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MOSCOW — Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov announced Wednesday that he would not run for president and called on other opposition candidates to follow suit or risk legitimizing a “farcical” election. Nemtsov, one of six candidates approved by the Central Elections Commission to run in the March 2 ballot, said he was quitting the race in part because of the opposition’s failure to field a single candidate. “I had always hoped there would be a single candidate from a united democratic opposition, and this had not happened,” Nemtsov said by telephone. Nemtsov’s departure leaves former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, head of the Russian People’s Democratic Union, as the only remaining candidate in the race from the liberal opposition. |
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SCUBA CLAUS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
An aquatic Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost — the Russian Santa Claus) waves to spectators from an aquarium at the Planeta Neptune oceanarium in the center of St. Petersburg on Tuesday. The aquarium also contains sharks, who remained indifferent to their unusual guest. |
 Once in order to save a man’s life St. Petersburg rescue worker Vadim Nenonen, who was named Russia’s Best Rescue Worker of 2007, had to take off almost all his clothes. “A man had fallen under ice and he’d been in the water for about 10 minutes. The man was so cold that he could have died from hypothermia so the only way to warm him up was to do so with my own body,” Nenonen, 44, said.
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MOSCOW — A renowned singer and an acclaimed film director protested the election of a lawyer as chairman of the State Duma’s Culture Committee at a session where old faces were re-elected to most senior positions, including Speaker Boris Gryzlov. United Russia easily pushed through its members as the heads of 26 of the Duma’s 32 committees at an opening session Monday. |
All photos from issue.
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The local branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona has thrown its weight behind a legal appeal against City Hall, arguing that city officials have made illegal changes to St. Petersburg’s development plan. The changes, claim Bellona, give a tacit blessing to rampant illegal construction practices that violate residents’ rights. The first hearing in the case was due to be held on Thursday in the Primorsky District Court. However the hearing was moved to Jan. 18 because the defendants did not show up. The environmental group is supporting a legal appeal that had been prepared by a group of residents in the Dolgoye Lake municipality. The residents felt City Hall had violated their citizens’ rights by failing to organize public hearings ahead of a massive construction project in the neighborhood and restricted their access to information. |
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SIGN LANGUAGE
Alexander Natruskin / Reuters
Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov talks to voters in Moscow on Thursday, as he collects signatures for his presidential campaign. |
 MOSCOW — It doesn’t take an astrologer to see that Dmitry Medvedev will become Russia’s next president. But that’s not stopping astrologers from predicting it anyway. Russian astrologers looking toward 2008 are forecasting a future that could have been scripted by spin doctors from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party that nominated Medvedev, a current first deputy prime minister.
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MOSCOW — Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said his ministry would propose easing access to state auctions of large oil, gas and metal deposits by foreign companies but would tighten control over large-equity deals. Analysts said the measure, if approved, would bring clarity to rules by which the Kremlin treats foreign investors. Investors have repeatedly called on Moscow to introduce a legal framework to policies often driven by resource nationalism. “If before, foreigners were not allowed to participate in strategic field auctions, now the mechanism of access has substantially eased,” Trutnev, who has previously advocated caps on foreign majors, told reporters Monday. |
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SHIP AHOY!
Jon Nazca / Reuters
A woman looks at Cunard’s new ocean liner the Queen Victoria at the port of Malaga, Spain, on Wednesday. The 90,000-ton vessel is the second largest cruise liner the company has ever built. |
 MOSCOW — Gazprom’s oil arm, Gazprom Neft, has received approval from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to buy half of Tomskneft, a Rosneft unit that once belonged to bankrupt oil firm Yukos, as the gas giant seeks to expand oil output. Gazprom Neft will pay 90.5 billion rubles ($3.66 billion) for half of Tomskneft, Kommersant reported, citing an unidentified person close to Gazprom’s oil arm.
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Gridlock Eases ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian truck lines at the border with Latvia eased Tuesday after record delays as drivers tried to leave the European Union before the start of the Christmas holiday. The number of trucks waiting at the Burachki crossing on the road to Moscow shrank 33 percent to 800 as of 1 p. |
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NEW YORK — Prices of existing U.S. single-family homes recorded their biggest annual drop in October, suggesting the housing slump is far from over, a national home price gauge released on Wednesday showed. |
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 A new critical year in East-West relations is fast approaching. It promises to be a year of decision and confrontation. 2008 will present an important challenge for European Union unity, trans-Atlantic cohesion and the determination of the West to stand up to an increasingly assertive and expansive Russia. |
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Moscow has turned into one huge marketplace in the run-up to the New Year’s holiday. Judging from the traffic jams in the city, and especially those near supermarkets, the scale of this year’s shopping bonanza will set a new record. |
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 The final full year of President Vladimir Putin’s presidency will be remembered in his hometown of St. Petersburg as the year when UK Flavours, a pro-tolerance musical event held in July on the sun-drenched beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress, brought a bit of cross-cultural harmony between Russia and the west. The event’s organizers, the British Council, are now threatened with closure amid a diplomatic spat between Russia and the U. |
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 LISTENING TO THE WIND OF CHANGE: The spirit of absurdity in Russia’s recent history was epitomized in one show last week. German hard rockers The Scorpions, whose most famous songs include its perestroika anthem “Wind of Change,” performed for the elite of Russia’s security services, including President Vladimir Putin, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, in the Kremlin on Dec 20. |
 French director Alain Maratrat’s adrenaline-driven production of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera of Carlo Gozzi’s “The Love For Three Oranges” that saw its premiere on March 14 at the Mariinsky Theater became 2007’s first remarkable event. The show was the Mariinsky’s third take on the opera after productions in 1926 and 1991. |
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MOSCOW — This year saw many memorable concerts in Moscow, but the two concerts given in February by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, left the competition trailing in their wake. |
 Given Russia’s penchant for self-reinvention, national memory has tended to be selective at best. During the Soviet period, the achievements of the tsarist era were swept under the rug only to be recollected after communism’s collapse; more recently, nostalgia for Soviet times has come back into vogue. |
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The 15th anniversaries that several public and private art institutions celebrated this year were reminders that Russia’s post-Soviet art world is still in its adolescence. |
 When the cream of the Russian pop scene gets together for a camp television show with plenty of in-jokes and tangled relationships between the stars, it has to be worth a look. But somehow “Two Stars” — now hosted by pop diva Alla Pugachyova and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” presenter Maxim Galkin — isn’t nearly as fun as it should be. |
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It’s probably the world’s most popular New Year’s resolution. Among those promises we make to ourselves on Jan. 1, when we turn over new leaves and hope for the best in the coming year, the decision to quit smoking is for many the most important — and agonizing — of them all. |
 Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82. The cause was kidney failure, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. |
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Magnus Magnusson, Icelandic writer and broadcaster who found fame in the U.K. Died Jan. 7, aged 77. Anna Nicole Smith, U.S. former glamour model and tabloid celebrity. |
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 NEW YORK — Hotel heiress Paris Hilton’s potential inheritance dramatically diminished after her grandfather Barron Hilton announced plans on Wednesday to donate 97 percent of his $2.3 billion fortune to charity. That wealth includes $1.2 billion Barron Hilton stands to earn from both the recent sale of Hilton Hotels Corp. |
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 LONDON — Manchester United went top of the Premier League after a 4-0 romp at Sunderland on Wednesday with Arsenal and Chelsea dropping points. Arsenal, who began the day in first place, were held 0-0 in a late kickoff at Portsmouth while third-placed Chelsea were involved in an astonishing 4-4 battle with Aston Villa. |
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Issues Archive