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MOSCOW — Arkady Patarkatsishvili, who had claimed that the Georgian government had planned to kill him, died in his mansion in Surrey, southwest of London late Tuesday, age 52. The Georgian billionaire, whose close associate self-exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky said he had complained of feeling “unwell,” died late in the evening, presumably of a heart attack, his spokesman Guga Kvitashvili told journalists in Tbilisi on Wednesday, Interfax reported. A spokeswoman for Surrey Police said by telephone Wednesday that Patarkatsishvili’s death was being “treated as suspicious, as with all unexpected deaths.” An autopsy was to be performed later Wednesday to establish the cause of death, the spokeswoman added. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he intended to become a powerful and long-serving prime minister after leaving the Kremlin but rejected suggestions he would dictate orders to his likely successor. |
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Months of humiliation, beatings, and bullying. Despair and a suicide attempt. A final punch in the stomach that was nearly a deathblow. Contradictory medical records, secrecy, and a suspended sentence for the attacker. The case of St. Petersburg conscript Roman Rudakov seems to incorporate every worst-case scenario that serving in the Russian army can possibly involve. |
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MOSCOW — RosUkrEnergo, the murky gas-trading vehicle half-owned by Gazprom, will continue to handle sales from Russia to Ukraine until a replacement can be set up, company officials said Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Central Elections Commission chief Vladimir Churov is not only the country’s top election official. Apparently, he’s the man to call for anyone who has a problem. Churov answered around 20 telephone calls and several e-mails from voters at a news conference Wednesday. |
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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is trying to assess whether a low-level flight by a Russian bomber over U.S. warships in the Pacific Ocean last weekend was a sign that Moscow is returning to a worrisome “Cold War mind-set,” a top defense official told Congress. |
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Russia With Love MOSCOW (SPT) — More than half of Russians think they are in love, Interfax reported on Thursday, citing survey results published on St. Valentine’s Day. The survey results claim that 54 percent of Russian people consider themselves in love, 35 percent said they are not in love, while 11 percent were not sure, Interfax said on Thursday. |
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 Top managers from around 180 companies attended a presentation of the Nadzemny Express (Nadex) project, which a delegation of St. Petersburg officials hosted in London on February 7-8. City Hall claims that potential investors “are increasingly interested” in the construction of this new light railway. |
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Petmol, UniMilk Merge ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Shareholders of Petmol open joint-stock company have approved a merger with UniMilk, Petmol said Tuesday in a statement. |
 MOSCOW — Presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday called for a 24-hour television channel on farming in an apparent bid to win support from the country’s farmers ahead of next month’s presidential vote. “I have proposed launching a specialized agricultural television channel,” Medvedev told a national agricultural assembly in Barnaul on Wednesday, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Fewer Russians are choosing bootlegged spirits and industrial alcohol over legally produced vodka and liquor, Pavel Shapkin, the president of the National Alcohol Association, said Wednesday. |
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 The protest began after OMON had been brought to Correctional Colony No. 5 and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside unclothed in the freezing cold. ... As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open. |
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In mid-January, India refused to accept its Sindhuvijay submarine after it was refitted with Russian Klub cruise missiles at a shipyard near St. Petersburg. |
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 The author and businessman Sergei Minayev rose to fame in 2006 when “Dukhless,” his cynical novel about thirtysomething Russians, hit the nations kiosks and was proclaimed a bestseller. A compound word using Russian and English, “Dukhless” translates as “soulless” and was called “an epitaph for his generation” in a recent New York Times profile of Minayev, comparing the book to Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984). |
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The rumors turned out to be true. British rock band Deep Purple did perform at the Kremlin for Gazprom and Dmitry Medvedev — as seen from a photo showing the Russian energy behemoth’s head and Kremlin-backed presidential candidate smiling in the company of the freaky-looking old men of rock. |
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Deep Purple and Tina Turner performed at Gazprom’s 15th birthday party in the Kremlin on Monday night, watched by 6,000 people, including company chairman and presidential front-runner Dmitry Medvedev. “This is simply surreal,” Medvedev said on NTV television after the concert. “I started listening to Deep Purple when I was 13. At that time their music was banned. I never would have imagined meeting the famous group in the Kremlin Palace.” President Vladimir Putin opened the celebration, thanking Gazprom, which grew out of the Soviet Gas Ministry, for providing one-fifth of the federal budget and congratulating it on becoming Europe’s largest company by market value, which he put at $350 billion. |
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 As Jethro Tull prepares for its 40th Anniversary U.K. tour in April, the veteran art-rock band returns to St. Petersburg to perform a concert at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Thursday, before going to Moscow and then Odessa, Ukraine. |
 Markscheider Kunst, one of Russia’s highly reputed live bands, has released a new album — its first studio outing that it is not ashamed of, it claims. Called “Cafe Babalu,” the album will be at Modern Art Center on Saturday. “‘Cafe Babalu’ is a romantic, nostalgic song about summer, about a good summertime mood, about kind, warm places,” said frontman Sergei “Yefr” Yefremenko about the title track that sets the mood for the album. |
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 The Fifth International Musical Hermitage Festival which is organized by the State Hermitage Museum and the Hermitage Music Academy promises a host of festive and unusual cultural events during the last month of winter. |
 This week Russian celebrities have been turning their minds to spiritual matters, albeit with a photographer in tow. This week, actor Konstantin Kryukov bagged five pages of Hello! magazine with the christening of his baby in a Moscow church. Meanwhile, Zhizn tabloid filled two pages with pictures of pop singer Nikolai Baskov praying in a church in Greece. |
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Leningrad Restaurant // 11A Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt // Tel: 6444446 // Open daily from 12 p.m. until 1 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with alcohol 2,900 rubles ($116) In a St. |
 The Dutch Student Orchestra (Nederlands Studenten Orkest, NSO) has established the tradition of ending its national tour each year with an international concert date. This year it has chosen to visit St. Petersburg — and added an extra performance — to perform two classical pieces and a new work by a young Dutch composer. This year’s pieces are: Johannes Brahms’ Double Concerto for violin and cello (Opus 102), the German composer’s last work for orchestra, composed in 1887; Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. |
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 It would be easy to dismiss “P.S. I Love You,” about the agonies visited on a young married couple, as the big-screen equivalent of a paperback romance. |
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 ROME — Ronaldo ruptured a tendon in his right knee during AC Milan’s 1-1 draw at home to Livorno on Wednesday and faces nine months on the sidelines, according to Gazetta dello Sport. AC Milan confirmed the extent of Ronaldo’s injury on their website, which he suffered just minutes after entering the fray as a second-half substitute and was taken to hospital. |
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Third-place Spanish premier division team Villarreal CF took on FC Zenit St. Petersburg at Petrovsky Stadium on Wednesday in the last 32 of the UEFA Cup, but left without the result they were hoping for. |
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LONDON — Sprinter Dwain Chambers has hit back at those criticizing his selection for Britain’s indoor world championship team, saying he is being made to feel like a leper. Chambers was named in the team for next month’s event in Valencia on Tuesday after emphatically winning the British trials but UK Athletics said the selection committee was unanimous in its desire not to include him and did so only because they felt there was no alternative. |
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