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Two St. Petersburg anarchists, Andrei Kalenov, 29, and Denis Zelenyuk, 22, who were arrested on Aug. 15 in connection with the bombing of a passenger train on its way to St. Petersburg were released from custody Thursday, their lawyers said. Both suspects gave a written undertaking not to leave the Novgorod region where they were detained, Kalenov’s lawyer Renat Gusmanov told reporters on Thursday. The police had also arrested 25-year-old Chechen Khasan Didigov. Nobody has yet been officially charged. St. Petersburg’s human rights groups have questioned the grounds for the anarchists’ lengthy detention. Ruslan Linkov, head of the St. Petersburg organization Democratic Russia, accused the police of a vindictive attitude toward the detainees, who allegedly created trouble for themselves by behaving badly during the arrest. |
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 MOSCOW — Like his predecessor, Viktor Zubkov kept a low profile before being propelled to the post of prime minister, but he maintained close personal ties with President Vladimir Putin since their days together in St. |
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Online Ticketing ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Eurolines and Rossiya Airlines are to improve their online ticketing services, the companies recently announced. The St. Petersburg-based airline opened its online ticket service on its new website, www.rossiya-airlines.com. With the bilingual (English and Rusisan) website it will be possible to choose and buy tickets using a bank card, the company’s press secretary Marina Peshekhonova said on Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Iran’s foreign minister met the head of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency in Moscow on Wednesday, but a Russian official said they did not tackle the vexed issue of the Bushehr nuclear plant Moscow is building for Tehran. Russia’s work on the plant has been drawn into the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with Washington urging Moscow to halt construction. |
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BRUSSELS — Russia told the United States on Wednesday to stop backing Kosovo independence while talks continue, and Serbia warned the EU on Wednesday that it would not accept any decision on Kosovo made outside the United Nations. |
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MOSCOW — The investigation into the mysterious death of Kommersant defense reporter Ivan Safronov, who fell from his apartment building in March, has been halted, Kommersant reported Wednesday. The case was halted because Safronov died “as a result of his suicidal actions,” Kommersant reported, citing the Central Administrative District branch of the City Prosecutor’s Office. |
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MOSCOW — Mosenergo said Tuesday that Gazprom had offered to buy out all of the Moscow city utility’s shares that it does not already own in a deal that could be worth as much as $4.7 billion. By putting a high price on the offer, Gazprom could well boost its Mosenergo stake to 75 percent or more, preventing any minority shareholders from building a blocking stake in the firm. The apparent intention to achieve unchallenged control of Mosenergo represents another step toward Gazprom’s goal of gaining a commanding position in the country’s electricity market. Such an acquisition, however, would hardly change Mosenergo’s investment plans, as Gazprom already owns a majority of the firm’s stock, analysts said. |
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 RBI holding plans to spend $500 million on acquiring land plots in Russia’s regions during the next two years. By doing so, the company hopes to start its regional expansion and operate on a national level. |
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MOSCOW — The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, the world’s largest maker of chewing gum, said Tuesday that it might build a second factory in Russia and acquire local producers to tap “double-digit” growth that is exceeding expectations. “We’re open to more acquisitions in Russia,’’ said Igor Savelyev, Wrigley’s chief for Eastern and Southern Europe. “There’s huge growth opportunity.” Savelyev said the company would decide on the plant’s site next year, Interfax reported. He added that the company would also consider growth through acquisition, although it did not have any specific projects in mind. Savelyev said Wrigley also planned to expand its St. Petersburg plant. |
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 MOSCOW — After an “excessive growth” in consumer lending, Russia’s banking sector faces a slowdown in the wake of the U.S. subprime crisis, a leading Western banker said this week. |
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 The surprise came a bit late. Usually the Russian political system is upended in August, but this year we had to wait until the second week of September to discover who would replace the inevitably outgoing prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov. But a surprise it was, nonetheless. |
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Most Hollywood disaster films follow a pretty standard plot line: A scientist identifies some kind of threat to society, typically the result of some kind of government or business activity. |
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 Sabot, the San Francisco-formed, Czech Republic-based band has returned to Russia after 15 years. On a Russian tour that started Wednesday in Yekaterinburg, the instrumental jazz-punk duo will also perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the cities the band visited in 1991 and 1992, just before and soon after the Soviet Union fell apart. |
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Dutch Punch, an annual celebration of underground music and arts from the Netherlands, kicked off with a party at Revolution club on Tuesday that centered around a huge bowl of Dutch punch. |
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Now in its tenth year, the city’s groundbreaking Early Music Festival returns this week. Every fall, vibrant performances of its refined ensembles evoke, embody and revive the long-lost noble spirit of St. Petersburg. The event, subtitled this year “Earth And Sky” kicks off on Sunday with a concert by the French ensemble “Le Poeme Harmonique.” The performance at the Glinka Philharmonic — showcasing old French romances — is titled “Aux Marches du Palais” (On the way to the Palace). Established in 1997 by Vincent Dumestre, this ensemble specializes in 17th century music with an interest in reviving the early 17th-century French and Italian madrigal. |
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 St. Petersburg has a huge network of rails set in its roadways and electric wires running overhead to serve electric trams and, although trams may be progressively playing a lesser role in urban transport and lines are being shifted to outlying city districts, they still remain visible on city center streets. |
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St. Petersburg archeologists earlier this month discovered the wreck of a class of ship used in the exploration of the Antarctic in the early 19th century. The shipwreck was found lying in differing depths of between 19 and 29 meters on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland. The discovery of the wreckage of the Svir, a sister vessel to the famous Mirny frigate, the first to reach the Antarctic coast in 1820, refutes the two-century-old hypothesis reached by marine researchers and historians that the sunken ship was swept to deeper seas away from the Gulf as a result of a storm in October 1824. “In fact the vessel went straight to the sea bottom immediately after it was hit by the storm, providing limited time for the 115-member crew to abandon ship,” said Andrei Lukoshkov, who led a six-man team of scholars and divers in a 12-day archeological expedition to the Gulf of Finland. |
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 Few contemporary writers have been less overtly contemporary than Tatyana Tolstaya. The stories on which her high reputation still largely rests were written some 20 years ago, and they were hardly of their time even then. |
 The advertising slogan for STS’s new drama series had an apocalyptic ring to it: “How can you live if you will soon be 30?” But the song playing over the opening scene of “30-Year-Olds” hinted at a resigned approach to the dying of the light. It was Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive. |
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Vostochny Ugolok // 52 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa. Tel: 713 5747 // Open 24 hours. // Menu is Russian and English // Dinner for two 1,296 rubles ($50) For a small country with a troubled past and a relatively arid climate, Azerbaijan, like its Caucasus neighbors Georgia and Armenia, has a culinary tradition overflowing with intricate and belly-filling taste combinations derived from a number of influences. |
 A scattershot screen adaptation of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s 2002 satirical beach read, “The Nanny Diaries” has one unassailable asset. As this exposé of the rich and miserable on the Upper East Side wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney. Linney defies a screenplay that paints her character, Mrs. |
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BEIJING — World number four and top seed Nikolai Davydenko was bounced out of the second round of the China Open by Croatian teenager Marin Cilic on Thursday, losing 6-3 6-4 in the first upset of the tournament. Less than a week after his U.S. Open semi-final defeat to Roger Federer, the normally indefatigable Russian looked out of sorts in his first encounter with the latest in a line of tall, big-serving Croatians to hit the ATP circuit. |
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