I don't know if Canon have a service centre there, but it might be worth giving this lot a bell and asking:
http://www.canon.co.uk/Contact_Us/Ca...ope/Russia.asp
Even if they can't help you directly, they should be able to point you to someone who can.
If that goes nowhere, I suggest you trawl the phone book to see if you can find a service company that does DV cams. I'm sure for the usual bottle or two of Vodka you'd get some traction there.
A half decent cam techie will sort it in pretty short order.
I've just had a very thorough scrute of my HV20 BTW, and it appears (to my sad eye's, anyway) that in order to obtain access to the head adjustment screw, the plastic panel BELOW the tape compartment door needs to be removed (it's the one housing the power socket and bearing the Canon sticker). Simply removeing the tape door outer skin appears to leave the loaded tape and head assembly obscured by this lower moulding. I count 8 screws.
A similarly thorough scrute of my A1 was quite revealing. Similar to the HV20, when the tape is loaded, the tape path/ head assembly is obscured by the plastic moulding/ skin of the camera body itself, which on the A1 doesn't appear removeably without dismantling the entire camera.
HOWEVER, if you look carefully under the handstrap, where the centre of your palm sits when hand holding the camera, you will find two ovoid plastic "flip outs", obviously designed to allow access to specific parts of the tape path/ head assembly.
From this I would deduce that the A1 would be a better/ easier bet to "tweak" to get these tapes to read.
No, I'm not daring you to have a go yourself, just pointing out what appears to be obvious.
I'll stay tuned for the next exciting episode.
CS