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The Presidium of Russia’s Museum Union is holding an emergency meeting in St. Petersburg on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the security and preservation of the most valuable art collections across Russia.
At the meeting on Monday, Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of Russia’s Agency for Culture and Cinematography, called for the creation of a full electronic catalogue of Russia’s vast museum resources.
Shvydkoi welcomed President Vladimir Putin’s initiative to form a commission to review and audit the collections of Russia’s museums. The commission, to include representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Culture Ministry, the security services and other state organizations, is due to start work on Sept. 1.
“The review will help to dispel a recent vicious myth about all museum directors and curators being thieves,” Shvydkoi told reporters on Monday. |
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LAPPING IT UP
Yves Herman / Reuters
Russia’s 4x400 m women’s relay team takes a victory lap on Sunday after winning the gold medal at the European athletics championships in Gothenburg, Sweden. Russia topped the medals table with 34 medals, 12 of them gold. See story on page 24. |
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LOS ANGELES — Oleg Maskaev scored a 12th round victory over Hasim Rahman to claim the WBC heavyweight championship on Saturday in Las Vegas, leaving the United States without a heavyweight champion.
Rahman, making his second defense, was the busier boxer throughout and had appeared headed for a narrow victory until the 37-year-old Maskaev came to life late, leaving everything to fight for as the bell sounded for the final round.
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GROZNY — Russia’s intelligence services have found a new way of getting a surrender appeal to Chechen separatist rebels — they are sending it on mobile phones by SMS text message.
Mobile phone subscribers in Ingushetia, which neighbours Chechnya, have begun receiving SMS messages from Russia’s state anti-terrorist committee urging rebels to take up an offer to disarm in exchange for a fair trial. |
All photos from issue.
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WASHINGTON — A 21-year-old U.S. sailor has been charged with espionage for purportedly taking a Navy laptop loaded with classified information and peddling its contents to Russian agents, U.S. officials said.
The Navy said Petty Officer 3rd Class Ariel Weinmann was successful in giving the classified information to a foreign government before he destroyed the computer. |
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Medvedev Pulls to Front
- MOSCOW (SPT) — Voters would pick First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as president if the election were to take place today, a new survey found. |
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MOSCOW — United Russia is looking to absorb another political party in a move that would give the pro-Kremlin party even more influence over the political process.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the secretary of United Russia’s general council, said late last week that talks were underway with officials from another party. |
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Special to The Moscow Times
MOSCOW — Fidel Castro celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday, and admirers from poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Vitaly Vorotnikov, a political hard-liner and former Soviet ambassador to Cuba, praised the Cuban leader. |
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The Cabinet on Thursday approved the creation of a state venture company that is to invest 15 billion rubles ($560 million) in the country’s high-tech sector.
Also known as the “fund of funds,” the Russian Venture Company is set to boost technology investments and diversify the economy away from commodities. |
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MOSCOW — Nelson Algren once warned never to play cards with a man called Doc, never to eat at a place called Mom’s and never to sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. |
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MOSCOW — Prosecutors are investigating the death of a serviceman who suffered severe head injuries after his drunken commanding officer kicked him in the face, a spokeswoman for the regional military prosecutor’s office said Friday.
The comments by the spokeswoman, Natalya Zemskova, contradicted an earlier account of the incident by military higher-ups, who suggested the commanding officer was simply punishing the serviceman for insubordination. |
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MOSCOW — With President Vladimir Putin’s blessing, Boeing struck an $18 billion deal Friday with VSMPO-Avisma to supply titanium for its airplanes.
The agreement came exactly a week after the United States announced it had imposed sanctions on state arms trader Rosoboronexport, which is acquiring VSMPO-Avisma, and could help Boeing land a large planes order with Aeroflot. |
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Ford’s Russian subsidiary incurred a net loss of 60 million rubles ($2.22 million) last year. This seemingly disappointing result followed two successive years of profit, Interfax reported Friday referring to the SPARK database. |
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Lenta Expansion
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Lenta retail chain will invest $80 million into construction of four new hypermarkets across Russia, which will open by the summer of 2007, the company said last week in a statement.
Four other hypermarkets are being constructed and due for completion this year. |
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SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Ukraine’s government is committed to joining the World Trade Organization but may delay talks to ensure membership conditions meet producers needs, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych said Friday. |
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AMSTERDAM — Yukos receiver Eduard Rebgun fired the management of a foreign unit of the company hours after a Dutch court ruling Friday, Interfax reported.
“They stood against the interests of shareholders,” the news agency quoted Rebgun as saying about Bruce Misamore and David Godfrey of Dutch-based Yukos Finance BV. |
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State-owned Sberbank has decreased the interest rates of ruble loans granted to individuals, and increased those of individual dollar and euro loans, Interfax reported Monday, in a move that is likely to have repercussions across the sector. |
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Many people are hooked on fishing — and Olga Romanenko of Astrakhan thought it would be silly not to try making money out of that. Eight years ago she invested $1,000 into infrastructure, six years ago she opened a fishing tourism services business, and now her company’s proceeds are almost $500,000 per year. |
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Managers at Russkiye Samotsvety are hoping to edge ahead of the competition. The jewelry producer has ambitions beyond its traditional area of expertise, and, with the help of bank credit and more efficient spending, is convinced of higher profits to come. |
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Last month’s successful G8 summit in St. Petersburg — which approved a record number of statements and communiques — confirmed that our shared interests, the challenges we face, and the solutions that are needed are all genuinely global in nature. But globalization does not, of course, happen just once a year. |
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Russia’s HIV and AIDS sufferers are not getting the treatment they need despite a dramatic boost in funding because of weak administration, activists will tell a major conference in Canada. |
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The Kremlin’s drive for greater control over Russia’s energy sector will accelerate but, in contrast to other resource-rich countries, will involve fierce rivalry between two state champions, analysts said.
Western oil investors seeking a foothold in Russia have accepted the idea that they will have to partner either state oil firm Rosneft or gas monopoly Gazprom in any big future projects. |
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The State Statistics Service recently published its latest data on the country’s population, which it said was 143.3 million as of April 1 — a drop of 224,000 from the beginning of the year. If we carry on dying off at this rate, there will be just over 142 million of us left at the beginning of next year. |
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The road from my dacha to the center of Moscow provides endless opportunities for traffic cops to lay in wait. On weekends, they stand at the turn-off to the beach, to focus on nabbing drunk drivers. |
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WATERTOWN, Tennessee — Our revels now are ended. This is my last column for The Moscow Times and The St. Petersburg Times.
It seems somehow appropriate, if entirely accidental, that I should be writing it here, in the small town in rural Tennessee where I grew up — indeed, in the same room where almost 40 years ago I first heard mysterious snatches of Radio Moscow filtering through the static on my shortwave radio, and where I spent so many hours reading and rereading Solzhenitsyn: my first exposure to Russian literature, and to a deeper Russian culture behind the chest-beating blather of state propaganda. |
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James Deck and James Heth — or “the Americans,” as their Russian film crew calls them — descended 70 meters down a rusty ladder into the blank darkness of one of Moscow’s serpentine metro tunnels, far below a cluttered construction lot near the old Red Army Theater.
Deck and Heth are the creative and technical advisers on “Trackman,” a thriller set here, filmed in Russian and aimed at millions of eager moviegoers spread across the former Soviet republics. |
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TORONTO — Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation has contributed $1.9 billion to fight AIDS, said Sunday that developing antiviral gels and pills that would allow women to protect themselves is an “urgent priority” in fighting the epidemic.
“We want to call on everyone here and around the world to help speed up what we hope will be the next big breakthrough on the fight against AIDS — the discovery of a microbicide or an oral prevention drug that can block the transmission of HIV,” Bill Gates said at the opening session of the world’s largest AIDS conference. |
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NEW YORK — Singer Boy George tried to perform court-ordered community service on Monday but found a major obstacle when a throng of news photographers prevented him from sweeping the streets of Lower Manhattan. |
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CANBERRA — Australia abandoned on Monday plans for tougher new asylum laws, designed to ease Indonesian concerns, after a revolt by government lawmakers ensured Prime Minister John Howard could not pass the legislation.
The revolt handed Howard the biggest parliamentary defeat in his conservative government’s 10 years in office, and forced him to withdraw the changes ahead of a vote. |
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PRAGUE — Despite being the farthest planet from Earth in our solar system, Pluto has come under attack from astronomers and may be about to lose its status in the battle. |
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GOTHENBURG, Sweden — Britain captured their only gold medal of the European athletics championships courtesy of their men’s sprint relay team on Sunday.
Dwain Chambers, Darren Campbell, Marlon Devonish and Mark Lewis-Francis won the 4x100 metres relay final in 38. |
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NEW YORK — Paul Maholm pitched 6-2/3 shutout innings and Jason Bay and Joe Randa hit back-to-back home runs, leading the Pittsburgh Pirates to a 7-0 win over the slumping St. |
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Issues Archive