The St. Petersburg Times
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NO. 639 FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2001 WWW.SPTIMES.RU Putin-Tronic Transferring What’s Turkish CENTRAL BANK RATE Electro-Pop Telecom Traffic For ‘El Torro?’ Austrian CD takes on Telecominvest subsidiary Camel wrestling is filling the Kremlin chief. Page 11. grabs mobile clients. Page 6. seats in Selcuk. Page 19. Mirilashvili Arrest Given Political Overtones Kokh By Masha Kaminskaya men who have fallen foul of prosecutors: Russkoye Video. Media-MOST’s acqui- denied that Mirilashvili’s arrest had STAFF WRITER Media-MOST’s Vladimir Gusinsky, and sition of a stake in Russkoye Video is at “anything to do with either Media- Since St. Petersburg prosecutors arrested businessman Dmitry Rozhdestvensky. the heart of the case against Gusinsky. MOST or [Mirilashvili’s] membership prominent Russian-Israeli businessman Gusinsky, the president of the Rus- In an interview with The St. Peters- of the Jewish Congress.” Mikhail Mirilashvili on Tuesday, specula- sian Jewish Congress, is under house ar- burg Times, Rozhdestvensky, whose trial “We have enough proof to suspect To Take tion has raged over the possible political rest in Spain awaiting a Madrid court de- is due to open Feb. 22, described Miri- [Mirilashvili] of organizing the kidnap- and business motives for the arrest. cision on a Russian extradition request. lashvili as “an old friend.” The two men ping of two St. Petersburg businessmen And while the prosecutors are stick- Mirilashvili is vice president of the Jewish have a long-standing business associa- last year,” said Sydoruk. “He will be offi- ing to their story — that Mirilashvili was Congress, one of the two main national tion, including partnership in the history cially charged within the week.” Charge arrested on suspicion of kidnapping as Jewish organizations in the country. of Russkoye Video. Sydoruk refused to give any details the result of a criminal investigation be- Rozhdestvensky, who has been on the names or age of the kidnapped. gun last September — Russian media charged with fraud and embezzlement, is KIDNAPPING CHARGES Immediately after news of the arrest and sources close to Mirilashvili are fo- head of the board of directors of the ad- At a press conference on Wednesday, broke, Yury Novolodsky, Mirilashvili’s cusing on his connection to two other vertising and film production company however, City Prosecutor Ivan Sydoruk See ARREST, Page 2 Of NTV By Andrei Zolotov Jr. STAFF WRITER MOSCOW — Gazprom-Media head Alfred Kokh announced Thursday that he is taking over control of NTV televi- sion and planning to install a new board that will not include NTV founder Vla- dimir Gusinsky. The announcement was a stunning turn in the months-long battle for the only national television station still in- dependent of the Kremlin. The stage was set earlier Thursday when court marshals seized the disputed 19 percent of NTV shares and forbade Media-MOST from voting with them. “This means that the number of vot- ing shares is 81 percent, and conse- quently Gazprom with 46 percent is the controlling shareholder,” Kokh said at a news conference. Gusinsky’s Media-MOST holding company said the court marshals had violated the court decision and pre- dicted the battle was not yet over. Kokh said he plans to call an emer- gency shareholders meeting within days and bring in new Gazprom representa- tives, including himself. Gusinsky and his closest associates, Igor Malashenko and Andrei Tsimailo, will be ousted. Management changes at NTV are also likely, Kokh said, but he promised to do his best to keep the existing team. Appearing later in the day in a dramatic duel with an NTV correspondent on the channel’s program “Geroi Dnya,” or Hero of the Day, Kokh said he is “satisfied” with Yevgeny Kiselyov as NTV’s general director. After insistent questions about the ALEXANDER BELENKY/SPT Kremlin’s role in his takeover of NTV, Nadezhda Grebeshkova and Vera Bodrina, shown here singing songs at a get-together, are two of the 560,000 people who were left in the city in January 1944. Kokh said in both public appearances that on Jan. 14, President Vladimir Putin had summoned him to his country residence to discuss the future of NTV. Blockade Survivors Who Lived by Bread Alone According to Kokh, Putin demanded that Gazprom-Media should not influ- By Irina Titova that wastes nothing. She could even Leningrad to death until it gave in. to use their imaginations to come up ence the channel’s coverage. STAFF WRITER make glue and bean skins an appeal- But the city never surrendered. with more palatable cuisine — which “Shares, debts, finance is your pre- Lidiya Lifanova, a 77-year-old pen- ing dish. When the blockade ended, only today would look more at home on a rogrative,” Kokh quoted Putin as say- sioner, has not thrown away a piece of Far from being some modern super- 560,000 people remained in the city, carpenter’s bench: soup made from ing. “But don’t touch journalists and bread for 60 years. recycling effort, however, these are which in 1941 had a population of 3.2 joiner’s glue; leather belts; potato peels management, that is my prerogative. I “For me bread is priceless,” Li- habits the women developed during the million. Of those, 1.7 million were and tea from pine twigs for vitamins. am the guarantor of press freedom. Our fanova said. “All these left-over odds 900-day blockade of Leningrad during evacuated during the war while Others dug the sweet soil near the task is to preserve the management and and ends that we have in our family we which the city was surrounded by Nazi 600,000 joined the army. Starvation, bombed-out Badayevsky facility fol- editorial team as much as possible.” give to stray cats and dogs,” she said. troops. While the siege ended 57 years sickness and bombing raids took the lowing the German bombing, where Media-MOST said Thursday that Nadezhda Samsonenko, another ago this Saturday, more sombre cere- rest — more than 500,000. fire had melted sugar into the earth. Kokh had jumped the gun. Both in 77-year-old woman, puts seemingly monies will mark the 60th anniversary At that time, small rations of bread In more morbid circles, some peo- comments from the press service, and useless scrapings from plates in the of its beginning later this year. — which was often more saw-dust ple actually sold meat from corpses on NTV’s news program, the company fridge with which she magically pre- At the beginning of the siege on than flour — were available on a daily and tried to pass it off as pork. Ac- focused on the difference between the pares delicious meals. Sept. 8, 1941, the German army de- basis and distributed according to the cording to Nina Volodina, who was 10 document it had received from the Unappealing frozen fish, three- stroyed all railways into the city, blew following scheme: laborers — 250 years old in 1941, city radio broadcast Moscow Arbitration Court earlier this day-old boiled potatoes left by her up Badayevsky, the city center’s main grams; office workers — 200 and an almost constant warnings about canni- week and the one it got from the court young relatives, a desiccated carrot, food storage facility, shut off electric- additional 125 grams for each of these balistic practices. Once when Anton- marshals Thursday. left-over broth, and spices all combine ity, water and all possible routes of peoples’ dependents. ina Mirinova, now 75, went to take wa- According to Media-MOST, the in her pot to create a delicious soup nourishment and vowed to starve Given the spartan fare, people had See SURVIVORS, Page 2 court froze the 19 percent stake but re- See KOKH, Page 2 2 ❖ Friday, January 26, 2001 NEWS The St. Petersburg Times humanism and culture. ARREST SURVIVORS Samsonenko, who worked in a Continued from page 1 Continued from page 1 school during the blockade, would read the poems of Alexander Pushkin to the lawyer, called a press conference and ter from the Neva river ice-hole she children to distract them from their declared his client innocent, demanding came across the severed head of a painful hunger. Later, in the evenings, his release on bail or on a guarantee that woman who had obviously been eaten. radio announcers would read those he would not leave St. Petersburg. “What was striking is that we were same verses to distract adults from their Novolodsky said that Mirilashvili was not shocked by the sight or the existence hunger as well. calm, if confused by the charges, which of cannibalism,” said Mironova. “We just Indeed, the city refused to give its the lawyer described as extremely vague. tried to fill our buckets, a difficult task culture up. People went to the sym- He also said that prosecutors were trying with the head constantly popping up.” phony, saw plays, visited museums, to frame Mirilashvili, who, he said, did So pervasive were the ugly signs of wrote and read. They visited the zoo as not know anything about the investiga- hunger that one became inured to them well, a storehouse of possible food that tion or what it might be linked to. in time. Samsonenko recalls walking no one ever dared to eat. “[Mirilashvili] came to see me in my down Ulitsa Nekrasova in December, Some people — including Alexan- office [Tuesday] evening and said he 1941 when a man in front her, struggling dra Pukhova, who smiles gently at the was afraid that there was a smear cam- to catch his balance, plopped down on a recollection — even managed to fall in paign being organized against him,” box at the side of the side walk.