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Politics & Society

Russia is seeking to recover its lost global influence. This time it’s coming not with weapons, but with ballet and blinis.

ANNA NEMTSOVA

SPECIAL TO RN

On a warm night in moist Mediterranean air, luxury SUVs slow down and park along the pavement of a busy road trimmed with lilac and pink bougainvilleas. “Bystree! [hurry!]” a little girl yells at her father. “Ya seichas [I’m coming],” he says with a thick Middle Eastern accent. Hand-in-hand they run to- wards a five-storey building and into a basement theatre. Here, away from the noisy construction sites of boom- ing Beirut, a performance by a Russian folk ensemble feels almost surreal: “And the birch tree stands in sleepy silence. And the snow flakes burn in golden light.” The gentle mel- ody of accordion and guitar covers the audience with a blanket of melancholy. In its 60-year history, the Bei- rut Centre of Russian Cul- ture and Science has learned how to transform from a school of Russian language and ballet classes on each of its five floors during the day into a party and amusement centre in the evenings; or, when war hits the tiny coun- try, into a bomb shelter for the Russians of Beirut. The Russian community in Beirut arose on its own, with roots tracing back to Rus- sian orthodox pilgrims who for centuries made their way on foot to Jerusalem on a months-long journey, some staying in what is now Leb- anon. It was reinforced by exiled White Russian offic- ers brought to Beirut by the French occupying army in the Twenties, to work as survey- ors. Eventually, about 3,000 White Russians lived in the city, holding an annual Russian Ball from the Thirties on- wards. The Soviets offered scholarships to Lebanese communists.

Medvedev’s approach

There is something new today. In order to strengthen Russia’s dwindling power in the world and promote Russian language and cul- ture, president Medvedev

Russians make pilgrimage to the River Jordan where Jesus Christ was baptised by John the Baptist

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www.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/main_eng Russian foreign ministry www.memo.ru/eng/memhrc/index.shtml Human Rights Centre eng.perspektiva-inva.ru Supporting grassroots organisations for people with disabilities in Russia

International Dmitry Medvedev hopes to regain some of Russia’s lost influence in the Middle East – and elsewhere – through a new federal agency

Ballet and blinis can win hearts

Remote co-operation through distance learning

To help Russian language teachers such as Marina Yer- milova-Sarieddine, Rossotrud- nichestvo is working on a pro- gramme for distance education funded by Gazprom. The idea is that Russian professors would work with foreign stu- dents without leaving their campuses in Moscow or St Pe- tersburg. The agency is also sponsoring youth exchange programmes for 400 students from different countries this year; that number should be

at least 3,000 in two years' time. “The US and Russia have stopped their military com- petition in Middle East,” says Sergey Vorobyev, a cultural at- taché at the Russian embassy in Lebanon. “Now we are back to compete with the USA and France in Lebanon, but this time in economy and culture.” Mr Vorobyev adds that a sur- vey of 50 countries conducted last year showed that Lebanon was in the top spot for positive attitudes toward Russia.

Representation abroad

founded a federal agency, Rossotrudnichestvo (Russian Collaboration), two years ago. The new agency’s funding has increased at least by 50pc since last year – this year, the state invested £350m in var- ious humanitarian pro- grammes and salaries for em- ployees working in 72 Russian cultural centres around the world. Rather than starting with a blank page, they build on the existing Russian di- asporas, adjusting to the pe- culiarities and interests of even little-known pockets of Russian culture like that in Beirut. According to the deputy head of the agency, Mikhail Kozhokhin, the Middle East is a geopolitical priority re- gion for developing Russia’s influence. The Centre repre- senting the agency in Damas- cus educates 500 students; the Russian Centre in Tel Aviv

runs successful youth con- tests of writing and poetry among the huge Russian- speaking diaspora there. Last year, the agency opened a new Russian Centre in Amman, Jordan.

We really wish Medvedev could play a peacemaker’s role in the Middle East

However, Yekatherina Soki- rianskaya of the Memorial Human Rights group sound- ed sceptical about the amount of money Russia is investing into its Centres of Culture and Science in the Middle East. She suggested that the money would be better spent on some of the republics in the territory of the Russian Fed-

eration: “I have never seen any palaces of culture in Gro- zny or Nazran. Children in Chechnya and Ingushetia do not see Russian people dance ballet or sing opera: they think that all Russian men wear uniforms and patrol their streets.”

A home in the Middle East

“The Middle East has tradi- tionally been in the sphere of serious Russian interests. A huge number of people in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria had their higher education in the Soviet Union – they now occupy high po- sitions in governments, busi- nesses and science. These people, as well as Russian ex- patriates living in the region, look forward to the improve- ment of Russia’s presence in the Middle East,” Mr Kozhokhin said. The community of 10,000 or

so Russians and another 10,000 Lebanese educated in Soviet universities back in Eighties and Nineties look forward to Moscow’s prom- ises to help solve the main issue they have in Lebanon – security. In the last 10 years of life in Beirut, Russian-language professor Marina Yermilova- Sarieddine saw multiple bombings of the city. In 2006, Marina was one of thousands of Russian expatriate women and children evacuated from Lebanon to Russia. Some of them ran from home to the Russian Centre in their slip- pers, she remembers. “We really wish Medvedev could play a peacemaker’s role in the Middle East; the ongoing possibility Israeli bombs will fall on us tomor- row feels devastating,” she said from her Beirut class- room. Russia’s traditional role as

arms broker and industrial engineer to the Arab coun- tries has not gone away. In search of support for mili- tary and business deals, pres- ident Michel Suleiman trav- elled to meet president Medvedev last February – for the first time in history a Lebanese leader travelled to Moscow. At their meeting, Mr Medvedev said that the is- sues of global and regional security was “the most acute topic” in Russian-Lebanese negotiations. Prior to his re- cent visit to Syria, Mr Medvedev wrote in his arti- cle for Syrian Al-Vatan that Russia makes “serious efforts to support the ‘reset’ of Ar- ab-Israel dialogue… to stim- ulate the movement towards peace and stability” in the Middle East.

Common history

The first wave of Russian im- migrants escaping the Bol-

shevik revolution formed a kernel of Beirut’s European professional class. The White Russian officers topograph- ic society drew maps of Leb- anon for the French army. One of them, Alexander Serov, was the son of a fa- mous Russian artist, Valen- tin Serov. The Serov family still lives in the same Ottoman-era house, a block away from the American University of Bei- rut, they have occupied since the Forties. Grigoriy Serof, who prefers the older transliteration of his name, teaches architec- ture at AUB and is also an artist who paints beautiful watercolour landscapes and city views of Lebanon. Last year, Vladimir Putin awarded Serof and his French wife Florance medals for their input in promoting Rus- sian culture in Lebanon. “When I was in Moscow, I

told everybody that after 80 years of my life in Beirut, I stayed 100pc Russian, but I am also 100pc Lebanese,” Serof said with a smile. The director of the Russian centre in Beirut, Mansur Khasanov, said that to have more leverage in the Middle East, Russia needs to build up an information bridge, translate Russian literature into Arabic and publish newspapers as was the com- mon practice in the Soviet period. “The good news is that with help of Rossotrudnichestvo we installed a satellite and flat-screen TV set at the Rus- sian Centre, so our visitors can watch the new Russian channel Al-Yaum in Arabic from 9am to 9pm,” Khasa- nov said. The wave of immigration that came in the past two decades was peculiar: Russian women have their own way of build- ing cultural bridges. Natalya Samaan runs a Russian wom- en’s club in Beirut for 57 Rus- sian women who married some of the thousands of Lebanese men who went to study in Soviet universities, then returned to Lebanon. Some of their husbands are Suni, some Shiite, some Druz, some Christian. “When we married our hus- bands, we also married their religions and political views,” she said. “But at our tables covered with dishes full of pancakes or ‘herring under a fur coat’ they forget about all their contradictions,” she added. One result is a large number of dual-nationality Russian/ Lebanese children, another group the Centre would like to remind of their Russian ties through parties and the- atre evenings.

A new role?

Students at the American University of Technology in Lebanon celebrated Russian traditional students day by reciting Pushkin poetry, and Maslenitsa, the pancake hol- iday, by eating plenty of Rus- sian blinis. Nobody should have illusions that Russia will mediate the conflicts in the Middle East by teaching ballet or cook- ing blinis, Mr Kozhokhin said. But it’s a start to restor- ing Russian influence in the region, he added.

Healthcare There is still little support for disabled Russians as they try to lead a normal, productive life

Time to bring down the barriers

New grassroots organisations have been set up to open doors for the disabled, but progress is slow. Some hope that Sochi's Paralympics will provide a model of access.

CANDICE HUGHES

SPECIAL TO RN

Living with a disability in Russia is an epic struggle. Take Liliana Fyodorova. To leave her apartment build- ing she must descend six steep and narrow concrete steps. Backwards. In a wheel- chair. Three times she’s fall- en, bouncing her head off the unyielding floor so sharply that she was hospitalised. Things have improved in re- cent years, but only a bit. The collapse of the Soviet system meant advocacy groups were free to organise. Russia’s drive for international re- spect and acceptance led to measures that, at least on paper, suggested solutions. But progress is as slow and painful as Fyodorova’s jour- ney from home to city street and often comes only through extraordinary personal will or ingenuity. “In Russia, a disabled per- son is excluded from life with very few exceptions,” she says. “If the government could create a ghetto and exile all the disabled, they’d do it. But because we want to be treated like a civilised country, we don’t do that.” Fyodorova was 27, a wife and the mother of a five-year-old daughter, when botched sur- gery for a ruptured disc left her paralysed from the waist down. A surgical nurse her- self, she had sought out the best doctors at one of the best hospitals. To no avail.

Alexey’s armour

After Russian medicine left Alexey Nalogin a bed-ridden paraplegic teenager, he spent years surfing the internet. At first, he mostly played games. Then he saw a photo of a po- lio victim in the West in leg braces. Nothing like them existed in Russia and Nalogin was in- spired. After several years of trial and error, he’d adapt- ed the idea for his own disa- bled body, inventing a full- body brace that supported his damaged, badly curved spine

Paralympian Amarov Makhdi and coach Denis Mikhailov

If the government could create a ghetto and exile all the disabled, they’d do it

“I came to the hospital in high heels; I left in a wheel- chair,” she says. In deep de- spair, she’d begged her doc- tors for a fatal overdose. A year later, while she was still bedridden, her husband left her, demanding custody of their child. “He said a dis- abled person shouldn’t raise a child.” Fierce anger ban- ished the despair. “I said: ‘I’m going to live!’” The disabled in Russia are invisible people, outcasts. Alexey Nalogin says he’d

Liliya Fyodorova must descend a staircase backward to leave her home

never seen anyone in a wheel- chair until he was stricken himself. Like Fyodorova, he awoke from surgery a para- plegic. A series of bone grafts gone wrong had left him with an S-shaped spine so deeply curved he couldn’t sit up. He was just 14. The system wrote him off, ex- pecting him to die young. “In Russia, someone who’s disa- bled is treated as someone whose life is over,” he says. He spent the next eight and a half years in bed. But as

one door slammed shut, an- other opened: the internet. From bed, Nalogin taught himself computer skills, cre- ated a charity website for a children’s hospital and start- ed a web design business. In- spired by pictures of Western leg braces on the internet, he invented his own full-body brace. It enabled him to use a wheelchair. But, like Fyo- dorova, he faces a daunting obstacle course just leaving his apartment. Fyodorova and Nalogin are

among the 13 million Rus- sians with disabilities, many of whom endure lives con- stricted by the walls of their homes. Russia’s leadership recognises how deep and broad the problem is. “When a disabled person can’t go to the store, get eas- ily on a plane or train, visit a museum, gym or cinema, or get a decent education, it’s not just indifference or carelessness, it’s a direct vi- olation of the Constitution,” president Dmitri Medvedev

said in a speech last year. Under Medvedev, Russia has signed a UN convention on the rights of the disabled. It promised to make Sochi a model of accessibility when the city hosts the 2014 Win- ter Olympics. There are new programmes and services, mainly in Moscow. It’s now possible, for example, for a disabled Muscovite to call a special taxi – if there is some- place to go. But there is al- most no access to public transportation. Many of the new laws are flawed or get only token com- pliance. “Russia has much more bureaucratic inertia than other countries,” says Mikhail Terentiev, a member of parliament and secretary- general of the Russian Par- alympic Committee. The success of Russia’s Par- alympians, who took top honours at the Vancouver games this year, is helping change attitudes. “They show the rest of society that we can make a contribution to improving the image of our country,” says Terentiev, who won seven Paralympic med- als in 1998, 2002 and 2006 in biathalon and ski racing. Like respect, jobs for the dis-

enough to enable him to use a wheelchair. He called it his “ar- mour” and it opened up the world for him. He was 22 years old and had been horizontal for more than eight years. Nalogin now has a small com- pany, Armor, that makes simi- lar braces for people afflicted with spinal problems like his. He employs 11 people and has two workshops in Moscow. Each brace is made to order, beginning with a plaster cast of the recipient’s upper body.

abled are scarce. The govern- ment says 40pc, around 5 mil- lion people, are able to work. But fewer than a million do, despite a law saying the dis- abled must be at least 5pc of the workforce at firms with more than 100 employees. “They think people with dis- abilities will be a huge bur- den to them,” says Denise Roza, executive director of the advocacy group Perspec- tiva, a pioneer in employment programmes for the disabled. Similar barriers mean inclu- sive education remains a dis- tant goal. Schools fear being overwhelmed, Roza says. For Fyodorova, getting a job was a turning point. After winning custody of her child, she spent years in rehab. Then, in 2002, she went to work at Perspectiva: “I start- ed feeling like someone who was useful to society.” She spent two years work- ing on employment issues. The job inspired her to go to law school. She was the first wheelchair-bound student at her university, which in- stalled ramps for her. Fyodorova plans to devote her life to disability law. “There are so many people like me in Russia,” she says.

ANDREY SHIROKOV_ITAR-TASS

NIKOLAY KOROLEV

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