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The police plan to introduce a new registration system in hotels to put in order information about foreign citizens visiting St. Petersburg, the Russian Tourism Union (RST) said last week. The system will be based on a unified computer network connecting hotels in the city, representatives of the union said. “I believe that this will significantly simplify the work of the hotels. We’re living in the 21st century and most of the hotels are using a computer system to register their guests. This would unite all the information. |
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Alexander Natruskin / Reuters
An Ilyushin-96-300 passenger plane stands at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport awaiting inspection Monday. Russia has grounded all such aircraft due to safety concerns. |
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The anniversary this past weekend of the 1991 coup attempt was bookended by two radically opposed memorials: a Friday rally by the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party mourning the coup’s failure and a Sunday ceremony by the liberal Union of Right Forces (SPS) mourning those who died opposing it. On Monday, SPS also marked the national Flag Day holiday — which commemorates the Supreme Soviet’s decision after the failed coup to replace the Soviet flag with the Russian tricolor — with a small demonstration near federal buildings in central Moscow.
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MOSCOW — Former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has thrown down the gauntlet to President Vladimir Putin with a manifesto for Russia in which he trashes the Kremlin’s policies. Kasyanov — who has hinted he may stand for president in 2008 — wrote in the preface to a British thinktank publication that key Putin policies were false, cynical and irresponsible. |
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MOSCOW — Russia urged the international community on Monday to make a joint effort to halt the spread of bird flu, which is potentially fatal to humans and is being carried by migratory birds across its vast territory. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Orthodox Church of Russia plans to widen its activities in Finland, Helsinki newspaper Helsingen Sanomat reported on its website Monday. Aleksei II, the Patriarch of Moscow was quoted as telling Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE’s TV-news on Friday that the Orthodox Church has to take care of the spiritual needs of Russians living in Finland, and to give them an opportunity to attend services that are held in Church Slavonic. |
All photos from issue.
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Despite leading Russia’s second city, Governor Valentina Matviyenko is only the fifth most popular regional politician in Russia according to a national survey conducted by state-controlled VTsIOM polling agency in August. Matviynko was behind four other regional politicians, including Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleyev, Tatarstan President Mintemir Shaimiyev and the Governor of the Krasnodarsky region Alexender Tkachev. |
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Muz-TV, Russia’s home-grown clone of MTV, has withdrawn an appeal against the verdict of Moscow’s Savyolovsky municipal court to close down the channel’s popular prime time talk show “V gostyah u Masyani” for its illegal use of the aminated character, Masyanya, created by St. |
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Extra School Security ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Security around all schools in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast is being stepped up ahead of the first day of school on Sept. 1. The first day of school, normally a festive occasion known as Knowledge Day, is this year the first anniversary of the terrorist attack at a school in Beslan, southern Russia, after which more than 300 people died. |
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MOSCOW — The Supreme Court last week struck down a lower court’s order to disband the National Bolshevik Party, the anti-goverment youth organization that has irritated authorities with its nonviolent, theatrical protests. |
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MOSCOW — After spending the night on a warship beyond the Polar Circle, President Vladimir Putin observed the successful launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine during naval maneuvers last week on the Barents Sea and told reporters that Russia could use cruise missiles to fight terrorists. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said the law allowing him to hire and fire governors had worked well since its introduction in January, but admitted there were delays in nominating new candidates. |
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ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — The jamming equipment made by Aviakonversia is so effective against U.S. planes and missiles that it apparently provoked an angry phone call to the Kremlin from U.S. President George W. Bush in the first days of the Iraq war. |
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ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — The Seventh Moscow Aviation and Space Show, MAKS 2005, saw a record number of visitors this year and yielded nearly $1 billion in deals signed, the air show’s organizers said Sunday. |
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SOCHI, Southern Russia — President Vladimir Putin and Jordanian King Abdullah II held a second day of talks Friday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, discussing bilateral relations and international issues, the Kremlin said. Putin also on Friday inaugurated a newly built tunnel connecting Sochi with five towns in the mountains, including a ski resort where he vacations during the winter. |
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MOSCOW — Grenades that federal commandos fired at the Beslan school during September’s crisis could not have set off the blaze that swept through the hostage-packed gym, the head of the parliamentary commission investigating the Beslan seizure suggested in an interview published Friday. |
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MOSCOW — New U.S. Ambassador William Burns took up his post Friday with a visit to the Foreign Ministry. During a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, Burns presented copies of his letter of credence from U.S. President George W. Bush, allowing him to officially assume his duties in Russia, a U. |
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Ministers, politicians and civil servants are seen as criminals by 19 percent of Russians, while only seven percent of the population associates lawyers with criminal activities, the Levada Center said in a survey earlier this month. |
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This week the Energy and Industry Ministry will start discussions on a project for high-voltage transmission cable that will allow Russia to export energy to Finland, Interfax reported Friday. The 150 kilometer-long cable, to be laid at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, will connect the Leningrad nuclear power plant (LAES), through the village of Kernovo in the Leningrad Oblast, to the Mussalo power plant, in the southeast of Finland. |
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VIENNA — Eastern Europe lender Raiffeisen International is on the lookout for more acquisitions in Russia and the former Soviet Union after buying Ukraine’s second-largest commercial bank, Bank Aval, Raiffeisen said. |
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Alien Stops Ship ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Cruise line operator Alien Holding has suspended the catamaran service between St. Petersburg and Kotka, Finland, which the company launched in May. Market operators said low passenger turnover was the main reason for the suspension of a service Alien claimed would attract 7,400 people between May and October. |
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Last week’s seizure of smuggled cellphones at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport shook the entire mobile industry. The $10 million worth of contraband phones — destined for several nationwide mobile retail chains — was, however, just a fraction of a continuous operation to smuggle phones, phone accessories, and computer parts into Russia. |
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Online banking and mobile banking are catching on as the latest fashion amid IT and financial companies, with strategic cooperation deals and consumer options being signed almost weekly. So far, the investment and hype around online services have not justified the consumer response, limited access to the Internet particularly holding back progress, and companies have partly turned to mobile banking to rouse interest. |
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By the end of this month the committee for investment and strategic projects will declare an open tender for the development of the New Holland island. |
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Morgan Stanley will start trading Russian stocks, bonds and currency instruments as early as next month as top investment banks flock to the country to profit from its soaring markets. The Wall Street bank has hired 35 new employees in Moscow and has received a license from the Central Bank, the head of Morgan Stanley in Russia, Rair Simonyan, said on Friday. |
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Port Safety in Doubt LONDON (Bloomberg) — Primorsk Shipping, Russia’s third-largest shipping company by tanker capacity, said the Russian government should consider alternative locations for a new Pacific port at the end of the oil pipeline from Siberia. |
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The subject of Russia’s sovereignty has recently come to the forefront of political discussion. This in and of itself is surprising and needs explaining. Strangely enough, top government officials are the ones expressing the most concern about the issue. |
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The Kaliningrad region grew faster than any other in the Northwest region in the first half of this year, according to figures released by Ilya Klebanov, the presidential envoy to the region. |
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Now is the summer of discontent for President George W. Bush, a man beset on every side — by a failing war and falling popularity, by scandal, suspicion and rising hostility, even in the red-state heartlands. With each passing day of his long vacation in the Texas wastes, his presidency is shrinking palpably before our eyes, his wildly inflated public image shrivelling like a punctured balloon. |
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Madonna, Barbra Streisand, David Duchovny, Uma Thurman, Sting, Keanu Reeves, Ricky Martin ... What joins this group of very different people? It’s a wish to find themselves, to achieve a happy, balanced and useful life, to improve their health, to join body with mind and mind with soul. |
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MOSCOW — An upcoming political show on NTV will be hosted by Kremlin-connected spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky and feature satirist Maxim Kononenko, whose popular spoofs about President Vladimir Putin are on the web site www. |
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MOSCOW — Boris Nemtsov watches to recall a time when state television had more freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev watches to see what he missed during his busy years as president. Vladimir Ananich and scores of others just watch to relive their youth. Ananich is the brains behind Nostalgia, one of two hugely successful cable television channels that offer viewers a trip back to the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras with a lineup of classic Soviet television programs. |
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COLOGNE — Pope Benedict XVI, wrapping up his first foreign trip, celebrated Mass Sunday for an estimated 1 million people on a field in his native Germany, quieting questions about whether the cerebral conservative could rally the young people who in the past had flocked to see the more instinctively charismatic Pope John Paul II. |
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NETZARIM, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops marched unopposed into the Gaza Strip’s last Jewish settlement of Netzarim on Monday to complete the evacuation of the territory after nearly four decades of occupation. |
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PRAGUE — Former Polish President General Wojciech Jaruzelski on Sunday apologised for the first time for ordering Polish troops to take part in the Moscow-led crackdown on the Prague Spring socialist reform movement in 1968. Speaking to Czech state television on the 37th anniversary of the crackdown, Jaruzelski, Polish defence minister at the time, said the invasion of another Warsaw Pact nation was “very painful for me”. |
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AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE DENVER, Colorado — U.S. writer Hunter S. Thompson got the send-off he wanted when his cremated ashes were shot into the sky at his Colorado home amid fireworks and cheers in a ceremony befitting his over-the-top journalistic career. |
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Senator Questions War WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Republican senator and prospective presidential candidate said Sunday that the war in Iraq has destabilized the Middle East and is looking more like the Vietnam conflict from a generation ago. Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq. |
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Issues Archive