg as in London, Manchester or Sheffield.

Forget what you learnt at school about the bloody Bolshevik revolution and tawdry 1918 murder of the Romanovs: most Russians love the Windsors. When the Romanovs were given a state funeral in St Petersburg in 1999, DNA from Britain’s Russian-speaking Prince Michael of Kent, helped identify the remains.

Just like Fleet Street and its obsession with royal affairs, the Russian press has certain double standards. Take the newspaper’s headline: “Old Prince. Why doesn’t England want to see him crowned?”

It set the tone for a detailed recounting of his early life, hardships endured at school and university and gauche initial attempts at dating young women.

Prince Charles, whose personal motto is “Be patient and endure” (distinct from his princely one, which is Ich dien, meaning “I serve”), is, the paper reminds us, the longest-serving Prince of Wales. “For 63 years, Charles has remained first in line to the throne, a period for which no other heir to the throne has ever had to wait.”

Like any British tabloid, the paper digs the dirt and enjoys doing so, reminding us that when Charles married his first bride, Lady Diana Spencer, in a grand state wedding broadcast to the world in July 1981, the “wife outshone the husband”.

His current wife’s role in destroying that union, both before and after the nuptials, is given plenty of attention under the rubric “fatal Camilla”.

“The marriage was doomed from the start,” the paper tells Russian readers who, like British readers, already know this but enjoy the retelling. “After securing his official wife, Charles continued his relationship with Camilla,” behaving “like a typical British representative of the aristocracy”.

It’s this subtle push and pull that makes Argumenty i Fakty’s piece such a fascinating insight into contemporary Russian realities.

It is a wonderful bit of hack journalism that manages to convey both sentimental love for the Windsor clan and disdain for Britain’s entrenched social castes.

Alexander Yakovenko AMBASSADOR

P

resident Vladimir Putin stressed at the final press conference at this month’s G20 summit in Brisbane that “the work took place in a very constructive atmosphere and was productive”.Important agreements were reached, in particular on increasing by 2pc the average rate of growth of the G20 economies by 2018, which should boost the world economy by $2trillion. Decisions were also made on fighting unemployment, improving financial and tax regulations, reforming international energy institutions and improving co-ordination on infrastructure projects.

The Australian chairmanship focused on promoting private-public partnership. Such partnership is increasingly common in Russia.

The decision to create a global infrastructure hub was significant: it is assumed such a structure will make it possible to share best practice and experiences. Russia, which is already implementing a number of large-scale infrastructure projects, is willing to participate directly in this work.

Unfortunately there was a lack of progress on reform of the global financial system, in particular of the International Monetary Fund.

It is no secret that the chief reason for delays in bringing about the reforms approved in 2010 was and still is the position of the United States.

Such an attitude to agreed commitments as well as any attempts to politicise the work of this forum undermines confidence in it.

The meeting of Brics leaders just before the G20 summit is now a tradition. In our view, this is a very good and useful practice. Such meetings make it possible to better co-ordinate the Brics states’ approaches to issues related to world trade and the financial system as well as to determine how best to react to contemporary challenges in these areas. The G7 also engages in such co-ordination.

President Putin held a series of bilateral meetings with his counterparts in Brisbane, in which the subject of Ukraine dominated the discussions. The president outlined the well-known Russian approaches towards the settlement of Ukraine’s internal crisis and his partners expressed their own assessments.

In general, as Mr Putin noted, the conversations were both frank and constructive. The topic of Ukraine was not discussed during the course of the official business of the summit, which, however, served as a platform for the much-needed dialogue.

We are convinced that the G20 must continue being a mechanism for global crisis response and co-ordination of collective decisions of a financial and economic nature and that it must not become a place for political squabbles. This is especially so since the crisis remains a reality – whether you call it the “new normal” or the“new mediocre”.The leaders of various countries, including Prime Minister David Cameron, correctly point to the threat of a new wave of global crises.

The so-called geopolitical risks, which can be created artificially, as in Ukraine, are exacerbating the situation. As John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, wrote in Foreign Affairs, the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement,“far from being routine, sounds like a back door to Nato membership”.

And the American diplomat Richard Haass likewise notes that “Russia could have been asked to join Nato, which would have little military difference.” As a result, the immense potential for co-operation between Russia and the European Union has not materialised.

Interdependence means that we either win together or we lose together.

This is why the recent summit leads to the conclusion that the old geopolitics is especially costly in the crisis conditions. It is necessary to choose between it and the interests of development, which have rightly moved to the top of today’s international agenda.

Keep in touch with the Russian Embassy in London on these social networks: www.twitter.com/Amb_Yakovenko www.twitter.com/RussianEmbassy www.twitter.com/RussianEmbassyR (Russian version) www.facebook.com/RussianEmbassy www.youtube.com/RussianEmbassy www.slideshare.net/rusemblon www.flickr.com/photos/rusembassylondon russianembassy.livejournal.com

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Travel THIS SUPPLEMENT IS SPONSORED BY ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA_www.rbth.co.uk_Tuesday, November 25, 2014_P8

Tourists go with the floe at Arctic base LAIF/VOSTOCK-PHOTO

Adventures on ice Russia’s floating Camp Barneo is the hotel of choice for travellers heading to the North Pole STEFANIA ZINI

I wasn’t able to meet Matvei Shparo, one of the new generation of Russian polar explorers, since he was accompanying a party of young skiers to the Pole, but I did meet dozens of unshaven but very happy tourists. Clearly, money was not a problem for them. Nor did they mind the very basic conditions in the camp. Everyone was just pleased to be able to say, “I’ve been there, too.”

It is amazing how every year this drifting patch of ice – whose lifespan depends not on the actions of man but on weather conditions – becomes a crossroads on the way to the Pole for people from all walks of life.

On the way to Barneo from the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the only thing I could see from the plane was water and ice. From the moment we landed at Barneo, there was no time to be afraid.

The tourists on my flight were welcomed by polar explorer and pilot Alexander Orlov, head of Barneo; Victor Boyarsky, who has conquered both North and South Poles and is director of St Petersburg’s Arctic and Antarctic Museum; and Alexander Bakhmetyev, commander of the Krasnoyarsk Air Unit, which is responsible for the air link with Barneo.

Almost immediately we were invited to a welcome dinner that involved slices of frozen fresh fish with shots of vodka dished out on an empty fuel drum.

But there was no time to linger. We were given 10 minutes to carry our rucksacks to the camp and be assigned a bunk, put on warmer clothes and make a dash for the helicopter. Its engine and blades started up, and the huge MI-8, packed with people and gear, finally lumbered into the air.

The next stop was near the 89th parallel, where we dropped five Australians who want-

From Russia’s main Christmas tree and Kremlin chimes on Red Square to the holiday cheer of the capital’s pedestrian zones, RBTH offers an essential guide to New Year’s Eve in Moscow

Cold comfort: living at Barneo Camp in temperatures of -30c is not for the fainthearted, but it’s a unique experience

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For most visitors to Barneo, the base is not the climax of the trip; it is just a temporary stop where you spend several hours or days before and after the main event, the conquest of the North Pole.

Tourists are delivered to the camp from the mainland by plane, landing in the northernmost airstrip in the world. From there, the journey to the Pole is made by skis, dog sled or by parachute from a helicopter. The camp’s organisers are ready to cater to your every whim, understanding that a trip to the Pole via Barneo is every bit as expensive as tours to elite, comfortable and less frigid destinations.

The pleasure of sleeping in temperatures of -30C, sometimes in snowstorms, in tents with outdoor lavatories, costs between £8,000 and £24,000, depending on the length of the trip.

Even so, every year Barneo plays host to hundreds of amateur and professional polar explorers as well as celebrities and the simply curious. Prince Albert II of Monaco visited the North Pole in 2006. Just a few days before my arrival, Prince Harry left the camp. During the

Vodka on a fuel drum

LAIF/VOSTOCK-PHOTO

By royal appointment

trip, a half-metre crack opened in the middle of the runway, severing the air link to the outside world. Fortunately, within two days, the ice plates had rejoined. Otherwise, the camp organisers would have been forced choose another suitable ice floe to build a new runway.

PRESS PHOTO

The drifting ice floe camp is the northernmost hotel in the world. It is the only shelter in the Arctic Ocean for scientists, polar explorers and tourists who want to play at being polar explorers and touch the tip of the Earth.

I have seen all kinds of hotels. In Florida, there are underwater suites; you can spend a night in the trees in Turkey; sleep underground in a coal mine in Sweden; in capsules at a Japanese train station; in a former church in Scotland or a former prison in Slovenia.

But sleeping at the North Pole was an unique experience. The Russian Arctic ice base Barneo doesn’t even have an address. Every year for more than a decade it has appeared on the map for 40 days, from the end of March until early May. Several tents and an airstrip float over the ocean currents, causing the coordinates on a GPS screen to change every second.

In this unique refuge, you never stand still.

You move willy-nilly even while you sleep or eat, and even when you stand trying in vain to tell east from west because all the directions are due south and, due to the polar day, there is no sunrise or sunset.

According to its organisers, finding a suitable ice floe to host Barneo camp is simple.

Two bases are set up in early March, the first at about 87 degrees latitude and the second closer to the Pole. Fuel and an ice reconnaissance group are flown in and the search for a large and solid ice floe begins.

The ice floe coordinates are reported to Murmansk, which sends a plane with tractors. An airstrip is cleared and a commission comes from Krasnoyarsk to grant approval. Then the personnel are brought in and the construction of the camp begins.

ALYONA REPKINA

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ed to reach the North Pole on skis. The chopper was airborne again and within 15 minutes we were at the Pole.

A middle-aged couple from New Zealand produced a bag with golf clubs and started playing golf; four Japanese women whipped out their cameras to take pictures; the guide uncorked a bottle and poured champagne, but no one managed to drink it before it froze. Then we all stared as an English Romeo dropped to his knees in front of his Chinese Juliet and proposed on the spot.

Back at camp we were treated to a hot meal.

Borscht with sour cream was the first course; “Straight from Moscow,”the chef boasted. The sour cream and yogurt can be kept in a warm tent for a long time because there is a steady refrigerated temperature at floor level.

For the second course, there was not canned meat but fresh beef cutlets.“Barneo is the best freezer for storing meat,” joked the chef. As a side dish, there was pasta in pesto sauce.

How to get there Like all Arctic destinations, Barneo is best visited as part of an organised group.

The only month open for tourists is April.

Tours can be booked in Moscow, where more details are available about expeditions. In St Petersburg, Vicaar Polar agency can advise. northpolextreme.com

The lounge with its ever-boiling samovar is the polar equivalent of the office water cooler.

You can sweeten your tea or coffee with cookies and exotic stories.

At one table, American scientists were bemoaning the loss of an expensive buoy that was blown out to sea; at another, the local guide was sharing his rich experience with a newlywed couple. He claims to have been present at weddings and divorces at the North Pole. One man on reaching the Pole immediately called his wife over a satellite phone, boasted of his triumph and told her he was divorcing her. At a third table, a group of tourists were busy exchanging business cards.

The pristine blue ice shimmers with gold for the organisers of Arctic tours. It seems that the pioneer spirit is still alive in the modern world, and many people are ready to pay a high price just to learn how early explorers Robert Peary and Umberto Nobile felt to be far from home in such a landscape.

THE NEW YEAR OF YOUR DREAMS: LET YOURSELF GO... IN RED SQUARE You should arrive in Red Square early, in daylight well before midnight, to walk around the luxuriously decorated halls of the GUM shopping mall, plunge into the festive atmosphere and buy souvenirs. The bright lights of Russia’s main Christmas tree, the cheerful seasonal illumination of St Basil’s Cathedral, fireworks, and an enthusiastic “Hurrah!” from tens of thousands of people in the crowd all make for an unforgettable start to the New Year. Hint: After finding the right spot on Red Square, you can record a presidential-style video message as the chimes of the Kremlin’s Kuranty clock strike and send it to friends and families celebrating around the world.

T R AV E L 2 M O S C O W. C O M

PEDESTRIAN STREETS: FAIRYTALE ATMOSPHERE, CARNIVAL PARADE As early as the middle of December, pedestrian streets in Moscow – the Arbat, Kamergersky Lane, Nikolskaya Street, Stoleshnikov Lane – are transformed into vivid, colourful illustrations of New Year fairy tales. Concerts, souvenir and holiday food markets, mulled wine, and hot food – you can have as great a time at midnight as at noon. On New Year’s Eve, these streets will be just as packed as Red Square and everyone can participate in the carnival parade.

SHOPPING, ENTERTAINMENT AND FROSTY FUN AT OUTDOOR MARKETS You can celebrate the New Year in full swing in the centre of Moscow at seasonal markets. Wooden huts with Russian shawls and scarves, Zhostovo trays, and Tula’s famous prianik gingerbread await customers – as well as chalets with mulled wine, mead and crepes, toys and New Year souvenirs from varous Russian cities and from all over the world. Guests can visit a gnome town and a fairy-tale land of Christmas angels or stop by a bazaar with holiday souvenirs from across the wintry frozen expanse of the country at the Journey to Christmas festival.

You can even run into famous characters from Russian folklore: Emelya and his famous flying stove and the hosts of the holiday, Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and his granddaughter, the snow maiden Snegurochka.

MOSCOW SKATING RINKS: ROMANTIC SETTINGS, COSY CAFÉS ON ICE For those who want their New Year celebrations to be healthier, there are skating rinks throughout Moscow. You can glide across the country’s main rink near GUM on Red Square to the sound of the Kremlin bells, drink champagne, eat tangerines, and spot the Russian celebrities who visit the square with their families. The skating rink in the middle of a wooded area in the Hermitage Garden is considered the most romantic, while that at Gorky Park (incidentally, the largest skating venue in Europe) has the most cosy cafés on ice. Moscow ponds also turn into icy arenas in the winter – you can enjoy the sport at the legendary Patriarch’s Ponds or Chistye Prudy.

PARK YOURSELF IN THE PARK: GOOD TIMES FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS Every year, parks in Moscow put on programmes for children and adults, including light shows, performances based on old Soviet holiday musicals such as Carnival Night, or Christmas ornament workshops. Kolomenskoye Park offers horse riding, Sokolniki Park hosts snowman-building contests, and Grandfather Frost and Snegurochka can be found in every city park.