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P.03

Economy

Bracing for a long-term slowdown

Russia comes to terms with the reality of sanctions

P.06

Feature

Russian architecture’s tireless advocate

American’s photographs preserve Russia’s heritage

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

NEWS IN BRIEF

A recent report from the World Bank showed that women in Russia are legally restricted from hol-ding 456 categories of jobs — more than in any other country in the world. The report stated that the regulations were a holdover from Soviet-era gender restrictions to promote healthy childbearing. Most Western nations have no gender-based job restrictions at all, though France requi-res that women’s work should not involve lifting weights of more than 25 kilograms (55 lbs).

Tech giant Apple has agreed to store the perso-nal data of its Russian users at a data center in-side Russia to comply with a new law, according to reporting by Russian business daily Kommer-sant. Apple has reached a deal for data storage with Moscow-based data center operator IX-cellerate, which already has a contract with on-line hotel booking service Booking.com. The deal will bring Apple in line with a Russian law re-quiring all companies supplying Internet services in Russia or targeting Russian users to store such data inside the country by Sept. 1. Apple held a tender for the contract in July, but the decision was only announced this month.Most major I.T. companies have announced their intention to comply with the Russian law, but some international giants, including Facebook, have yet to formally state their position.

Russian Women Barred From

Holding 456 Types of Jobs

Apple to Store User Data in

Russia to Comply with Law

St. Petersburg was named the best travel desti-nation in Europe by the World Travel Awards at a ceremony on Sept. 4. The organization cited the city’s “exceptionally rich history, centuries-old tra-ditions and bright future,” in announcing the award. The citation gave Russia’s northern capi-tal bragging rights over Moscow, which just days earlier was selected as the unfriendliest city in the world by the MasterCard Global Destinations Index. The Index noted the “aloofness” of locals in explaining its decision.

St. Petersburg Best in Europe

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Migrants Syrians fleeing their homeland don’t see Russia as a destination or as a pathway to Europe

Diplomacy Russian leader expected to stress importance of the organization in mediating conflicts

Experts say that Russia is an

unattractive destination for

Syrian refugees due to the

bureaucratic asylum process and

the lack of routes to Europe.

After a decade-long absence, the

Russian president is scheduled to

return to the U.N., leading a large

delegation of Russian foreign

policy dignitaries.

In mid-September, as Europe struggled to cope with thousands of Syrian refugees seeking asy-lum, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to blame the situation on European countries themselves. Speaking on the sidelines of an economic forum in Vladivostok, Putin called the crisis “completely expected.” “We in Russia, and myself per-sonally said several years ago that our so-called Western partners continued to maintain their fl awed foreign policy, especially in regions of the Muslim world,” Putin said.

The Russian president’s words were a rebuke to those who sug-gested that Russia could do more to help refugees. Yet the number of Syrians who want to come to Russia is minimal.

“Syrian refugees do not want to remain in Russia because here they don’t receive welfare, hous-ing and work. And it is also dif-fi cult to apply for legal residen-cy,” said Munzer Khallum, a Syrian journalist and writer liv-ing in Moscow.

According to Khallum, the Syrians who have come to Rus-sia can be separated into three categories: transients whose fi nal destination is Europe; students who come to study and don’t know what they will do after they fi nish; and long-time ex-patriates who still maintain a dream of moving on to a better country.

Mahmoud al-Hamza, Council Chairman of the Damascus Dec-laration Abroad Movement agrees

Russian President Vladimir Putin will speak at the 70th anniver-sary session of the U.N. General Assembly, according to a state-ment made by the Kremlin press service on Aug. 28. The last time the Russian leader addressed the gathering was in 2005.

Refugees Reject Russia

Putin Slated to Speak at U.N. General Assembly

MARINA OBRAZKOVA RBTH

IGOR ROZINRBTH

that Russia has little to offer Syr-ians, in part because the process of applying for asylum is long and difficult. “Russia accepts very few refugees from Syria and does not offer much help to asylum seek-ers. While they look for work, they must go through complicated pro-cedures and pay bribes,” said al-Hamza. “I encountered cases in which people on the Russian bor-der were interrogated about their political convictions and which Islamic rules they follow. In Eu-rope the approach is completely different.”

Russia is also less attractive as a transit zone, in part because the distances refugees must travel to get to a border between Russia and an E.U. state are vast. “It’s difficult to get to Europe from here,” al-Hamza said. Addition-ally, few Syrians have taken such a path and therefore cannot ad-vise others on how to travel. Most refugees attempting the crossing to Europe rely on the experience of a family member or friend, ac-cording to Khallum.

“Usually one of their acquain-tances illegally arrives at a loca-tion and then through personal contact on the phone or by mail says how he got there,” Khallum said. “No one of these refugees will reveal the route that they in-tend to use to get to Europe be-cause they are afraid for their safety and the safety of those who trusted them with this informa-tion.”

It also remains difficult to de-termine the exact number of Syr-ian refugees in Russia because many Syrians come to the coun-try on work visas or as students and not as asylum seekers, said Svetlana Gannushkina, chair-women of Russia’s Civic Assis-tance Committee.

As Europe searches for ways to cope with thousands of migrants fleeing the violence in

Syria, Russia remains an unattractive destination for those seeking asylum.

The last time Russian President Vladimir Putin ad-

dressed the U.N. General Assembly was in 2005.

Presidential aide Yury Usha-kov told reporters on Sept. 11 that Putin would address the role of the U.N. in mediating internation-al confl icts.

“As Russia considers the 70th anniversary of this organization to be very important, we see it necessary to stress our commit-ment to the organization contin-ually playing a coordinating role in all the matters on the interna-tional agenda, in regard to inter-national security issues,” Usha-kov said.

Putin is not expected to meet

with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the meeting, although Obama is scheduled to have a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poro-shenko.

A number of senior foreign pol-icy fi gures are expected to be part of the Russian delegation, includ-ing the chairmen of the foreign relations committees of both houses of the Russian parliament, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. and its permanent representative to the U.N.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 2

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“The Syrians who come here are not formally refugees. They have a visa and a part of them had come to Russia to work. But now they have nowhere to return to.”

Journalist Hallum said that he had recently met some Syrians with student visas, but doubted they were in Moscow to study. “In the airport I met a group of ladies wearing traditional Mus-lim attire with year-long student visas. They told me that they had come to study Russian in St. Pe-tersburg. However, I think that they had used the only way to avoid the war and possibly, they will not stay long in Russia,” Hal-lum said.

On Sept. 4, Russia’s Federal Migration Service announced that there were 12,000 Syrians in Russia, but did not separate

the number of those who were migrants or asylum seekers.

Gannushkina says it’s doubt-ful that the number of Syrian

refugees in Russia is very high. “In 2012, when the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees asked representatives of the

countries that had signed the convention on refugees to intro-duce a moratorium on their de-portation to Syria, the Russian authorities demonstrated their loyalty to the refugees and start-ed preparing documents for them. However, when last year we were fl ooded with Ukraini-ans, the Syrians were practical-ly forgotten,” Gannushkina said.

Recent statements from the Kremlin contradict Gannushki-na’s words, however. On Sept. 10, Presidential spokesman Dmi-try Peskov told Russian news agency Interfax that Russia wasn’t interested in contribut-ing to an international effort to help Syrian migrants. “We ex-pect that for the most part that expenditures [for dealing with refugees] will fall on the coun-tries linked to causing the cat-astrophic situation,” Peskov said.

Russia’s Lack of Support for Refugees Limits Flow of Syrian MigrantsCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Regions Officials have declared the Republic of Dagestan a center of terrorism, but to local residents, security forces are a bigger threat

Gimry, a mountain village in Dagestan’s Untsukulsky District, is the birthplace of two legend-ary imams, Shamil and Gazima-gomed, local chieftains who put up fi erce resistance to the Rus-sian Empire in the 19th century. They have become a symbol of national pride for the people liv-ing here, which since the 1990s, has become a stomping ground for various illegal armed groups and the scene of frequent coun-terterrorist operations conducted by Russian security forces. Such operations are rarely greeted with understanding and support from the local population, and for good reason.

The most recent special opera-tion here took place in June, with federal forces killing two mili-tants. On this occasion, however, locals were impressed by how the military conducted the operation.

“They acted quite profession-ally. They must have had reliable information,” said Sagid, a native of Gimry, who until recently was a public activist. Sagid himself had to change his place of resi-dence in order to stay alive.

“This special operation, of course, cannot be compared to what happened in Vremennoye [a settlement in the same district]. There things got very scary,” Sagid said.

Local residents or terrorists?On Oct. 18, 2014, Vremennoye was declared the subject of a coun-

terterrorist operation (K.T.O.). The special operation lasted for more than two months, during which security and military forces killed seven suspected militants. In the process, 16 houses were blown up and the foundations of sev-

eral residential blocks were badly damaged as security forces searched for terrorist bunkers. As a result, cracks appeared in three apartment blocks, which now stand empty. The remaining seven were damaged too, but people continue to live in them, repair-ing the damage themselves.

“Why did they do this to us? Before the K.T.O. was introduced, there had not even been a single exchange of fi re here. They made us suffer for two-and-a-half months. And now nothing is being done to restore the houses, the settlement,” complained a female resident of Vremennoye, who asked not to be named.

The woman recalled how the settlement was fenced with barbed wire and all the local res-idents over 14 — civilians, who had not been charged with any-thing — were given a number. They also had their fi ngerprints and DNA taken and were told to walk in front of the camera, to have their gait captured on fi lm.

Property damageAlthough this process was hu-miliating, local residents are more upset about the rough conduct

of the military and security per-sonnel who damaged their prop-erty, threw their furniture out into the street, left graffiti on their walls and knife scratches on their doors.

Locals complained about the actions of the military and even wrote a letter to Russian Presi-dent Vladimir Putin asking him to look into the matter. A source in the Dagestani prosecutor’s of-fice told RBTH that this com-plaint from the local residents is being considered but no decisions on it have yet been made.

As regards the destruction of houses, investigators are inclined to support the military’s position. The militants killed were hiding in fortifi ed underground bunkers where “a large number of impro-vised explosive devices (I.E.D.s), components for them, fi rearms and ammunition” were found.

“Since there was a danger of their spontaneous detonation,” the I.E.D.s were destroyed on the spot, “as a result damaging the residential buildings in which they were found as well as near-by buildings,” RBTH was told at

the prosecutor’s office.However, not all local residents

and activists accept these expla-nations of why residential build-ings were destroyed.

“Security forces as a rule jus-tify their actions by saying that explosive devices were detected and had to be destroyed on the

spot for safety reasons. However, in some cases there are grounds to doubt that this was indeed the case,” said Varvara Pakhomenko, a consultant with the Interna-tional Crisis Group.

“When people return to their homes and see offensive inscrip-tions on the walls, it all looks like a punitive operation rather than like a fi ght against the militant underground.”

Pakhomenko added that law-enforcement agencies are step-ping up checks and detentions of devout Muslims.

“They are detained in public places; there are even raids on private homes. People are taken to police stations, where they are fi ngerprinted and photographed. It happens on a regular basis. A database is being compiled,” she said. Unsurprisingly, this situa-tion often causes irritation and misunderstanding among local residents.

Incidents falling?Local officials say that the num-ber of terrorist attacks in the re-gion have decreased in recent years, although government sta-tistics show they are on the rise.

In July, Dagestan’s president, Ramazan Abdulatipov, said that in 2014, only 12 terrorist crimes were recorded in the republic, compared with 300 two years ago.

Slightly earlier, in March, the republic’s interior minister, Ab-durashid Magomedov, announced that in the same period of time “20 acts of sabotage and terror-ism involving the use of explo-sive devices were prevented and 161 bandits were killed while put-ting up armed resistance.”

According to official statistics from the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, the number of terrorist crimes in Dagestan is steadily on the rise: 220 in 2011, 295 in 2012, 365 in 2013, 472 in 2014, and 307 in the first five months of 2015.

At the same time, the website Caucasian Knot, which keeps its own statistics, says that “in 2014 the number of victims of the armed confl ict in Dagestan fell by more than 50 percent:” 208 people were killed and 85 injured, while in 2013, the fi gures were 341 and 301, respectively.

Experts attribute discrepancies in the fi gures to amendments in Russia’s anti-terror legislation. Last year, the list of crimes fall-ing under the defi nition of “ter-rorism” was expanded to include political assassinations, prepara-tions for and organization of mass unrest, etc. The new defi nitions make it possible to press crimi-nal charges, among other things, for “inciting, recruiting or other-wise engaging a person” in ter-rorist activity.

Suffice it to note that 15 out of the 46 people on last year’s list of political prisoners compiled by the Memorial human rights cen-ter are either civil activists from the North Caucasus or members of Islamic organizations banned in Russia. By way of reference, ethnic groups that are considered Muslim make up about 10 per-cent of the population of Russia, while practicing Muslims make up just 6–7 percent.

Residents of Gimry, where anti-terror operations have been conducted.

There are six republics in Russia’s North Caucasus region, which stretches across the mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the coun-try’s south, along the border with Georgia and Azerbaijan.

For several years, Russia’s

southernmost region, Dagestan,

has been the epicenter of

terrorist activity in the country,

according to law enforcement.

BADMA BYURCHIYEV SPECIAL TO RBTH

Dagestan: Front Line of Russia’s War on Terror

Russia’s North Caucasus republics

Fifteen out of the 46 people on last year’s list of political prisoners are civil activists from the North Caucasus.

During the counterterror operation, security forces killed seven suspected militants and blew up 16 houses.

Refugees from Syria crossing the border near Sanliurfa, Turkey.

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Russia is girding itself for the pos-sibility of a long haul under West-ern economic sanctions, as offi-cials in Moscow warn that they see no near-term end to the cam-paign of economic punishment that the International Monetary Fund has said could shave off al-most a tenth of Russia’s economy.

A year and a half after the U.S. and European Union launched an effort to punish Russia over its role in the Ukrainian dispute, about 150 individuals have been targeted with travel bans and asset freezes, while dozens of Rus-sia’s biggest banks and energy fi rms have been cut off from ac-cess to Western fi nance.

Russia has retaliated by ban-ning imports of U.S. and Euro-pean food products, a blow that fell especially hard on European farmers. Albert Jan Maat, presi-dent of the European farmers group Copa, told the Reuters news agency that sanctions against Russia had led to the loss of about 5.5 billion euros’ worth of agri-cultural exports last year.

Yet as the dispute drags on and the economic damage piles up, observers said there seems to be no end to the standoff in sight.

“It looks as though the coun-try is gradually adjusting to a new old reality: life under permanent sanctions, as it was in the Soviet Union,” bemoaned economists at Russia’s largest savings bank, Sberbank, itself a target of sanc-tions, in an analysis published this month.

The E.U. and U.S. initially im-

Economy Assessing the affect of sanctions a year and a half after they were imposed

Russia, already facing recession

and falling oil prices, prepares for

the possibility that Western

sanctions may remain in place for

years to come.

posed measures against Russia in March 2014, following the annex-ation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Western countries also accuse Russia of continuing to support Ukrainian separatist mil-itants, a charge Russia has repeat-edly denied.

“We should proceed from the premise that sanctions will last for a long time,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told journalists during a visit to the Russian city of Nizhny Tagil

on Sept. 9. “We, at least the Rus-sian Foreign Ministry, are under no illusion that the sanctions may be lifted or alleviated in the near future.”

The U.S. added 29 people to the sanctions list on Sept. 2 in a move aimed at tightening restric-

tions already in place by extend-ing the sanctions on people and entities that are already covered, such as Russian arms maker Ka-lashnikov.

Overall trade between the U.S.

and Russia fell by about 10 per-cent in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, to $34.3 billion from $38 billion in 2013.

On the European side, howev-er, the damage looks to be far greater. Europe may lose a total of 100 billion euros due to sanc-tions, according to an indepen-dent study published by the Aus-trian Institute of Economic Research in Vienna this summer.

Exxon’s $1 billion lossWhile trade levels between Rus-sia and the U.S. were low even before sanctions kicked in, one of the highest-profi le U.S. fi rms dealing with the fallout is Amer-ica’s biggest oil company, Exx-onMobil.

The Irving, Tex.-based fi rm said in a fi ling with the U.S. Securi-ties and Exchange Committee that it lost a maximum of $1 bil-lion due to U.S. sanctions on the Russian energy sector.

Exxon was forced to back away from a massive joint venture with Russia’s top oil producer, Rosneft. The two companies had planned to start drilling for oil in the far-northern Kara sea this year.

Sanctions also mean Exxon has been unable to collect revenues from its 30 percent ownership stake in the Sakhalin 1 oil and gas project on Russia’s Pacific coast.

“In compliance with the sanc-tions and all general and specif-ic licenses, prohibited activities involving offshore Russia in the Black Sea, Arctic regions and on-shore western Siberia have been wound down,” Exxon said in the 10-K fi ling with the SEC. Exx-on’s “maximum exposure to loss from these joint ventures as of Dec. 31, 2014, is $1.0 billion.”

Nevertheless, Exxon has con-tinued to quietly acquire new

Sanctions: Russia Braces for Long Haul

A Moscow bar called Sanctions is making the most of a bad situation.

DAVID MILLER , JARED FELDSCHREIBER SPECIAL TO RBTH

drilling rights in Russia, appar-ently with a view to expand its operations in Russia when, and if, sanctions are lifted.

Exxon boosted its total stake in Russia to 63.7 million acres last year from 11.4 million acres in 2013, the Bloomberg News agency reported, citing data from U.S. regulatory filings. While Exxon has been forced to halt operations in Russia, sanctions don’t prevent the fi rm from tak-ing out rights to new fi elds for future development, according to Bloomberg.

Oil just makes it worseFor Russia, the impact of the sanc-tions has been magnifi ed by the decline in the value of the coun-try’s main export: crude oil.

Russia, a key global energy ex-

porter that gets about half its state budget revenue from oil ex-ports, entered recession this year after crude prices tumbled to about half their value compared to the previous year.

Economists broadly agree that both sanctions and oil prices are damaging Russia’s economy, but many say it’s hard to say which is having a greater impact.

“It is difficult to disentangle the impact of sanctions from the fall in oil prices,” the Washington, D.C.-based I.M.F. said in a state-ment in August.

The agency said current esti-mates indicate sanctions clipped Russia’s economy by about 1–1.5 percent in the early stages, and that “the cumulative output loss could amount to 9 percent of G.D.P. over the medium term.”

TIMELINE

18 months of U.S. sanctions

MARCH 17, 2014 • 31 Russian offi-cials were included in the initial U.S. sanctions list, which included travel bans and the freezing of their U.S. assets.

APRIL 2014 • NASA announced the cessation of all cooperation with Roscosmos except for the Interna-tional Space Station. On April 28, the U.S. imposed a ban on business transactions within its territory on 17 Russian companies and seven of-ficials, including Igor Sechin of oil major Rosneft.

JULY 17, 2014 • U.S. extended its transactions ban to two major Rus-sian energy firms, Rosneft and No-vatek, several banks and arms mak-er Kalashnikov.

DECEMBER 17, 2014 • Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Crimea by executive order, prohib-iting exports of U.S. goods and ser-vices to the peninsula.

MARCH 2015 • Sanctions from March and December 2014 were ex-tended for an additional year. The U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement announcing new sanc-tions against eight pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, one youth or-ganization and one bank operating in Crimea.

JULY 31 • The U.S. added new com-panies and inviduals to its sanc-tioned list including state-owned Vnesheconom bank and more parts of Rosneft.

Russia’s largest airline, state-owned Aerofl ot, is buying 75 per-cent of the country’s second larg-est carrier, Transaero, in a deal that experts say will create a new monopoly, as the combined com-pany will control more than 50 percent of the Russian air travel market.

“Transaero’s activity will be fully restructured and integrated in the Aerofl ot group,” Russian news agency RIA Novosti quot-ed an official Aerofl ot represen-tative as saying. A company press release stated that Aerofl ot had sent Transaero its offer on Sept. 3. The decision was made after a meeting headed by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov.

“For the aviation industry, this means consolidation and a move towards monopolization, and in this particular case, government monopolization,” said Anna Ba-zoyeva, analyst at investment company UFS.

According to Bazoyeva, while on the one hand, this is a step back from a healthy, competitive market economy, during this time

Transportation Russia’s largest airline, Aeroflot, has bought the country’s troubled No. 2 carrier, Transaero, for the symbolic sum of 1 ruble

Experts have called the deal

between Russia’s two bigges

carriers the birth of a new

monopoly a change in state

policy.

of economic crisis, the merger has more advantages than disadvan-tages.

In 2014, 51.5 percent of all Rus-sian airline passengers fl ew with either Aerofl ot or Transaero. Aer-fl ot carried 34.7 million people and Transaero, 13.2 million. Ac-cording to the Federal Air Trans-port Agency, a total of 93 million people fl ew in Russia last year and air travel continues to rise.

The main reasons Semyon Nemtsov, an analyst from Russ-Invest, said that Transaero’s owners couldn’t see a clear way to shake its massive debt.

“In today’s aggravated econom-ic conditions, the sector is not doing so well — Transaero’s debt in the last several years has re-mained very high,” Nemtsov said, adding that Transaero had asked the government to give it a loan of 20 billion rubles ($297 million).

Georgy Vaschenko, director of operations on the Russian capi-tal market at Freedom Finance, says that Transaero found itself in a fi nancial position that it could escape only through recapitaliza-tion or bankruptcy.

“Practice has shown that com-panies with low budgets that are not supported by the industry’s giants do not survive,” said Vaschenko.

From October to December 2015 there will be offers for hold-ers of Transaero debt. Since the announcement of the deal the risk of default has been minimized.

Transaero founders and own-ers Alexander and Olga Plesha-kova will leave the company as part of the deal.

Headaches for travelersThe merger of the companies will likely have negative repercussions for the traveling public.

“For the population and tour operators, such a merger will doubtlessly lead to a hike in tick-et prices, inconvenient conditions and the lack of the right to choose an airline,” said Bazoyeva.

Both companies fly direct flights between New York and Moscow. The cancellation of one of those fl ights would cause ad-ditional headaches for travelers, who are already facing the loss of Delta Air Lines’ Moscow-New York fl ight next month.

Ticket aggregator OneTwoTrip told RBTH that it was too early to know how the merger would affect any particular routes, and airline representatives refused to comment on the future of any par-ticular routes.

The creation of a monopolyAccording to Dmitry Baranov, a leading expert at investment holding Finam Management, the creation of a new monopoly dem-onstrates that the government has changed its policy on how the air-line sector should develop.

“Before, the government would say that ineffective airlines should leave the market and then the cri-sis in the sector would end. How-ever, in the current economic con-ditions the idea of creating small airlines that would compete with each other is unsustainable,” Ba-ranov said.

Rescue Deal Creates Airline Monopoly

Transaero and Aeroflot both have direct flights from New York to Moscow. Their future remains uncertain.

ALEXEI LOSSANRBTH

51.5 percentof all Russian passen-gers flew either Aero-flot and Transaero in 2014. The two compa-nies control more than half the market.

93 millionpeople flew in Rus-sia last year. Aeroflot carried 34.7 million of them while another 13.2 million traveled with Transaero.

$2.36 billionis how much debt Tran-saero held at the time of the buyout. Trans-aero’s activity will be restructured and inte-grated into Aeroflot.

IN FIGURES

As the dispute drags on and the economic damage piles up, observers say there is no end in sight.

Overall trade between the U.S. and Russia fell by 10 percent in 2014, to $34.3 billion from $38 billion.

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Education Controversial changes could be paying off

When news came in fall 2012 that School 122 in central Moscow would be merged with another school, parents were up in arms. The school, which is the home of the Moscow Boys Cappella and requires all students to take choir, is one of the few places outside of conservatories where students can do coursework for a special diploma in music. Parents were afraid that the merger would not only result in the loss of the spe-cial music curriculum, but that it would “destroy the school’s unique culture,” in the words of one parent, whose daughter was then in the second grade.

The school was slated for con-solidation under a controversial reform that began in 2010 and involves merging small or under-performing schools with larger schools primarily to more evenly distribute fi nancial and admin-istrative resources. Under the re-form, funding for schools would be distributed on a per capita basis — a move officials said was necessary to accommodate an in-crease in demand.

“In our very large country, it is essential to ensure maximum equal access to early childhood services, and supplementary ed-ucation,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, defending the changes, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2011.

Russia experienced a baby boomlet during the economic prosperity of the early 2000s. Rus-sia’s state statistics service, Ros-stat, showed a steady increase in births from 2007–2012. In Mos-cow, 101,000 children were born in 2007. By 2012, that number had risen to more than 134,000. While some schools in the center of Mos-cow, like School 122, are under-subscribed, schools in the bed-room communities on the edges of the city, where young families moved into newly constructed apartment complexes, are over-crowded.

Parents at Intellectual, a state-run boarding school for gifted students in western Moscow, took to the streets to protest the merg-er and expansion of their school, which had a student-teacher ratio

of two to one. Students from the school took up the cause, writing letters to President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s mayor and mak-ing a short fi lm that was shown on local news portal Moskva24.

Moscow Deputy Mayor Leonid Pechatnikov responded in an in-terview with Russian daily Kom-mersant that if the parents want-ed to keep that level of staffing, they would have to pay for ad-ditional salaries themselves. “We cannot afford to allocate 378,000 rubles ($5,640) per student. Two students for one teacher is, in fact, a system of tutoring. We have a law on universal education, but we do not have the law on uni-versal tutoring,” Pechatnikov said.

The average amount per stu-dent spent in Moscow schools today is 63,000 rubles ($940).

In search of excellenceIn addition to redistributing funding, the reform’s authors hoped to improve the perfor-mance of students on the Unifi ed State Exam (E.G.E.), which is re-quired for graduation from Rus-sian schools, by combining schools with weaker academics with stronger ones.

Boris Kagarlitsky, a political scientist and the director of the Institute of Globalization and So-cial Movements, said that this sec-ond goal is at odds with the fi rst one.

“In Soviet times, they sought to reduce class sizes so that the teacher could work with each stu-dent. Now per capita funding en-courages schools to fi ll classrooms as much as possible, with fewer teachers,” Kagarlitsky said.

But other experts disagree with Kagarlitsky. Isak Frumin, a re-searcher at the Institute of Edu-cation of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said that forcing smaller schools to merge with larger ones will give more students access to high-quality education.

“There are several schools where the competition was doz-ens of people for one place, but now they were given additional space by combining with other

schools and now they take more children. Opportunities to send a child to a good school have in-creased,” Frumin said.

Writing in a blog on the web-site of independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, local lawmaker Irina Kurash said that it is clear that the school reform has been a success — parents no longer have to “run around Moscow” in search of a good school and teach-er salaries have increased as ad-ministrative costs were lowered, she wrote. Additionally, she noted, 13 schools in Moscow made it into the listing of the top 25 schools in Russia.

“Moscow fi nally has a fair sys-tem of fi nancing educational in-stitutions. Now funding decisions are based on standards and not the status of the school,” Kurash wrote. Previously school funding depended in part on the school’s designation, if it was classifi ed as an ordinary school or had a title that indicated a special cur-riculum, such as “gymnasium.”

Out of options Frumin said that no matter what experts and parents think of the reforms, they are necessary. This year, the number of children en-tering school in Russia has in-creased by 560,000 over last year, and the number is only going to continue to rise at least for the near future.

“In the next few years, we will need between 1 and 2 million new places,” Frumin said. “Either the number of children who will study in a second shift will in-crease, or we should put new school buildings into operation. This is a serious problem for the entire country; we are talking about hundreds of billions of ru-bles. The money has not been fully allocated for it.”

Over the past four years, 4,000 schools in Moscow have been combined into 692 larger insti-tutions — including Intellectual, which merged with Gymnasium 1588, and School 122, which was united along with a kindergar-ten and a school with an inten-sive German-language program, with School 1234, an English-in-tensive school with a reputation for strong academics.

Results?After the merger, the students re-mained in the same building and the music curriculum continued, but School 1234 brought in a new

Moscow Makes the Case for School Reform

Russia instigated a major reform of its educational system in 2010 to improve administration and quality.

Five years into a process to

consolidate and redistribute

funding to schools, results are

being seen, despite protests from

parents and experts.

ALEXEI STROGANOV SPECIAL TO RBTH

No matter what experts and parents think of the reforms, they are necessary, said researcher Isak Frumin.

Parents estimate that the cost of school supplies has risen on average by 15 percent compared to last year.

Regional authorities are trying to help the poorest families with payments at the start of the school year.

What parents think about the changes

Consumers Russian parents struggle with the rising costs of school supplies for the start of the academic year as real incomes fall

As students head back to school,

Russia’s continued economic

downturn and decline in real

income is forcing some parents to

make difficult decisions.

Victoria Gordeichuk, 34, a single mother of a 13-year-old son, used to make enough money to live comfortably in Moscow and also take a nice vacation every year. Today, however, due to the fall in the value of the ruble, her salary is the equivalent of $920 a month.

This year, she spent 20,000 ru-bles ($300) on her son’s back-to-school expenses. Most Russian schools require uniforms, which can cost between 2,500 and 6,000 rubles ($38-$90). Students must also have uniforms for P.E., shoes to wear inside the school build-ing (as Russian schoolchildren must leave shoes worn outside on the streets in the cloakroom), and pens, notebooks and workbooks.

Victoria says the school expens-es have forced her to cut back on the kinds of food she buys.

“Sometimes, I even deny my son his favorite grapes. Previous-ly, I bought them all the time, just like cucumbers and peppers, but they have become much moreexpensive,” said Victoria, adding that she has started to put more of her food purchases on hercredit card.

Parents estimate that the cost

of school supplies has risen on average by 15 percent compared to last year. Meanwhile, the real wages of Russians declined by 9.3 percent in the fi rst half of 2015, according to figures from theRussian State Statistics Service, Rosstat.

News agency TASS reports that parents living in the Central Fed-eral District, which includes Mos-cow and the surrounding regions, will spend the most on back-to-school purchases — 25,000-27,000 ($375-$403) rubles on average.

In the Volga Federal District,

which includes Russia’s third-largest city, Nizhny Novgorod, prices are lower. In the Nizhny Novgorod Region, parents spend on average 10,000 rubles ($150). The average salary in the region is also lower, however — 27,000 ($403) rubles per month. Costs are also high in Russia’s Far East. In the Khabarovsk Territory, par-ents will spend 20,000-25,000 ru-bles, out of an average monthly salary of 36,500 rubles ($545).

Big family, big expensesCosts just go up for parents with

several children, even if not all of them are in school. Last year, Muscovites Irina and Pavel had a third child. Although only their oldest son in in school, educa-tion-related expenses take a major chunk from their income, which is about 40,000 rubles ($600) per month.

“The prices of some items have almost doubled,” said Irina. “His backpack is already three years old, but we have to postpone the purchase of a new one, to wait for discounts. My son is neat; it is the only thing that saves us.”

Social helpThe situation is even more diffi-cult for needy families — the number of which has increased signifi cantly with the fi nancial crisis.

The number of Russians living below the poverty line (monthly income of 9,700 rubles or $145) has reached 22 million, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets told Interfax news agency in July.

Regional authorities are trying to help the poorest families to prepare children for school with lump-sum payments at the be-ginning of the school year; the amount varies depending on the region.

Volunteers also help poor fam-ilies and families with several children get their kids ready for school. In the town of Smolensk in western Russia, a local priest, Fr. Dionysis Davydov, of the Church of the Icon of Our Lady of Tikhvin, put a notice on online forums asking for people to con-tribute money to help needy fam-ilies or donate school supplies.

Natalia Popova, the officer-in-charge of the church’s social ser-vice and charity department, said, “People donate less than last year, but still continue to help — both retired women and even school students bring donations. Now that times are difficult, many hearts have hardened, but we went through a lot and will en-dure this, too.”

School Year Brings Lessons in Economics

Most Russian schoolchildren are required to wear uniforms, which can cost up to $100 per set.

ALEXANDR BRATERSKYSPECIAL TO RBTH is how much parents estimate the

cost of school supplies has risen. Uniform costs have risen by more, in some cases by as much as 40 percent, because they are imported.

or 27,000 rubles is the average amount parents in the Central Fed-eral District, which includes Moscow and the surrounding regions, spent on back-to-school items this year.

15%

$403

IN FIGURES

Why was the decision made to

start the unification of schools and

kindergartens in 2010?

In Moscow in the last three years, about 500 schools have been unit-ed with other schools. This does not lead to a reduction in school accessi-bility — the buildings and the teach-ing staff remain — but to an increase in education quality, because prov-en educational models are taken to a larger number of schools. Usually a strong school is united with oth-ers and introduces its own educa-tional standards, teaching methods and technology. This also results in an increase in economic efficiency, be-cause the costs of the administrative staff are reduced.Are the interests of small but unique schools taken into consid-eration during the unification pro-cess?We believe that each unification must be the result of a deep analy-sis. These unifications cannot be ap-proached mechanically. All regions are given the task of performing an analysis when restructuring their ed-ucational organizations, an analysis from the perspective of education standards. In no way should the stan-dard be lowered.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Dmitry Livanov

RUSSIAN MINISTER OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE

administration and some new teaching staff in the academic subjects in the upper school. The crumbling entryway and concert hall of the school’s 1930s build-ing were remodeled and a new playground was installed. Now, two years later, the graduates of combined School 1234 scored so well on the E.G.E. that the school is now ranked 57th out of all schools in Moscow. After years of struggling to attract newstudents, the arts division intro-duced a first-grade class of 21 students at the opening bellceremony on Sept. 1 and the school choirs held a concert as

part of Moscow’s official City Day celebrations on Sept. 5.

“Things have changed for the better, and many of our fears were not realized,” said one parent with two children at the school, who declined to give his name.

According to a poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) in July, his views are shared by only 15 percent of parents; 42 percent of Russian parents be-lieve the consolidation of schools is wrong. But for nearly half of those who responded, the jury is still out — 43 percent of respon-dents told the pollsters the ques-tion was too difficult to answer.

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Russia Establishes New International Student Association

rbth.com/48227 Special Report

Today the university faces new challenges as international rankings become an important part of recruiting.

In the 1980s, RUDN was one of the first Soviet universities to offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Universities Peoples’ Friendship University was established to encourage communist sympathies in the 1960s, but its legacy is far richer

As it turns 55, People’s Friendship

University draws on its history as

one of Russia’s most diverse

institutions to attract students in

the 21st century.

In late August 1968, 17-year-old Vladimir Filippov arrived in Mos-cow on a late-night train from Uryupinsk, a small town in the Volgograd Region, to begin his studies at Peoples’ Friendship University (RUDN).

He reached his dorm room close to midnight and found that one of his roommates was from Mad-agascar and the other from Cam-eroon. Neither spoke a word of Russian. He spent his fi rst night in the capital treating them to the homemade jam he had brought, but when it came time to go to bed, a problem arose.

“It turned out that the lady who was in charge of laundry and bed linen had already gone home. As we were turning in, they saw that I did not have any. They then moved all the three beds togeth-er, put their two bed sheets on them and put me in the middle. That was how I spent my first night with foreign students. That was it; that was how the peoples’ friendship started,” remembered Filippov, who is today the rector of the university.

Peoples’ Friendship University celebrates its 55th anniversary this year and continues to attract students from all over the world, although the goals that led to the university’s creation are no lon-ger relevant.

When the university opened its doors on Feb. 5, 1960, the Soviet Union was seeking to spread its infl uence to the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America by of-fering higher education to rising leaders from those parts of the world. Soviet officials hoped that after years of living and being educated in the communist sys-

Union to switch to the Western model of higher education, offer-ing bachelor’s and master’s de-grees rather than the Soviet fi rst degree, a fi ve- or six-year course of study.

Today the university still at-tracts students from around the world, but faces new challenges as international rankings become an important part of recruiting.

Inayê Brito, 27, who studied at RUDN after being selected to par-ticipate in a new internship ex-change program between Russia and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in her native Brazil, praised the international character of the university. “I appreciated very much its openness to foreigners,” she said. “It seemed to me that the institution was prepared for the inclusion and teaching of students from anywhere in the world.”

However, she thinks the uni-versity deserves its fourth-place ranking among Russian univer-sities in a recent survey done by Russian news agency Interfax. “The demands and high expec-tations of students are much high-

Zoya Zaitseva, RUDN’s region-al director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, agreed with Brito that the university’s diver-sity is one of its major strengths, but said that to move up in in-ternational rankings, the school will need to focus on again being a place where the best academ-ics want to teach.

“Education became a compet-itive market place for the rest of the world a while ago, but in our case, being still mainly state-sup-ported, it is a completely new thinking,” said Zaitseva. But, she added, RUDN’s position in inter-national rankings is in part a re-fl ection of its low name recogni-tion abroad.

“This is probably one of the most modern, fl exible and pro-gressive universities in Russia,” she said. “We have to make an ef-fort to be recognized globally so that our alums could be mobile and can fi nd a good job without going through all the troubles of proving our diploma is worth something.”

One way of improving the uni-

versity’s reputation is to tap into its vast alumni network, which includes Abbas Yusuf Saleh, a prime minister of Chad; Abdra-mane Sylla, a government min-ister in Mali; and Achieng Ongong’a, the managing director of the Kenya Tourism Board. The challenge, said Zaitseva, is to get these alumni to spread the word about the school.

“RUDN is doing a wonderful job keeping in touch with [alum-ni]. Now they just need to con-vert [these contacts] into pub-licly available and interesting news so that not only market ex-perts can fi nd this information, but also kids and parents,” Zait-seva said.

Filippov, for his part, contin-ues to emphasize the university’s unique focus on promoting friend-ship between people of different cultures and backgrounds. “It is necessary to create an opportu-nity for closer contacts at theeveryday level, both in thedormitory and in the classroom,” he said. “Everything will follow from there.”

Getting an Education in Friendship

The student body at Peoples’ Friendship University is as diverse today as it was in the 1960s. The school has the highest percentage of foreign students of any Russian university.

ALEXEI STROGANOV, MARINA DARMAROS SPECIAL TO RBTH

tem, these young people would return to their home countries and, if not promote communist values, at least encourage their governments to be friendly to the Soviet Union.

The university was staffed by some of the Soviet Union’s lead-ing academics in both the scienc-es and the humanities, and had a reputation as one of the most open-minded schools in Soviet academia. In the 1980s, RUDN was one of the fi rst educational establishments in the Soviet

Since 2013, Russia has invested millions of dollars in an attempt to drive up the position of its uni-versities in internationalrankings.

According to its official man-date, Project 5-100 is focused on increasing the competitiveness of Russian universities in the inter-national marketplace. Fifteen uni-versities were selected for the pro-gram, whose name comes from the overall goal of having fi ve Rus-sian universities in the top 100 of three world rankings: Times High-er Education World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Currently only two Russian uni-versities appear in these rank-ings at all — Moscow State Uni-versity and St. Petersburg State

Ratings Russia makes a major push to increase the standings of its universities in the international marketplace through a federal projec

Project 5-100, launched by

presidential decree two years

ago, sets the ambitious goal of

getting five Russian universities

in the world’s top 100 by 2020.

University — and neither in the top 100. Moscow State Univer-sity’s best showing is 114th out of 700 schools in the 2014 QS World University Rankings.

According to Irina Abankina, director of the Institute of Edu-cation Development at the High-er School of Economics, with Project 5-100, the Ministry of Ed-ucation and Science intends to separate out the Russian univer-sities with the most potential, and give them the fi nancing needed to help them achieve their goals. In 2015 the Project 5-100 univer-sities will receive a total of 10.1 billion rubles ($148 million).

In interview with Times High-er Education, Alexander Polvalko, deputy minister of science and education, said that the program was not just about improving Russian university rankings, but making long-lasting changes in Russian higher education — which will in turn result in bet-ter rankings.

“This transformation has three key objectives,” Polvako said. “We want to change the university en-

vironment, upgrading it to a world-class level by creating a large choice of international ed-ucational programs. Second, we want to reform our university re-search — to join in partnership with leading international re-search teams and to increase our presence in highly cited interna-tional research journals. Third, we want to increase the attrac-tiveness of our universities in order to recruit talented interna-tional faculty and students.”

Since the start of Project 5-100, Russian universities have indeed become more noticeable on the international education market, said editor-in-chief of Times Higher Education, Phil Baty, al-though he noted that the most noticeable school is Moscow State University, which is not part of Project 5-100.

“Moscow State University has been making impressive strides up the rankings recently. I pre-dict it will see further good news when we publish the world uni-versity rankings for 2015–2016 on Oct. 1,” Baty said.

Abankina says that two uni-versities that are in the program, Novosibirsk State University and the National Research Nuclear University, have also been mov-ing up the rankings and are two schools to watch in the future.

Experts are skeptical about the program’s potential for success, however. Alex Usher, the presi-dent of Higher Education Asso-ciates in Canada, said that there are fundamental problems with Russia higher education that can-not be solved quickly.

“The management of universi-ties which are very successful in

rankings is much more ‘bottom-up,’” Usher wrote in a recent ar-ticle for Higher Education in Rus-sia and Beyond. “Russian universities, on the other hand, are very much ‘top-down’. Uni-versity cultures change very slow-ly, so no one should expect Rus-sian universities to suddenly become free-wheeling havens of progressive academic practice.”

According to Baty, the program will only be successful if it is a long-term commitment. “The big-gest challenge is whether or not the reform and investment pro-gram goes far enough,” Baty said.

The project is focused on the pe-riod up to 2020. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

Baty does point out one aspect of Project 5-100 that might con-tribute to its long-term success.

“The most exciting aspect of the reform program is interna-tionalization. Russia must work hard to attract and retain lead-ing global talent from across the world. Too many great Russian scholars in the past left Russia to pursue their careers else-where. This must change. The reforms recognize this,” Baty said.

Unhappy With One in a Hundred, Russia Goes for Five

Moscow State University is Russia’s highest-ranked school in global ratings, but still has room to improve.

GLEB FEDOROVRBTH

IN FIGURES

21  Russian universities are members of the QS World University

Rankings, which include more than 700 institutions. In 2013, only 18 Russian schools were on the list.

$148million will be spent in 2015 on the 15 uni-

versities selected to participate in Project 5-100.

RUDN then and

now

The Soviet government founded the Peoples’ Friendship University on Feb. 5, 1960. On Feb. 22, 1961, the university was renamed Pa-trice Lumumba University after the first democratically elected leader of the Congo. Its first class, made up of 228 students from 47 coun-tries, graduated in 1965. Today, more than 29,000 students from 140 countries around the world are studying at the university. in addi-tion to RUDN’s illustrious foreign alumni, the school has a number of notable Russian graduates. Op-position leader Alexei Navalny and spy Anna Chapman both graduated from RUDN.

er in USP than in RUDN, even though the system is completely diverse in terms of programs, grades, classes, methodology, teachers,” Brito said.

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Could the Iran Nuclear Deal Set a Precedent for

Ukraine?

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PUTIN UNLIKELY TO MAKE WAVES IN TURTLE BAY

IMPROVING EDUCATION FOR ALL RUSSIANS

According to the pundits, the 70th Session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, which

opened yesterday, could be the scene of a blazing rhetorical bat-tle. The General Debate, which be-gins Sept. 28, is currently slated to feature speeches in succession by U.S. President Barack Obama, China’s leader Xi Jinping, Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin and Iran head Hassan Rouhani on the very fi rst day of the gathering.

In today’s turbulent times, the U.N. General Assembly is perhaps the only place where such a di-verse range of speakers can gath-er under one roof for such a dis-cussion.

Of course, the ceremonial na-ture of the 70th anniversary of the event will leave a mark on the con-tent of the speeches, and the lead-ers of the great powers are un-likely to set about listing their grievances without prolix pream-bles and platitudes. Rather, atten-tive listeners will have to read be-tween the lines and fi sh out their own interpretations from the stream of evasive phrases and al-lusions.

It has become common in re-cent years for one maverick speak-er to shake up the rhetoric and bring some life to the staid pro-ceedings. Previously, this role has been played by the presidents of Iran and Venezuela. But at the 70th Session of the General Assembly the bookies’ odds-on favorite is Vladimir Putin.

All eyes and ears will be tuned to the Russian president on Sept. 28, expecting juicy denunciations of the United States and its allies, and off-the-wall solutions to in-ternational exigencies. But all told, such grand expectations may well be in vain. Not only should ob-severs consider that Putin may not make such declarations — he may decide not to make an appearance at all, instead deciding to send a subordinate to give the speech.

The fact is that in today’s inter-national climate, particularly in the U.N., it is hard for the Russian

When I came to Russia 26 years ago in 1989, people with disabili-ties were totally in-

visible. No buildings or forms of transport were accessible, and the media ignored the issue. It was as if there were no people with dis-abilities in Russia. The majority of children with disabilities were educated in segregated special schools, residential institutions or in homeschool programs, often not leaving their homes for months due to the accessibility challeng-es. Children with intellectual dis-abilities were still considered un-educable – a term that was shocking to me – and were receiv-ing no education at all. Orphan-ages also did not provide any ed-ucation for their residents with disabilities.

Some of the people I met dur-ing my work with Perspektiva, an N.G.O. that promotes improved quality of life for people with dis-abilities, stand out as examples of the challenges children with disabilities face getting an edu-cation in Russia. Once a young man named Alexander who had cerebral palsy and had grown up in an orphanage came to us for a job, but he was illiterate. So in-stead of finding him a job, we found him a Russian teacher. I remember Natasha, a young

from which to spread its infl u-ence among the newly indepen-dent countries of the developing world.

In the fall of 1960, Khrushchev’s visit to New York to attend the 15th Session of the General As-sembly lasted three weeks, dur-ing which time the Soviet leader actively engaged in the discussions and attracted global attention. Suffice it to recall the infamous shoe-banging incident in protest against what he regarded as “anti-Soviet” statements.

Under Leonid Brezhnev, the So-viet Union sought to utilize the U.N. General Assembly largely as a platform to promote its ideas in the area of disarmament and in-ternational security. These ideas appeared more sober in compar-ison with the projects put forward by Khrushchev for “general dis-armament in four years,” and al-lowed the Soviet Union to pres-

ent itself as the “bastion of peace,” especially at a time when the Unit-ed States was bogged down in Viet-nam.

But this carefully built construct began to crumble in the late 1970s, when the aging Soviet leadership embarked on its own foreign pol-icy misadventure in Afghanistan.

As a consequence, the U.N. Gen-eral Assembly swiftly turned from being a champion of Soviet for-eign policy into its harshest critic. Forceful intervention in the affairs of small and medium-sized coun-tries unable to resist was not to the liking of most members of the General Assembly.

The Soviet Union’s reputation in the U.N. was restored by Mikhail Gorbachev and his “new think-ing” in matters of foreign policy. Gorbachev’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1988, was one of the most striking epi-sodes in the organization’s histo-

ry and seemed to herald a new era of international cooperation.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russia tried for a while to preserve and build on the political capital gained from “the Gorby effect,” persistently calling for the U.N. to play a great-er role in interntional affairs. This position was welcomed, especial-ly in light of the openly disdain-ful attitude toward the U.N. on the part of the United States.

But in the second decade of the 21st century, Russia has decisive-ly waved goodbye to the legacy of Gorbachev’s foreign policy. If Putin decides to devote his speech at the 70th Session of the U.N. General Assembly to the need for strict observance of international law and a more prominent role for the U.N., he might simply be catcalled.

For many years, Moscow sub-jected Washington to legitimate criticism, but now the Kremlin has demonstrated by example that it recognizes no other means in the defense of national interests other than power politics in cir-cumvention of all international institutions.

Having made this “coming-out,” Russia has effectively nullifi ed the many years of image-building in the eyes of the U.N.; the goodwill toward Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the late 1970s is but a distant memory. Fast forward to today and the reality is that appeals by the Russian president to the anti-Americanism of some delegations in the hall will not work. For many, modern Russia is no better than the United States — it, too, is a great-power predator that is only looking out for No. 1.

This being the case, Vladimir Putin’s best option when speak-ing from the U.N. podium is to refrain from making bombastic statements about respect for in-ternational law, and from accus-ing the United States of numer-ous mortal sins. In any case, there is no way that he can surpass the oddball rhetoric of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ah-madinejad.

As the leader of a great power, Putin should deliver a realistic as-sessment of the current threats, primarily the Islamic State, and show a commitment to creating a mechanism of international co-operation that can withstand them, preferably under the aus-pices of the U.N.. However, given the present state of Russia-West relations, such cooperation is wishful thinking.

Ivan Tsvetkov is an associate professor of American studies in the international relations de-partment of St. Petersburg State University.

Over the 70-year history of the organization, relations between the United Nation and Russia have fluctuated wildly.

As the leader of a great power, Putin should deliver a realistic assessment of the current threats, primarily the Islamic State.

wheelchair user from the Komi Republic, who had studied in a homeschool program. She never got her degree because she was unable to take some of her cours-es as there was no teacher avail-able to visit her home. Then there was Kirill, also a wheelchair user, who studied at a mainstream school in the early grades. When he entered middle school, how-ever, he was supposed to transfer to a homeschool program since all the classes for the upper grades were on the third or fourth fl oor of the building, and the school had no elevator.

Perspektiva was able to secure

a chairlift for Kirill, so he could continue to attend the same school. We were also able to help a parent of a child with Down Syndrome win a court case to allow her daughter to study in a local kindergarten.

There have been many positive changes over the past 10 years to support inclusive education in Russian schools, in which chil-dren with disabilities study in or-dinary schools. The biggest changes have taken place over the past three years. In May 2012, Russia ratifi ed the U.N. Conven-tion on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the situation for

people with disabilities began to improve at a much quicker pace. Russian cities are slowly becom-ing more accessible thanks to fed-eral and local funding, and a new law on education that went into force on Sept. 1, 2013, guarantees inclusive education for children with disabilities and special ed-ucation needs.

Attitudes towards people with disabilities are changing as they become more visible, and Pers-pektiva is playing a role in that. In 2003, Perspektiva began pro-moting inclusive education, de-veloping and supporting pilot programs and raising awareness about the benefi ts of such edu-cation in our campaign “Children should go to school together.” We were the fi rst disability N.G.O. to do this, and our campaign was the fi rst one to raise awareness about inclusive education and its benefi ts. Today, our campaign is widely recognized, and our dis-ability awareness trainings and other inclusive programs are in high demand not only by schools, but by the Ministry of Education.

Ten years later, in 2013, Pers-pektiva launched a national com-petition for Russia’s “Best Inclu-sive School.” We received 100 applications that fi rst year and more than 400 in 2015. This com-petition has been endorsed by the Ministry of Education and Sci-ence, and the ministry is now a key partner in this annual event.

I know many children with physical and intellectual disabil-

Ivan Tsvetkov RUSSIA DIRECT

Denise

RozaSPECIAL TO RBTH

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president to take the moral high ground over his opponents. And without the certainty of victory, Putin will not act — or will at least limit himself to a formal ad-dress.

Over the 70-year history of the organization, relations between the United Nation and Russia have fl uctuated wildly. For most of the fi rst decade of its existence, the United Nations in the eyes of Mos-cow was an enemy stronghold and a tool for the Western countries who had a fi rm majority in the

General Assembly to exert pres-sure on the Soviet Union.

The Soviet delegation during this period (as, indeed, any peri-od) actively used its right of veto, mainly to block the accession of new “pro-American” members.

After the death of Joseph Sta-lin and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power, the Soviet attitude to the U.N. made an about-face. The admission of new countries was now welcomed, and the Krem-lin began to view the General Assembly as the ideal platform

ities who were very excited about going back to their inclusive school or starting school on Sept. 1. But unfortunately they are still a minority, as parents continue to face a number of challenges to get access to inclusive educa-tion – teachers lack skills, knowl-edge and information about in-clusive pedagogy; after testing, children with intellectual disabil-ities are still being sent to segre-gated special education schools; there are insufficient supports at schools for children with vision and hearing impairments; acces-sible transportation is lacking; there is a lack of trained teacher assistants, and funding is not al-ways available to support them.

And these are just a few of the challenges.

However, we at Perspektiva, to-gether with our coalition of 25 regional disability and parent or-ganizations that promote inclu-sive education, are confi dent that this movement, which has been slowly developing, will only move forward and continue to grow with government and communi-ty support. We hope that aware-ness and services will only con-tinue to improve, and more and more parents will be able to choose inclusive education for their children.

Denise Roza is the director of Perspektiva.

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were called defi cit goods, or just “defi cit.” In the 1970s and 1980s, salaries steadily rose, people start-ed to have more money, and ev-erything more or less valuable sold out quickly. Corresponding-ly, the scope of “defi cit” widened. Salespeople took advantage of this and started selling deficit goods “through the back door” or “on the side.” For their part, shop-pers tried to build friendships with salespeople in order to buy items by avoiding the shop coun-ter. Such an action was known by a different verb: “to come by something;” this meant to receive something that was not openly on sale. To be able to “come by” something, people usually paid not just with money, but with something else, even a service that had a connection to the “defi cit.” This system of relationships was captured in the popular proverb “You — to me, me — to you.” As a result, everyone turned out to be interested in the defi cit.

Nevertheless, stores needed to put at least a portion of the mer-chandise on the open market. And when it became known that a batch of “defi cit” had arrived at a store (jeans, for example) and would go on sale in the morning, a line would start forming the night before. So that people did not stand in line all night, lists were established. Anyone who wanted to could sign up for the line and then get a number to save their place.

Today, in this time of abundant goods, the classic Soviet type of line with lists for defi cit items is no longer relevant; nevertheless, there are vestiges of it. In Russia you’ll still fi nd people arriving at a line and asking “kto posledny?” — who’s last — before taking their place or giving their name to the person holding a list of numbers.

a Soviet scholar rediscovered it in the 1970s.

Translator Maria Bloshteyn, who has cleverly replicated the freshness of Chekhov’s prose and the deliberate awkwardness of his parodies, explains in her ex-cellent introduction how subver-sive these stories were.

At fi rst glance Chekhov’s fl ip-pant fables, some little more than extended jokes, seem inoffensive.But look more closely and these seemingly innocent scenarios ex-pose hypocrisy and corruption: a father tries to bribe a teacher into giving his son a better grade; a train carriage becomes a corrupt and stinking social microcosm. One traveler observes: “darkness, snoring, stale tobacco and rotgut — this is Russia all right.”

In the opening story, an apart-ment block full of “artists’ wives” suffers from frenzied, baby-waking singers, sleep-inducing lit-erature or painters who demand their wives pose naked by the win-dow. The protagonist, Alphonso Zinzaga, is a young novelist: “very famous (only to himself)”.

Newcomers to Chekhov might fi nd this slim volume an amus-ing appetizer; for those who al-ready know and love his work, it adds an interesting layer to the portrait of the ironic, melanchol-ic doctor we think we know. Con-fi rmed theatrical Chekhovophiles will scour these pages for a glimpse of the later playwright, with his tragicomic psychologi-cal observations.

As Bloshteyn hopes, these sto-ries have “the effect of an early photograph of someone met in middle age.” Unfamiliar at fi rst, closer inspection shows us “smil-ing eyes” and recognition: “Yes, that’s him! Of course that’s him.”

If you visit a Russian super-market today, you’ll see peo-ple lining up at the cashregisters with full carts — in

this sense, contemporary Russia is hardly different from other countries. However, during the Soviet era, buying goods required standing in line, a particular phe-nomenon that required a specif-ic vocabulary.

Store shelves were occupied by “unsellable” items, that is, goods for which there was no demand. If something that was truly needed went on sale, a line formed for it, sometimes for hours on end. This situation was described with the verbs davat’ — “to give” — or vybrasyvat’ — “to throw out,” a kind of short-ened form of the expression “they threw it out for sale,” as in: “They’re giving coffee at the bakery!” or “They threw out jeans at the department store!”

There was a popular joke about a woman who, seeing a line, walks up to the end of it and asks, “Who’s last?” and then, “And what are they giving?” The joke was honestly not very far from reality: Soviets, even when they did not set out to go shop-ping, would carry a mesh bag with them, just in case. As early as the 1930s, thanks to stand-up comedian Arkady Raikin, this bag got the name avoska. The name comes from the old Russian word avos, which can be translated as “What if?” The bag was carried just on the off chance you might run into a line where something was being given out.

The very existence of a line meant that something truly needed was being “given,” and if it was being “given,” it need-ed to be taken.

Goods that did not exist in sufficient quantity for everyone

"  The Prank” is a collection of stories that Anton Chek-hov hoped would kick-start his career as a writer. Cen-

sored in 1882, the book he in-tended has fi nally been published — in English. The collection has never appeared before, even in Russian, although many of the stories in it are well known and only two of them are new to translation.

This selection of playful tales sheds new light on the young writer. Chekhov appears as a chameleonic jester — here in the guise of a Spanish translator, there as a scientifi c journalist; a malapropistic, elderly land-owner, writing to his educated neighbor; a cantankerous moth-er complaining about marriage. By the end of the book, the au-thor’s romantic pastiche swal-lows its own tail in an ecstasy of metafi ctional, pre-modernist surrealism.

In the 1880s Chekhov was in his 20s and training to be a doc-tor. To pay his tuition fees and support his family, he wrote a series of comic short stories under pseudonyms like Anto-sha Chekhonte. Already pub-lished in humorous magazines, “The Prank” was to be his fi rst book, with the revised stories illustrated by his brother Niko-lai. The imperial censor rejected the manuscript and it lan-guished in a dusty office until

BEHIND THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

BIBLIOPHILE

Recalling the Soviet Past: Line, Deficit, String Bag

Chekhov’s Censored Early Work Finally Published

Learn more about other

Russian words at

rbth.com/30493

Read our updated literature section!

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LITERATURE

TITLE: THE PRANKAUTHOR: ANTON CHEKHOVPUBLISHER: NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSICS

Regina Gluckman, a cheerful and active woman of 93, sits in her New York apartment, telling her daugh-ter stories from her life before World War II and showing pictures from an old photo album. Here she is with her father and her little brother, young and beautiful. “Back then, when I was a child, I did ev-erything boys did – but just better than them,” she said, smiling.

Gluckman has never told these stories to anyone, but now, as she is approaching the end of her life, music therapy – specifi cally songs in her native Yiddish – have stirred long-lost memories and given her daughter an opportunity to record them.

The story of Gluckman and her daughter is captured in a docu-mentary by young Russian direc-tor Olga Lvoff, 27, called “When People Die They Sing Songs.” In 2014, it was nominated for a 2014 Student Academy Award and re-ceived a number of prizes, includ-ing the 2014 CINE Golden Eagle Award.

Lvoff is one of several young Russian documentary fi lmmakers who are now making their mark in the United States.

Lvoff graduated from the School of Journalism at Moscow State University, but even before she graduated she realized that she wanted to make documentaries. She went to New York for gradu-

Movies Russian documentary filmmakers find professional success in the United States

Russian Filmmakers Benefit From American Techniques Russian documentary filmmakers

find that graduate study in the

U.S. helps them put the theory

they learned at Russian

universities into practice.

VSEVOLOD PULYARBTH

ate school and received a master’s degree in Fine Arts and Social Doc-umentary at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

“There are wonderful documen-tary makers in Russia, but there is no industry,” Lvoff said. “That world is very small, and revolves around several groups of people.” She said that in contrast, New York is the center of the documentary fi lm world.

Viktor Ilyukhin, 26, who was a classmate of Lvoff’s at Moscow State University, graduated from the School of Visual Arts a year after she did. His fi lm “Two and Twenty Troubles,” which tells the story of disabled actors working

on a production of Anton Chek-hov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Ni-cu’s Spoon Theater, has already re-ceived numerous acclaimations. “The fi lm is about the idea of over-coming physical limitations through art,” said Ilyukhin. After two weeks of shooting, Ilyukhin completely forgot that the actors had any disabilities at all. “We were just talking about life, about how it has changed,” he said. “It was a revelation to me how many ways they fi nd to express their acting ability.”

Craft and artGeorgy Molodtsov, 29, had a suc-cessful career in Russia before

deciding to continue his studies in the U.S. In 2008, he graduat-ed from the prestigious Gera-simov Institute of Cinematogra-phy (VGIK) and was hired to select fi lms for the Moscow In-ternational Film Festival. Later, he moved to Washington, D.C., for graduate work at American Uni-versity. He received his master’s degree in Film and Media from the School of Communication at American this spring.

“If VGIK offers an outstand-ing education in the philosophi-cal and artistic appreciation of cinema, teaching you to under-stand its depth, [at American] we were instructed how to do it in-side the industry,” Molodtsov said. “I was really impressed by how systemic all the processes are.”

The animated social ad he made to promote a service that makes it possible to refill a drinking water bottle in 500 locations in Washington, D.C., received Amer-ican University’s Vision Award.

Molodtsov’s main American project is an as-yet-unreleased documentary about Anton Bus-lov, a journalist and expert in

urban planning who died in Au-gust 2014 in New York after a lengthy struggle with cancer. Bus-lov, who was a popular blogger, chronicled his illness, Hodgkin lymphoma, and the treatment he received in Russia and the U.S.

Next stepsAll three fi lmmakers have ambi-tious plans for the future, and aren’t limiting themselves to just one country. Ilyukhin is working on several environment-related projects both in Russia and the U.S.; Lvoff is starting to shoot a fi lm with a working title “A Sym-phony One” about Dissociative Identity Disorder formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder and plans to continue living and working in the U.S.; and Molodtsov is in Russia, experi-menting with virtual reality glass-es in his documentary-cum–so-cial project, VRability, which aims to enable people with disabilities to participate in sports.

See Russian Documentaries in New York

The Eighth Independent Russian Documentary Film Festival will take place at several locations across New York including the Anthology Film Archives, DCTV theaters and the Brooklyn Public Library on Oct. 9-11, 2015.The festival features documenta-ries from Russia, Belarus, Lithuania

and the U.S. that were made over the past year and emphasize so-cial topics. Fifteen of the 20 films scheduled will have their Ameri-can premieres at the festival. Some screenings will also include Q&A sessions with directors. For the complete screening sched-ule, visit www.rusdocfilmfest.org

“When People Die They Sing Songs” by director Olga Lvoff is one of the films scheduled to be shown at the festival in New York next month.

Read the full story at

rbth.com/47733

“There are wonderful documentary makers in Russia, but there is no industry,” said filmmaker Olga Lvoff.

One of the Soviet Union’s most popular fi lms, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” celebrates its 35th annivesary this year. Al-though today the fi lm seems like a typical Hollywood romance, when it was made in the Soviet Union of the late 1970s, its themes of women who choose their own – sometimes unconventional – paths to happiness, was anything but ordinary.

Modeled in part on the 1959 Hollywood fi lm “The Best of Ev-erything,” in which three women move to New York in search of success and romance, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” is a story of three girls from the Rus-sian regions who fi nd themselvessharing a room in Moscow.

Ambitious Katerina (Vera Alen-tova, who is also director Vladi-mir Menshov’s wife) is determined

Film Oscar winner “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” was inspired by a Hollywood film

Iconic Soviet Film Celebrates 35th AnniversaryOscar winner “Moscow Doesn’t

Believe in Tears” was a ground-

breaking depiction of Soviet

women at the beginning of the

1980s.

GENNADY USTIAN SPECIAL TO RBTH

to win a place at a university, de-spite having failed at her fi rst at-tempt, and spends her evenings after work studying. Carefree Ly-udmila (Irina Muravyova) sees life in Moscow as a big lottery and hopes to marry a good-looking man with a great Moscow apart-ment. Modest Antonina (Raisa Ryazanova), meanwhile, works as a painter at a construction site and marries a fellow worker early in the fi lm.

Gradually, Katerina becomes the fi lm’s central character. After a brief affair with a high-fl ying fi lm student, she becomes preg-nant and is lectured by his for-midable and domineering moth-er about the sorry fate that awaits single mothers in Soviet society.

Katerina goes on to have a suc-cessful career, demonstrating the fi lm’s overall message that there are no universal rules for fi nding happiness.

“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” had its premiere in the Russian capital at the end of 1979, but was released nationwide only the following year. More than 90 million people went to see it in

the theater, even though it was released on television only the month after it appeared on the big screen. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film in 1980.

The fi lm’s depiction of single motherhood caused a lot of con-troversy at the time – officials in the Soviet fi lm industry did not want to see a successful single mother presented on screen. But the fi lm’s astonishing box-office success, followed by its Oscar win, made them change their minds about this “soppy melodrama not worthy of the Soviet woman.”

Director Vladimir Menshov’s Oscar story was also typical of the Soviet era. He was not allowed to travel to attend the ceremony

itself and, having heard the news of his win on TV on April 1, thought that it was an April Fool’s Day prank.

For years, Menshov’s Oscar stat-uette was kept at the State Cin-ema Committee, which oversaw the Soviet fi lm industry. When in 1989 Menshov was presented with a Nika, Russia’s national film award, his Oscar was also brought on stage during the ceremony. Menshov seized the opportunity to get hold of his statuette and refused to hand it back when the ceremony was over. Like the char-acters in his most famous fi lm, who followed long and winding paths to happiness, Menshov fi -nally attained the most coveted prize in world cinema.

Husband and wife, actress Vera Alentova and director Vladimir Menshov.

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HIS STORY

William Craft

Brumfi eld

A native of Charlotte, N.C., William Brumfield took his first photographs of Russian architecture during avisit to the Soviet Union in 1970. Since that first trip, Brumfield has taken hundreds of thousands ofpictures of Russia, documenting many structures throughout the Russian north that have since fallen into disrepair or been destroyed. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the Humanities in 2000 and last year was awarded the Dmitry Likh-achev Foundation award “for out-standing contributions to the pres-ervation of the historic and cultural heritage of Russia.” He has taught at Tulane University since 1980.

AGE: 71

NATIONALITY: AMERICAN

STUDIED: SLAVIC LANGUAGES

It’s not easy to get William Brum-fi eld to talk about himself. For Brumfi eld, 71, the foremost au-thority on Russian architecture in the U.S., the focus of any con-versation is the work. And the work, fi rst and foremost, is the photography.

“The photography has always been the fulcrum for me to con-vey this knowledge that I have about Russian culture and archi-tecture,” Brumfi eld said.

Although photography has de-fi ned Brumfi eld’s career, he did not train as a photographer. He studied Slavic literature at the University of California at Berke-ley, receiving his Ph.D. in 1973. Perhaps fi ttingly, he fi rst picked up a camera on his fi rst trip to the Soviet Union in 1970.

The only time a conversation with Brumfi eld hints at anything personal is when he talks about the connection between the Rus-sian North and his native Amer-ican South. Born in Charlotte, N.C., Brumfield did his under-graduate work at Tulane Univer-sity in New Orleans, where he has also taught since 1980.

Like the South, Brumfi eld says the Russian North is full of struc-tures that tell the story of a cul-ture clinging to its heritage while searching for a way forward.

“For all the losses, the trauma …there is an extraordinary wealth, much of it in a ruined state. But for the historian, the ruin is also important. This is something of extraordinary power. What created it? Because there’s nothing visible sustaining it now,” he said.

A tireless advocate for the rec-ognition and preservation of Rus-sian architecture, Brumfi eld has published countless articles in English and Russian as well as several major books, including “A History of Russian Architec-ture” (1993), widely used as a text-book in Russian studies courses, and “Lost Russia” (1995), which Brumfi eld described as a book that tried to put Russian archi-tecture into a familiar Western context, “this trope of the ruin as a point of meditation.”

His more recent work, includ-ing “Architecture at the End of the Earth,” which was published in June, approaches Russian ar-chitecture more on its own terms, as an anomaly that doesn’t fi t into the traditional narrative of West-ern art and architectural history.

“It’s interesting because it’s Russia,” he said, adding that in his view, “architecture is as much an expression of Russia as its music or literature. Although it’s rare to fi nd any of the great nov-elists talking about the architec-ture of a church, for example, that ambience is there.”

He has received numerous ac-colades for his work over the

Architecture Tulane professor has spent 45 years photographing the iconic buildings of Russia’s difficult-to-reach places

Brumfi eld’s unique ability to create these powerful images comes from his roots as a schol-ar of Russia itself, according to Blair Ruble, former director of the Kennan Institute in Washing-ton, D.C., and a longtime friend of Brumfi eld. “His interests grew from his love of Russian culture, which makes his photography dif-ferent from that of an architec-tural photographer,” Ruble said.

For now, Brumfi eld is focusing on archiving the images that exist in pre-digital form — as well as taking more.

He would like to do a trip to the Russian south and photo-graph some cities he has never visited, including Krasnodar and Astrakhan. Such a trip would take him in the footsteps of early 20th century photographer Ser-gei Prokudin-Gorsky, whose color photographs of imperial Russia

prefi gured Brumfi eld’s own work.“How much I’ll be able to get

done in my allotted span is very much an open question. I’ve be-come almost fatalistic about it now,” he said.

Although he says that he has spent more time in Russia than any American who doesn’t live here, Brumfi eld has no desire to move to the country and do pho-tography full time, because that would mean giving up teaching.

“We’re trying to create educat-ed citizens and they need to know something about Russian culture,” he said. “To the extent that my work can reach out to our stu-dents, that’s good. I do my job and I have to believe that it’s going to make a difference to someone, because I know that the people who started me on this journey were just dedicated teachers, not art historians.”

William Brumfield: We See Things in Russia We Never Expected to SeeWhat Americans know about

Russian architecture is mainly

thanks to the work of one man,

who has photographed the

country since 1970.

LARA MCCOYRBTH

Mireya Rodriguez: I am going to

visit Russia and would like to see

the classic highlights, but also the

new Moscow and St. Petersburg.

What would you recommend I see?

There is so much to see in the central part of European Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novgorod, Pskov, the Golden Ring towns ac-cessible from Moscow such as Vladimir, Suzdal and Yaroslavl.

In terms of recent develop-ments, Moscow has the more dy-namic architectural mix. The sky-

William Brumfield answered

questions from RBTH readers

about traditional Russian

architecture and the best places

to see it.

scrapers of Moscow City are the most visible and can easily be reached by subway. But new proj-ects are spread throughout the city. Tastes and opinions vary, but the energy is undeniable.

Kimberly Zenz: Where are the best

places to see wooden architecture?

Are there any places where it is still

built or masters exist?

Wooden architecture is alive and well in Russia. Indeed, tradition-al wooden buildings are visible throughout the country. There are also a number of open-air muse-ums where distinctive examples of regional wooden architecture have been reassembled.

The most famous of these sites

is Kizhi Island, in Lake Onega in Karelia. Others are Vitoslavlitsy, near Novgorod, and Malye Kore-ly, near Arkhangelsk.

Yes, there are indeed masters in the traditional crafts of wood-en construction still working in Russia. There is even a school de-voted to traditional construction methods at the St. Kirill Beloz-ersk Monastery, in the northern town of Kirillov.

Charles David Shaw: Where and

when did the first onion dome

emerge? And why in Russia?

Our knowledge about their ori-gins is quite limited.

The earliest visual evidence ap-pears to be an engraving of St.

Basil’s on Red Square in a book by the German scholar Adam Ole-arius (1599-1671). In the engrav-ing, St. Basil’s (a.k.a., Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat) clearly has the elaborate onion domes we associate with it today. They apparently appeared as the result of a major repair follow-ing a fi re that damaged much of the upper structure in 1588.

Why did this form take shape at this time? We are not sure. One hypothesis is that it imitates an onion dome that was presumably over the Holy Sepulcher (the grave of Jesus Christ) in Jerusa-lem in the early medieval period.

Jerusalem was a very impor-tant theme in Russian spiritual

culture in the latter part of the 16th century. Some even consid-ered Moscow the new Jerusalem. Therefore, the argument goes,the onion dome would haveexpressed this idea in the most visible new church of Ivan the Terrible’s Moscow.

We do know that the onion dome became so admired that it replaced more traditional domes on Russian churches far older than St. Basil’s.

Ask the Professor: Why the Onion Domes?

Prepared byAnna Sorokina

years, but he says he doesn’t seek out these opportunities; rather, they fi nd their way to him.

When the National Gallery of Art approached him about cre-ating an archive of his photo-graphs in 1985, it was “not be-cause of some abstract idea — we need to fill in Russia, there’s a gap here — but because they saw my photographs,” he said.

The National Gallery archive led to connections at the Library of Congress, which supported other research trips.

“These linkages have been so unpredictable in my career, but the image has to be there,” Brum-fi eld said. “There’s a higher logic here that goes beyond anything that I could have predicted — it’s the power of the image.”

William Brum-

field attributes

his ability to

visit and pho-

tograph many

hard-to-reach

cities in the

Russian north

to his network

of friends in

the region who

support his

work.

Read more questions at

rbth.com/37769

THE RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY ON THE FRUNZENSKAYA EMBANKMENT

Artists from Russia, France, the U.K. and the U.A.E. will display their work on the buildings belonging to Russia’s Defense Ministry and also on the Andreyevsky Bridge over the Moscow River.

T RAV E L 2 MO S COW. COM

Nine venues in Moscow will take part in the annual Circle of Light Festival. Some of the world’s best

light designers will present videomappings projected against some of the city’s most iconic buildings

in 2-D and 3-D installations and multimedia shows as part of the event.

From Sept. 26 to Oct. 4MOSCOW

THE CENTRAL CHILDREN’S STORE

Amazing stories about fantastic creatures and a parade will turn the facade of the country’s biggest children’s store into a fairytale village.

THE MOSCOW RIVER

Boats projecting light and multimedia shows will run from the House of Music near Paveletskaya railway station to the Luzhnetskaya Embankment. Projections from the boats will be visible on both sides of the river.

THE BOLSHOI THEATER

The facade of the Bolshoi will become a canvas for variations on the opera “Carmen” and the ballet “Swan Lake.”

VDNKH

The revamped VDNKh park and exhibit center will host a light show that includes fi gure skaters. Light installations will greet visitors at the park entrance and accom-pany them along the main promenade.

PATRIARCH’S PONDS

The location memorialized in Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s mystical novel “Master and Margarita” will feature projec-tions of the novel’s characters.

CHISTYE PRUDY (CLEAN PONDS)

The Life in the City light installations will take place in this favorite haunt of young Muscovites.

lightfest.ruThis announcement was produced by the Department for Multicultural Policy, Interregional Cooperation and

Tourism of Moscow

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