Saint-Petersburg, Russia "Baltic House" International Theatre Festival Contact: Sergey Shub, General Director, Alexandrovskij Park, 4 Saint-Petersburg, Russia 197198 TEL/FAX : 7 812 232 0961 email: fc@baltichouse.spb.ru
Liberty is always unfinished business. --anonymous
Triptych from the Russian Theatre: An Artistic Biography of the Komissarzhevsky Family By Victor Borovsky / Hardcover / January 2001 / 0877457336
Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia by W. Bruce Lincoln; Basic Books, 2001 Ch. TWELVE. PAST AND PRESENT: EVER SINCE THE TSARS OF OLD MUSCOVY first began to gather the lands of Eurasia into a state, the Russians have struggled to determine whether their destiny pointed East or West...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad = Saint Petersburg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Leningrad)
... "Founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 27, 1703 as a "window to Europe", it served as the capital of the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years (1712-1728, 1732-1918)." ...
federal subject of Russia
...
St. Petersburg
2005: 2007:
"Peter in Moscow"
The title is misleading. There is no St.Petersburg in Russia, only Leningrad. A set under such a name...
I love the city. No less than Moscow. In 1917 it "gave birth to revolution." It was a crime against Russia, Peter's Russia. Today it became Russia's capital again, criminal Russia...
The Moscow Railroad Station : Travel from Petersburg to Moscow?
Red, Blue express Trains and the Yellow Train (Pelevin)
...
LEADING LIBERAL DEPUTY STAROVOITOVA MURDERED... Though somewhat inured to violence, Russia's political elite responded with shock to the murder of State Duma deputy and co-chair of the Democratic Russia party Galina Starovoitova, who was slain by gunmen in her St. Petersburg apartment late on 20 November. Her press secretary, Ruslan Linkov, was critically injured in the attack. Starovoitova, 52, had been a democracy activist both before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. She served as one of Yeltsin's advisers on nationalities policies and more recently led efforts to censure Duma deputy Albert Makashov for his anti-Semitic remarks. President Yeltsin expressed "shock and profound anger" at the killing, calling her "one of the brightest figures in Russian politics." Historian Dmitrii Likachev said her killing seems to signal the "outburst of a new Red Terror" (see also "End Note" below). JAC
... AFTER RECEIVING DEATH THREATS. Linkov, a former
journalist, reportedly had compiled a report on contract killings traceable to Duma Speaker Seleznev and Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov, Viktor Krivulin, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Democratic Russia told reporters on 21 November. Starovoitova intended to present the report at the next Duma session, he claimed. Starovoitova had been receiving death threats in recent months over the reports published in "Severnaya stolitsa" about corruption among high-placed officials in the federal and St. Petersburg government, Duma deputy Ludmila Narusova told Interfax on 21 November. Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin told reporters that there is no evidence linking Seleznev to the killing, and Federal Security Service chief Vladimir Putin said that he has no reason to believe the killing was a "political assassination." In October, a close aide to Seleznev was shot in St. Petersburg and critically injured (see "RFE/RL Newsline, 19 October 1998). JAC
STAROVOITOVA MURDER TO GALVANIZE ANTI-CRIME MEASURES? Duma deputy speaker and member of the Our Home is Russia party Vladimir Ryzhkov cautioned against using the tragedy to "press for a ban on the Communist Party or insult one's political opponents." He told reporters that the country should pay attention not to political infighting between right and left but to the "growing wave of crime that is sweeping us all." Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii called on the country not to tolerate violence any longer, saying "we must stop feeling powerless before the increasingly insolent scum." Former First Deputy Prime Ministers Anatolii Chubais and Boris Nemtsov and former Mayor of St. Petersburg Anatolii Sobchak all pointed to the growing lawlessness in St. Petersburg in their comments on the lawmaker's death. JAC
The brutal murder of State Duma deputy Galina
Starovoitova has deprived Russia of its most consistent defender of democracy, human rights, and interethnic cooperation. But more than that, her death on 20 November in St. Petersburg threatens the possibilities of debate in Russia's still fragile democracy, to the same extent that the August 1998 devaluation of the ruble undermined the country's economy.
And that threat explains both the vehemence of the
reaction of Russian political leaders and Starovoitova's recent anticipation of her own fate and her understanding of the likelihood that those who had made the democratic revolution might soon be cast aside. In the decade before her death, at the age of 52, Starovoitova went from being an ethnographer to being a leader of the democratic movement in Moscow. In both capacities, she was never afraid to criticize others who called themselves democrats if they failed to defend democratic principles.
Earlier than almost anyone else, Starovoitova spoke out in defense of the rights of the Karabakh Armenians, a position that led to her 1988 election to the USSR Supreme Soviet from Yerevan and membership in that body's Human Rights Committee.
And even before the Soviet Union collapsed, she
showed both her courage and commitment: In 1990, she won a libel suit against the Communist newspaper "Pravda," which had accused her of urging extraconstitutional means to change the government. But her concern for these human rights and constitutional rules was not, as some thought at the time, merely a reflection of her ethnographic interests. Instead, it arose from her deeply held belief that every individual and every group has certain rights that must be protected.
In 1991-1992, she combined her passion for both
ethnography and democracy by serving as President Boris Yeltsin's senior adviser on nationality issues and as co-president of the Democratic Russia Party. And at that time, she also worked closely with reformers like Yegor Gaidar, Anatolii Chubais, and Anatolii Sobchak. But her relations with all of these leaders, as well as others were often stormy, precisely because of her uncompromising commitment to principle. She was among the most outspoken critics of Yeltsin's ill-fated war against Chechnya. She condemned Mayor Yurii Luzhkov's decision to expel "persons of Caucasian nationality" from the Russian capital. And most recently, she denounced her colleagues in the Duma and some members of the Russian government for failing to take a tougher line against the vicious anti-Semitic remarks and activities of Albert Makashov and other Russian nationalists.
But perhaps because of her willingness to break
with allies when they backed away from their principles, Starovoitova had greater moral than political success. She failed in her bid to run for president in 1996, supposedly for "technical reasons," but more probably because Yeltsin forces did not want her to draw off any reformist votes they felt they needed to defeat communist challenger Gennadii Zyuganov. At the time of her murder, Starovoitova was in St. Petersburg to take part in the Northern Capital political movement, a group she hoped to lead in a liberal challenge to that region's communist governor, Vladimir Yakovlev, in upcoming elections there.
Reaction to Starovoitova's death was swift and
angry. Her former ally Gaidar, speaking for many who had worked with her, said that Starovoitova had "paid with her life" to advance the cause of democracy in Russia. She believed that "democracy in Russia is possible," Gaidar added, arguing that while this belief might seem "trivial" to some, her death shows that it "still needs to be demonstrated."
In a statement, Yeltsin professed himself to be
"deeply outraged" by her murder. He pledged that the killers would be brought to justice because "the shots that have interrupted her life have wounded every Russian for whom democratic ideas are dear."
The Russian president dispatched his interior
minister, Sergei Stepashin, to St. Petersburg to
investigate Starovoitova's murder. And Stepashin
indicated that her death would be investigated under the country's terrorism statute.
But as so often in her short but brilliant life,
Starovoitova herself appears to have described what her murder--the sixth of a Duma deputy since 1993--means. In an interview on Ekho Moskvy a few days before her death, she gave what many are certain to see as her last testament to the country, people, and principles about which she cared most.
"Any revolution inevitably devours its own
children," Starovoitova said. "We, the democrats, should recognize that this is true even of our peaceful one. But now we want to do what we can to save the gains of our revolution from being erased--the freedom to vote, the parliamentary system, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press."
Those who killed her would like to kill those
things as well. Those who remember her best will do what they can, now that she is gone, to prevent such efforts from succeeding.
[Copyright (c) 1998 RFE/RL, Inc.]
... AND ST. PETERSBURG POLITICAL MACHINE IS SCRUTINIZED. The slaying of Starovoitova has increased scrutiny of St. Petersburg and its political process. Starovoitova's assassination is "first of all a St. Petersburg murder, connected with events in the city, which has become a testing ground for criminal groupings and a center for corruption," Duma deputy and Yabloko party member Yurii Shchekochikin told "Segodnya on 24 November. The newspaper claimed that the 6 December election to the local legislative assembly is "perhaps the first one in the city in which the criminal world has at least one representative in each constituency." According to the newspaper, the acting deputy speaker of the city's legislative assembly, Viktor Novoselov, is a close friend of "Kostya the Grave," who "controls" practically all trade in the Moscow district of St. Petersburg. "Kommersant-Daily" the same day referred to the "not too ethical and even manifestly criminal methods being used in the pre-election campaign," noting that Starovoitova herself predicted that someone would be shot during the elections. JAC
... Leningrad's boys in Kremlin:
Liberty is always unfinished business. --anonymous
