Workhorse clunker to depart
Production will likely stop next year on the Soviet workhorse sedan – the Zhiguli semyorka (Model 7), which has dominated the country’s roads for nearly 30 years.
The semyorka is a second generation spin-off of a Fiat made at the Volga-based AvtoVAZ plant, and to this day is the most popular Russian-made vehicle, due to its low cost (R185,000, or about $6,500) and the ubiquity of spare parts. Yet it does have notoriously awful emission standards and a tendency to break down regularly.
The end of the semyorka comes as AvtoVAZ flirts with Renault Nissan on jointly-produced models, and as the Russian government makes baby steps toward adopting cleaner emission standards.
Oil alliance upset by angry Russian partners
A highly touted deal between Russia’s largest oil producer, Rosneft, and British Petroleum was unexpectedly blocked by a European arbitration court, delivering a blow to Russia’s top officials.
Both Rosneft and BP likely wanted to shift media attention away from unsavory issues like the incarceration of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Rosneft now controls most of the assets that once belonged to Yukos and Khodorkovsky) and last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill. The companies’ agreement, signed early this year, included a $16 billion share swap, as well as plans to jointly explore and develop the Arctic shelf off the Russian coast.
Yet Russian leaders had only two months to show off the deal as a symbol of the country’s improved investment climate, before TNK-BP, a group of BP partners already active in Russia, nixed the deal by convincing the arbitration court that BP was in the wrong when it sought to do a deal in Russia without them. BP and Rosneft stocks dove on the news, which even seemed to surprise Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who is also Rosneft’s head and the “grey eminence” of the Russian energy sector.
President Dmitry Medvedev’s team, which is not as involved with the oil sector, downplayed the development. “The investment climate is already so bad that this won’t hinder it,” said Arkady Dvorkovich, an economic aide to Medvedev, in an interview with Reuters.
In what may have been a related move, at press time Medvedev ordered that by the middle of the year ministers (such as Sechin) be replaced on corporate boards of directors by independent representatives.
Medvedev issues plan to improve, open economy
“Until we improve the business climate, we cannot improve the quality of life in Russia,” President Medvedev declared in March. To that end, he proposed a set of ten hugely ambitious measures which must all be pursued, the president said, in order for the Russian investment climate to improve. The measures were:
Long-lost note from the past finally arrives
This spring, Daniil Korotkikh, 13, of Kaliningrad found a message in a bottle on the beach. The note was written by a German boy 24 years ago and read (Daniil’s father translated it): “My name is Frank and I am five. I am travelling in Denmark with my father,” and listed an address.
Komsomolskaya Pravda tracked down Frank Usbek, now 29 and an accountant living in West Germany. Usbek said his dad wrote the note and Frank added his initials before throwing it into the sea in 1987. The bottle then travelled across the Baltic Sea only to be found by another boy, also helped by his father, a quarter of a century later.
President reaps benefits
of high office
President Dmitry Medvedev hosted the 1980s British rock band Deep Purple at his suburban residence in March. Medvedev said he was a DJ at school dances, where spinning hard rock discs was allowed despite the watchful eye of the Soviet authorities.
“You create real musical culture, you help young people understand what rock music is,” Medvedev observed over pirogi and tea.
Medvedev, whose melomaniac tendencies were previously revealed by bloggers who spied extremely expensive music equipment in photos of his residence, has in the past admitted to being a fan of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. He also met with U2’s Bono last year.
Meanwhile, the other member of the dynamic duo, Vladimir Putin, allegedly invited an Abba tribute band to a secret outing on Lake Valdai two years ago, and in the past has met with a wide range of artists, from Russian rockers Andrei Makarevich and Yury Shevchuk to former Beatle Paul McCartney.
New law irks Russian fishermen
Authorities struck a nerve with Russia’s fishermen this year when they passed a law that introduces fishing tickets – permits to fish in designated areas on rivers and lakes that have been rented out to firms which have promised to maintain the shoreline and rent out equipment.
While the new law was advertised as an attempt to mitigate the human impact on Russia’s waterways, it seems to have completely misfired. Thousands of fishermen have begun protesting across the country, demanding the law’s repeal. The anglers argue that the law is yet another trick to make people pay for something with no added value.
Kazan witnessed its largest protest since 1993, when three thousand people in fishing gear demanded that the Volga remain accessible to all. In Russia, fishing is far more than a sport, as many rely on rivers and lakes for food, even though overfishing and pollution threatens leaving them with nothing to catch.
State giant relaunches key paper
A mouthpiece of the perestroika era, Moskovskiye Novosti (The Moscow News), has been relaunched by the state-owned RIA-Novosti conglomerate after staging a pricey campaign with a hint of scandal.
Launched in 1930 as the Moscow Daily News (by American journalist Anna Louis Strong), the paper was originally published only in English, to cater to foreign specialists coming to work in the young Communist state. In 1949, the paper was shut down for “cosmopolitanism” and its editor, Mikhail Borodin, was sent to the camps. The paper was relaunched again in 1956, and new language versions (French, Italian, Arabic) were added throughout the 1960s. The Russian language edition was launched in 1980, in connection with the Olympic Games in Moscow.
The paper played an important role in whipping up the winds of change in the late 1980s, after its new editor, Yegor Yakovlev, appointed in 1986, introduced liberal editorial policies and made it the first privately-owned paper in Russia, breaking away from APN Novosti. (Yakovlev’s son Vladimir took up the family business and started up Kommersant a few years later.)
MN had lost its spark by the end of the 1990s, passing through several hands, including those of exiled oligarch Leonid Nevzlin. In 2008 the paper halted publication, and ownership was eventually transferred to RIA-Novosti, which had already bought and relaunched the English version of The Moscow News.
Launching the new Russian edition, MN put up huge banners in central Moscow with provocative quotes from Russian literature. When the authorities removed one banner on Smolensky Bulvar bearing a quote by Fyodor Tyutchev, “Russian history before Peter the Great is one big funeral service – after Peter the Great, it’s a criminal case,” MN editor Vladimir Gurevich cried foul. The city apologized and said the poster had been damaged by the rain. Then the billboard advertising company, News Outdoor, a subsidiary of the Murdoch publishing empire, cancelled its contract with MN, citing contractual irregularities.
Observers stopped short of accusing the paper of inciting the scandal, but Gurevich himself said, “There isn’t a single PR campaign that could match the effect that resulted from this.”
One of Russia’s best known painters, naivist artist Pavel Leonov, passed away at the end of March in a small village near Ivanovo. He was 91. Leonov’s epic panneaus featured diverse subjects, from WWII battlefields, to scenes from village life, to Pushkin at a circus.
The Pushkin Art Gallery called Leonov’s work “Art born out of life experience of a vagabond and unskilled laborer.” Much of that work was being exhibited in Moscow at time of his death.
Born in Oryol region in 1920, Leonov ran away from home to escape a despotic father. His wanderings about the vast reaches of the Soviet Union included a jail sentence and chasing the Nazi troops through Hungary during the war.
Leonov started taking art lessons by correspondence when he was 40. His paintings are done in a style that mixes Rousseau’s whimsical jungles with Russian ‘lubok’, with a few Soviet cliches — like Gagarin and collective farm combines — thrown in for good measure.
After an artistic hiatus in the 1980s, brought on by a fear of tax collectors, Leonov continued painting sporadically in his cluttered, unkempt house in Ivanovo region, penning letters to his patrons in which he asked them to send more paint, so that he could produce his optimistic oeuvres amid the desperate, alcohol-infused surroundings of the Russian countryside.
To view some of Leonov’s art, visit: bit.ly/leonovart
After complications suffered from a broken hip, actress Lyudmila Gurchenko passed away in late March. She was 75.
A star of film and stage, and a fashion icon, Gurchenko was one of Soviet Russia’s best known actresses, having launched her career in the 1950s in Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night , while she was still a student. She continued to be Ryazanov’s muse and starred in many of his best known comedies, always as an independently minded but quintessentially Russian woman.
Married five times, including to popular singer Iosif Kobzon, Gurchenko was also often embroiled in scandal. Her multiple memoirs included tidbits about her family problems and stories about singing Marlene Dietrich songs for Nazi soldiers in occupied Kharkov to earn money.
Gurchenko, who the media often called “the firework woman,” remained a celebrity to her death, even though she was no longer starring in blockbusters. Instead she retreated to theatrical work that included avant-garde plays and physically exhausting musicals.
“People were looking at me from the second row through binoculars,” Gurchenko said in a 2001 interview after playing Madlen, a retired music hall dancer. “An actress born in 1935 singing and dancing for two hours – that is curious,” she said.
Viktor Ilyukhin, one of main voices of orthodox Communism over the past two decades, a parliamentarian with a mission to unseat every Russian president, was unexpectedly felled by a stroke at 62.
One of Russia’s longest serving Duma members, Ilyukhin represented the Communist party for 18 years and was not shy to launch the most provocative of initiatives. He rose to fame in 1991, when he was a top official at the Soviet prosecutor general’s office, by launching a criminal probe against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was fired two days later.
In the late 1990s Ilyukhin was one of the initiators of Boris Yeltsin’s impeachment, and spoke as his chief accuser before the Duma. Later he launched a tribunal against Vladimir Putin, accusing him of taking decisions that devastated the Russian military.
Ilyukhin’s other signal campaign was seeking to prove that the Katyn massacre was a hoax and that the now declassified documents proving that the Soviet secret police shot Polish officers had been planted in archives.
The “master of ‘compromat’” died at his dacha so suddenly that his Communist Party colleagues launched an investigation to see if his death was indeed from natural causes.
Vladimir Lenin’s last living relative, Olga Ulyanova, passed away in Moscow at the age of 89. Ulyanova was the daughter of Lenin’s brother Dmitry, and was two years old when Lenin died. She was a chemist and taught the science at Moscow State University, but also authored several books on her notable ancestor and vocally opposed proposals to move him from his mausoleum on Red Square.
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