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 There was talk of gulags, hunting down dissidents and the Stalinist junta at an opposition meeting on Pionerskaya Square on Wednesday as liberal politicians, veteran dissidents and human rights advocates spoke out against what they see as a tragic return to authoritarian rule and even a Soviet-style police state. The event, organized by the Union of Right Forces, a liberal party, drew more than 1,000 participants. |
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 MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin told voters on Thursday to support his party in Sunday’s parliamentary election, hours before one of his most vocal critics warned Russia was heading for dictatorship. |
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MOSCOW — Sergei Guzev, a train driver from the Vladimir region, said he had always been against the idea of going on strike — until rising inflation made it difficult for him to meet basic family expenses. “As a father of two, I can hardly keep up with day-care costs and school bills,” Guzev said. |
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In an article headlined “Ford Workers Stay on Strike Amid Deadlock” published on Tuesday, Nov. 27, Ford spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko was misquoted when she discussed the effect on production a strike was having at its plant in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast. |
All photos from issue.
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KIEV — The two parties that led Ukraine’s Orange Revolution on Thursday reached a coaliton deal, setting the stage for pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko to return as prime minister. The party of President Viktor Yushchenko and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc signed an agreement on forming the new government, interim speaker Roman Zvarych told parliament. Applause broke out in the parliament chamber and some deputies presented Tymoshenko with a large bouquet of blue and yellow flowers representing Ukraine’s national colours. “I believe that we will succeed in forming an effective government and provide hope for systematic and deep reforms in the country,” said Tymoshenko, wearing her characteristic blonde braids. |
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 Christie’s International in London held the highest-grossing Russian art auction Wednesday, raising $81 million, exceeding the $80 million raised by Russian art sales at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday this week. |
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MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin warned on Wednesday that the arrest of his deputy Sergei Storchak on embezzlement charges was starting to harm the ministry’s activities. Kudrin also said he had requested a meeting with Storchak, who was arrested two weeks ago while Kudrin was attending an international conference. Storchak was charged on Friday with attempting to embezzle $43 million from the state budget. “I need this meeting, and I need it urgently,” Kudrin said in remarks broadcast by all the state television channels on their evening news programs. After his detention on Nov. 15, FSB officers raided Storchak’s home and offices, seizing key documents, Kudrin said. |
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 Plans drawn up by Russian and German architectural studios Yevgeny Gerasimov & Partners and NPS Tchoban Voss have won the tender for the construction of a new administrative center to be known as Nevskaya Ratusha, the press service for the St. |
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MOSCOW — Sberbank’s board of directors overwhelmingly voted in German Gref, the former economic development and trade minister, as the state-owned bank’s new president Wednesday. Gref, the sole candidate for the post, received 96.9 percent of the vote at an extraordinary general meeting in Moscow. |
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Bank Societe General Vostok (BSGV) unveiled a new service for its corporate clients this week — financial institution loan servicing. BSGV managers expect this new service to be popular among financial institutions that lack a regional distribution network and among companies that do not have a license to issue loans to individual borrowers. |
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Ford Back to Work ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ford Motor Company resumed production at its plant in Vsevolozhsk on a one-shift basis Wednesday. The majority of employees (80 percent) are not on strike, Ford said Wednesday in a statement. On Wednesday the plant produced 66 cars as compared to 300 cars a day in normal working conditions. |
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 Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful “tipping point” in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, even its significance. |
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None of my friends knows what to do about the upcoming State Duma elections. Some think that it would be wrong to vote for United Russia since it has turned the campaign into a Soviet-style farce. |
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 One of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands is back and will come to St. Petersburg for one show this week. New York Dolls, a rhythm and blues-rooted, protopunk band, has influenced generations of bands, even if its original career was extremely brief. |
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Rock and roll is becoming relevant again in Russia, says rock historian Andrei Burlaka. “Judging from what happens in this country’s internal politics, somebody (and it’s clear who) wants to revive the Soviet Union — I don’t mean outward pressure, but rather inward pressure on Russia’s own population; they want to bring back the ‘like-mindedness’ that already proved unworkable,” said Burlaka. |
 Until a few years ago, Russian artists used to complain that Moscow didn’t have a museum of contemporary art — even though the Moscow Museum of Modern Art opened in 1999. The museum was either politely ignored or openly derided, and that wasn’t only because of hostile feelings toward its founder, the controversial Georgian-born sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. Critics of the young museum also pointed to the museum’s failure to tell a coherent story about art in the 20th century, to the spotty quality of the works on view and to the lack of a clear acquisitions policy. |
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 Early in “The Silent Steppe,” Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s remarkable memoir of growing up in Kazakhstan in the 1930s, the narrator is sent alone, on horseback, on a 60-kilometer mission to save his family from hunger. |
 Last week, the Zhizn tabloid broke a story about threatening phonecalls that were made to Yana Rudkovskaya, the producer of pop star Dima Bilan. The caller said he had photographic evidence exposing the clean-cut Eurovision runner-up as a gay drug user, and demanded “big money” not to publish. |
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Krokodil // 46 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 570 4240 // Open from 12 a.m. through 12 p.m. // Menu in Russian // Dinner for two 1,535 rubles ($63) Diners are in for a few mild surprises at Krokodil on Kazanskaya Ulitsa. |
 “Lust, Caution” — a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” — is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director. Based on a short story about Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, it was directed by Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born, Hollywood-cultivated filmmaker who brought “Brokeback Mountain” to the screen. |
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KHARTOUM — A British teacher appeared before a heavily guarded Sudanese court on Thursday charged with insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred by allowing pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed. Gillian Gibbons, 54, went into a closed hearing at Khartoum’s criminal court wearing loose fitting dark clothes and looking well despite facing possible conviction that could see her jailed, flogged in public and fined. |
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BAGHDAD — The United Nations on Thursday said it feared an outbreak of cholera in Baghdad where at least 101 cases have been reported in the past three weeks. |
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LONDON — Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard is happy that a win will almost certainly be required in Marseille to reach the last 16 of the Champions League. A flattering 4-1 victory over Porto on Wednesday left Liverpool in third place in Group A behind the Portuguese and Marseille but the momentum has swung towards the Premier League side after a terrible start to their campaign. |
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Issues Archive