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The city will allocate 1.755 billion rubles ($660,000) this year to the construction of an administration and business center for Russia’s energy giant Gazprom, according to a draft law which passed its first reading in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, despite criticism from many of its members. |
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Fifty-four miners in Kazakhstan and Ukraine were killed in twin blasts Wednesday, providing further evidence of the dangerous state of decades-old mines in former Soviet republics. |
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As victims of Sunday’s clash between the nationalist Movement Against Illegal Migration (DPNI) and Antifa, an anti-Fascist movement, recover in local hospitals, the fight’s participants blame the authorities for their “hands-off” approach and predict that such incidents will be repeated in the near future. |
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MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the resolution of the Kosovo conflict should serve as a precedent of nations’ right to self-determination. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The State Duma on Wednesday tentatively approved a bill overhauling legislation on intellectual property rights and toughening penalties for piracy to six years in prison.
The bill, Part 4 of the Civil Code, is part of a Kremlin bid to squash Western criticism over the widespread piracy of DVDs, software and other goods as it seeks to bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. |
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MOSCOW — In the next few years, Russia can expect to see personal financial wealth grow faster than anywhere else on the planet, save India, a Boston Consulting Group report finds.
Buoyed by a flood of cash from oil and gas exports, the value of stock, bonds and other financial assets held by Russians will grow at 12 percent yearly through 2010. |
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MOSCOW — State pressure on foreign oil companies intensified Wednesday as the Natural Resources Ministry said it was reviewing whether to revoke Total’s production sharing agreement for its Arctic Khoryaga oil field. |
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The global software services company EPAM Systems has announced a merger with one of the largest Russian software outsourcing vendors — Vested Development Inc (VDI). The move is expected to solidify EPAM’s leadership in the Central and Eastern Europe, the company said Tuesday in a statement. |
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The world’s fourth largest producer of building materials, HeiderlbergCement, is investing 140 million euros ($179 million) in cement production in Leningrad Oblast. |
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IRKUTSK — Aeroflot said Wednesday that it would buy long-range airliners from both Boeing and Airbus, a decision that will keep open Russia’s options on international aerospace cooperation.
The decision to buy U.S. Boeing’s hot-selling 787 Dreamliner will meet Aeroflot’s need to strengthen its 90-plane fleet, while an extra order for Airbus’ A350 XWB will support Russia’s push to cooperate with Europe’s EADS. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom, the country’s natural gas monopoly, will supply the gas the country’s power plants need this winter, the company’s chief executive officer said. |
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Secret Budget
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The government’s secret budget spending has almost tripled in the last four years, Vedomosti said, citing the Institute for Economies in Transition.
The classified portion of the 2007 budget is 12.2 percent of the total, or 666.1 billion rubles ($24.9 billion), versus 9. |
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Would it be possible for someone in the United States to kill Alan Greenspan to prevent a review of mortgage rates on his or her private home? Of course not. This would be incompatible with the structure of the state.
In Russia, however, it was possible for someone to kill Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrei Kozlov, quite likely in revenge for the closure of problematic banks (read: minor clearing-houses for money laundering). |
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Democracy does not march very long or very far. It lunges forward into vacuums created by the collapse of colonial, communist or imperial systems. Democratic reforms must then often creep or ooze or simply abide until the next turn of the political wheel makes new progress possible. |
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Finding the right balance in its reaction to Sunday’s referendum in Transdnestr must have been tricky for the Foreign Ministry. For years, Russia has pledged to respect Moldova’s territorial integrity. But Russian diplomats have recently asserted publicly that the right to self-determination should be a factor in the resolution of frozen conflicts in the former Soviet Union. |
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 Musician Goran Bregovic brings his blend of gypsy folk and rock to St. Petersburg.
Composer and guitarist Goran Bregovic, who spearheads a Balkan music craze that adds a rock slant to South-Slavic and gypsy folk traditions, has hardly been out of the limelight for the past three decades. |
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In a unique art project, members of the public are asked to complain and set their grumbles to music.
Complaining can be fun, complaining can be art and complaining can be a very entertaining and enlightening experience. |
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Tsokol, the new name for Moloko club after its move to a new location close to Ploshchad Vosstaniya, has postponed its formal opening until October.
The club, which is now still under construction, proved to be smaller but better-organized than its former premises when it hosted a pre-opening concert by the New York-based band Melomane late last week. |
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Ruin and devastastion were the words used by Ilya Cherkasov, executive director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, when he spoke about the state of the interior of the Shostakovich Philharmonic Grand Hall currently undergoing restoration. |
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This past week brought St. Petersburg’s third annual world physical theater festival, “Vertical: Stop in Time,” to the Music-Hall.
Running Friday through Wednesday, its most publicized attraction was the classical Indian dancer Sanjay Bhattacharya and his Srabosti Theatre, which performed in the first four programs of the festival. |
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“Ya lyublyu iskusstvo i dengi,” Harry Lybke, director of the legendary Gallery Eigen+Art of Berlin and Leipzig said in an amusing accent, encapsulating in a phrase (“I love art and money”) the upshot of a two-day international symposium on contemporary art held at the State Hermitage Museum last week. |
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MOSCOW — Marat Safin was picked ahead of fifth-ranked Nikolai Davydenko and will open against Andy Roddick on Friday when Russia plays the United States in the Davis Cup semifinals, the Associated Press reported.
Davydenko, a U.S. Open semifinalist, was left out of Thursday’s draw by Russia captain Shamil Tarpishchev. |
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STRAFFAN, Ireland — Ryder Cup organizers have made contingency plans for an unprecedented Monday finish at the K Club because of this week’s poor weather. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive