MOSCOW, October 31 (RIA Novosti) Putin tries to prove he is not another Stalin/ U.S. trying to agree with Russia on Iran, Kosovo, CFE treaty/ Bureaucrats pressure Putin to stay on as leader/ E.On wants Gazprom to work without intermediaries/ Alrosa waives tax exemption
Gazeta.ru, Vedomosti
Putin tries to prove he is not another Stalin
Russian President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly attended a ceremony on Tuesday to commemorate the victims of persecution under Stalin.
October 30 was declared the Day of Victims of Political Repression in 1991.
It was the first time he traveled to Butovo in south Moscow, where the NKVD secret police executed 20,765 people in the late 1930s. Human rights advocates and analysts detect political motives in the president's decision.
Alexei Makarkin, head of the Center of Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank, told Gazeta.ru that Putin wanted to "put a distance between himself and Joseph Stalin with his personality cult."
Arseny Roginsky, head of the International Memorial Society, said: "It is an important and positive event, no matter whether Putin has been driven by public sentiment this year, 70 years after the Great Terror, or simply wanted to pray for the innocent victims, or did it for political considerations."
Lev Ponomarev, executive director of the movement For Human Rights, was less diplomatic: "Putin did this to make Russia look better in the West, [to show] that Russia is developing freely, and to whitewash himself. But this runs counter to the recent attempts to rehabilitate Stalin."
The president's speech, in which he denounced the persecution campaigns of the 1930s and the ideological reasons behind them, can cut short the alarming trend of recent years, when only human rights activists and the liberal opposition commemorated the victims, while the authorities dissociated themselves from everything connected with the tragic chapter in the country's history.
Putin said in Butovo that millions of people, "who were not afraid to express their opinions, the elite of the nation," had been killed in political purges under Joseph Stalin.
Russians have a mixed view on that period of their history. According to polls, groups justifying and denouncing Stalin are roughly equal, and Lenin seems to be an appealing rather than a disliked figure.
The division can also be traced to the country's leadership. The president has denounced the crimes of the past, but the authorities are restoring the "attractive" attributes of the past, such as the Stalinist anthem, the red flag of the Armed Forces, public beatings of artistic intellectuals, demonstrations at the embassies of countries that have somehow spited Russia, and enforced price cuts "in the interests of the people."
It is even more alarming that the revival of the above elements is accompanied by the reappearance of the birthmarks of the Soviet political system, which can lead to self-imposed isolation of the authorities from the people, and arbitrary rule.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
U.S. trying to agree with Russia on Iran, Kosovo, CFE treaty
U.S. sources say Washington has offered to meet Moscow halfway on Kosovo, Iran and the CFE treaty. The U.S. administration decided to propose a major deal, as certain deadlines on the three disputed issues are drawing closer. However, experts in both Russia and the U.S. do not think this kind of settlement is realistic.
The International Herald Tribune published in Paris recently reported, with reference to diplomatic sources, that the U.S. was planning to propose to Russia a compromise on Kosovo and Iran. The source said the proposal was part of a larger package Washington plans to use to encourage Russia to relax its resistance to Kosovo's independence and to make it agree to slap additional sanctions on Iran.
The UN Security Council will be discussing the Kosovo problem on December 10. December 12 will be another deadline, one set by Russian President Vladimir Putin for Russia to suspend its participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty until it is ratified by all NATO member countries.
Deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' U.S. and Canada Institute, Pavel Zolotaryov, said this kind of mutual concession, if that is what Washington proposed, sounded impracticable because the three issues are unrelated. "The three issues under heated international debate are not related to each other and require different schemes and timeframes to be solved," the expert said.
According to Zolotaryov, Russia does not plan to withdraw from the CFE treaty permanently but wants to free itself from the limitations imposed by the old CFE treaty, which are no longer justified, and to have the revised treaty, a document reflecting the current European realities, ratified. As for Washington's possible compromise on the missile-defense project, Moscow is already aware of what they could propose - the U.S. will invite Russian observers to inspect the bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is not much. What is important is who controls the missile-defense system.
Dmitry Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington, said the news of an alleged deal coming between Russia and the U.S. was certainly exaggerated. He said it was hard to imagine what could make Russia change its approach to such important issues as Kosovo and Iran, all the more so since these issues involve relations with countries which Russia does not control.
Vremya Novostei
Bureaucrats pressure Putin to stay on as leader
Public demonstrations have been held all over Russia in the past few weeks to encourage President Vladimir Putin to run for a third term. Regional parliaments approved appeals to him to remain the country's leader after the expiry of his presidential term in March 2008.
Such initiatives had been advanced before, but they were never so large-scale and numerous. The current "Putin for a third term" calls appear to be a planned campaign, which the pro-Kremlin party Untied Russia intends to join.
Official party policy did not call for a third term for Putin, but it changed after the president agreed to head United Russia's election list without joining the party.
Boris Gryzlov, leader of the party and speaker of the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, described the December 2 parliamentary elections as a referendum on people's trust in the head of state. Why hold such a referendum if Putin plans to lay down his powers in less than six months?
Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the Center for Current Politics in Russia, said: "This is being done to present the success of United Russia as Putin's achievement, and to strengthen his position after the parliamentary elections."
Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute for Strategic Assessments, views the situation as bureaucratic pressure on Putin.
"I am deeply convinced that he actually wanted to leave. However, he has become mixed up in his options," Konovalov said. "First he said he could become prime minister, but later said he would not. He doesn't have a plan. He would remain as the top national and political leader, but he knows that one must not let go of the reins of power in Russia for a half hour, let alone half year."
"They will continue to pressurize Putin to remain for a third term, because for many members of the power elite this means preserving their personal source of income and personal freedom," the analyst said.
Kommersant
E.On wants Gazprom to work without intermediaries
Germany's E.On, Gazprom's largest minority shareholder, has proposed that the Russian natural gas monopoly change the pattern of its operations on Western markets and work without intermediaries chosen from among Gazprom's subsidiaries, such as Switzerland's Rosukrenergo, Germany's Gazprom Germania and Britain's Gazprom Marketing & Trading.
However, the sector's experts think that E.On has raised the issue to strengthen its position in negotiations with Gazprom on the Yuzhno-Russkoye field (Tyumen Region).
"There is no talk of a juridical liquidation of Gazprom's subsidiaries in foreign markets, but we should have one gas supplier," explained a source familiar with the proposals made by Gazprom's German shareholders.
Today, Gazprom Export and Rosukrenergo (50% Gazprom-owned) supply gas to the Hungarian market, and Gazprom Germania and Gazprom Marketing & Trading (both 100% Gazprom-owned) to west European markets. So far, the sale of only small amounts of gas has been involved, but under the conditions of liberalization of the EU gas market some of the German company's consumers may go to new traders if their price offer is more attractive.
Earlier, Dmitry Medvedev, chairman of Gazprom's board of directors, raised the issue of excluding intermediaries from the monopoly's marketing schemes abroad, primarily in connection with gas supplies to Ukraine by Rosukrenergo.
A businessman working on the CIS countries' gas market confirmed that "the question will soon be raised of whether Rosukrenergo will work in east European countries and in Ukraine."
At the same time, it will be difficult to abolish intermediaries who are united by long-term contracts. Therefore, the sector's experts think that the Gazprom management is not likely to support E.On's initiative, while the German company cannot implement it: it controls only 6.43% of the monopoly's shares and has one seat on the board of directors.
Valery Nesterov of the Troika Dialog investment company said the only intermediary who could stop work "in a year or two" is Rosukrenergo and all other statements are just "ongoing speculation." In his opinion, the EU does not want to have a monopoly exporter.
Analysts are convinced that the real aim of E.On's initiative is to strengthen the company's positions in negotiations with Gazprom on the Yuzhno-Russkoye field. For several years now the companies have failed to come to terms on E.On's assets to be contributed in exchange for a 25% stake in the deposit with reserves of 805 billion cubic meters of gas.
Vedomosti
Alrosa waives tax exemption
Alrosa, Russia's state-controlled diamond producer, may boost revenues next year. Last week, the company circulated a letter to Russian diamond-cutting companies, informing them of the decision to forgo the privilege of being exempt from VAT on diamond sales from January 1, 2008. Experts say this spells the end of Russia's diamond-cutting industry.
If Alrosa no longer enjoys VAT exemption, the price of its diamonds bought by Russian cutting companies will go up 18%. However, the company will not pay all VAT on the sales to the federal budget, but will subtract VAT it had paid to its suppliers. This scheme will fetch Alrosa an additional 2.4 billion rubles (around $100 million) in 2008 alone, a company source said, adding that diamond-cutters could also lower their VAT payments by the VAT amount included in the price of uncut diamonds.
Alrosa will need the cash to partly compensate for what it regularly loses on the exchange rate, as diamond prices are set in dollars, and to launch more costly mining projects, the source said.
"We hope that Alrosa's letter is no more than an attempt to draw attention to Alrosa's VAT-refund. If applied, this scheme would mean the end of Russia's diamond-cutting industry," said Valery Morozov, director general of Ruis Diamonds.
The scheme will imply additional costs of around 1% or 2% of a company's turnover, said Nikolai Zhuravlyov, a news spokesman of the Smolensk-based Kristall plant, the largest manufacturer of cut diamonds in Russia. It will put Russian cutters in an unprivileged position compared to foreign companies which do not incur such costs.
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