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MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has promised to continue Vladimir Putin’s policies after his likely landslide victory in the March 2 presidential election. He appears to be continuing Putin’s speech patterns as well. In his public appearances since Putin publicly endorsed him for president in December, Medvedev has displayed a style of articulation that political allies and pundits say intentionally mimics that of the tough-talking Putin. |
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MOSCOW — The current presidential election campaign has not differed much from previous ones, as the overwhelming majority of television coverage has gone to the Kremlin’s choice candidate, a report from a media monitor released Thursday says. |
 Several dozen police on Thursday afternoon violently manhandled two liberal activists carrying a large sheet of rusty metal with the words “The Iron Curtain Returns” painted on it near the headquarters of the democratic party Yabloko. Grigory Pashukevich and Alexander Gudimov, both members of Yabloko’s youth wing, were detained before they had managed to walk fifty meters with the ironic iron banner as they left the party office at 46 Ulitsa Mayakovskogo. |
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CLEVELAND — U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who has argued she would be stronger on foreign policy than rival Barack Obama, stumbled over the name of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in a debate Tuesday. |
All photos from issue.
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The celebrated opera diva Anna Netrebko, of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, received Russia’s highest state cultural honor in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin presented Netrebko and three other artists at the theater with the title People’s National Artist as the Mariinsky celebrated its 225th anniversary with a gala concert. Putin, who attended the concert, also announced that the state would increase its funding of what he called “the cradle of Russian musical art” to up to 1.5 billion rubles ($62 million) a year. Putin said that now the Mariinsky would have a budget equal to that of Moscow’s Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theater. |
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A DOUBLE ACT
Denis Sinyakov / Reuters
A Russian two-headed eagle is seen against an election poster depicting President Vladimir Putin (l) and presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev in central Moscow on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Voters in 11 regions Sunday will cast ballots in local parliamentary elections coinciding with the presidential election. But they won’t have many liberal opposition candidates to choose from. In the wake of a disastrous performance in the Dec. 2 State Duma elections, the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, is fielding candidates in only one region, while Yabloko is not on a single ballot.
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MOSCOW — Hello to Spring! Goodbye to Winter! Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of either of these festivals, as neither had anyone else until regional officials conjured them up to entice people from their homes and down to their local polling station Sunday. Perks being offered at polling stations in different regions across the country include the chance to win a car, vote for Sochi’s 2014 Olympic mascot, attend free concerts or fill up on free pancakes. |
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Contract electronics manufacturer Flextronics will open a plant in St. Petersburg this year, where the company will produce liquid crystal display (LCD) television sets in premises that formerly housed Elcoteq. Elcoteq is selling its plant in St. Petersburg because the venture proved to be unprofitable. |
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EBD Increases Assets ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Eurasian Bank for Development, an international financial institution founded by Russia and Kazakhstan, increased its assets by 70 percent over the last year up to $1. |
 MOSCOW — Hungary formally signed on Thursday a deal to join Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom’s $15.18 billion South Stream gas pipeline. The pipeline, which will be jointly built by Gazprom and Italy’s ENI, will take Russian gas to southern Europe. |
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NEW DELHI — India and Russia have ended a protracted dispute over the cost of a Soviet-era aircraft carrier which will be now sold at a higher price to the Indian navy in 2011, officials said Thursday. |
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 President Vladimir Putin will offer the next U.S. president a frail olive branch in the person of Dmitry Medvedev next Sunday, when voters dutifully go to the polls to ratify Medvedev as Putin’s chosen successor. Leadership changes in Moscow and Washington this year will provide an opening for a halt in the erosion of U. |
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Kosovo has declared its independence. Russia was only a spectator in the process, cheering as loud as it could and threatening the possibility of independence for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s two breakaway regions. |
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 Tequilajazzz, one of the city’s leading alternative rock bands, performs the second of its two traditional winter concerts on Friday — while the release of the band’s long-awaited new album has been postponed. The band has to play many concerts to finance recording sessions, which, in turn, delays studio work, Tequilajazzz frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov explained. |
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Dozens of teenagers who had gathered, peacefully, to hold a memorial procession in memory of Yegor Letov, the late punk icon and leader of Grazhdanskaya Oborona, and then were attacked by policemen who threw them into a police bus on Sunday, were detained for “minor public order offences,” the police said this week. |
 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s icy blue gaze may soon be replaced by the softer brown eyes of his protege Dmitry Medvedev in the portraits that stare from the walls of tens of thousands of Russian offices. Bureaucrats and businessmen have been snapping up Medvedev photographs ever since Putin — whose eyes famously gave President George W. Bush “a sense of his soul” — backed the former corporate lawyer as his successor last December. |
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 A new production of Richard Wagner’s early masterpiece “Der Fliegende Hollander” (The Flying Dutchman), which premiered on Sunday and Monday at the Mariinsky Theater, received a surprisingly tedious and stagnant rendition from British director Ian Judge. |
 Audiences who came of age in the Iron Curtain era still find it astonishing to contemplate a career like Diana Vishneva’s. Vishneva is the prima ballerina of the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet in St. Petersburg, and appears on its foreign tours, dancing not just its old ballets but also its newly acquired Balanchine repertory. She is a leading guest artist with American Ballet Theater in its New York seasons at the Metropolitan Opera House, dancing both ballet classics and mid-20th-century gems by Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. |
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 Now that sushi has become as predictable as guacamole at cocktail parties, the last word in small bites is overdue for discovery. Zakuski, a Russian tradition dating from Tolstoy’s time, is food made for drinkers, although teetotalers would have a hard time resisting temptation. |
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SEOUL, South Korea — After South Korea began sending soldiers to fight beside American forces in Vietnam, President Park Chung-hee made an unusual plea. He wrote to President Lyndon Johnson to say that his troops were miserable, desperate for kimchi, the fermented cabbage dish that Koreans savor with almost every meal. Chung Il-kwon, then the prime minister, delivered the letter to Washington. When he traveled overseas, he told Johnson, he longed for kimchi more than for his wife. The president acquiesced, financing the delivery of canned kimchi to the battlefield. Now kimchi is set to conquer the final frontier: space. When South Korea’s first astronaut, Ko San, blasts off April 8 aboard a Russian spaceship bound for the International Space Station, the beloved national dish will be on board. |
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 Last week, MTV Russia started a new showbiz gossip show called “Minimum Program,” which promised to tell you “everything you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. |
 MOSCOW — Just days before Russia’s presidential election, the country’s children have no doubt who will win, judging by an exhibition of drawings that opened Tuesday in Moscow. The competition titled “Draw the Future President” so far features only Dmitry Medvedev and his backer President Vladimir Putin, according to Yekaterina Shumeiko, spokeswoman for the organisers, the weekly tabloid Express Gazeta. |
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 HELSINKI, Finland — “I’d prefer to face indoors,” I said to my friends Christopher and Dirk, who had taken me out for dinner on my first night in Finland’s capital last October. |
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Soup & Wine // 24 Kazanskaya Ulitsa // Tel: 312 7690 // Open daily from midday to 12 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Lunch for three without alcohol 1,550 rubles ($64.50) Small but perfectly formed, Soup & Wine is a welcome addition to the restaurant scene in St. Petersburg — a very reasonably priced eatery that’s ideal for a light lunch or somewhere to drop into after a ballet or on your way out for a night clubbing. Housed in what must be one of the tiniest spaces on Kazanskaya Ulitsa, it could, at a push, seat about fifteen people. The designers have done well though, using high stools and high tables to maximize the room’s area, with a small bar at one end and the toilet door curtained off next to it. |
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 “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis. |
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 CARACAS — Four Colombian lawmakers begin their first full day of freedom Thursday, the day after being released by FARC guerrillas. Speaking in Caracas, they told of their years-long ordeal and of other captives left behind in the jungles of Colombia. |
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ALGIERS — The United States may soon sign an agreement with Algeria on the possible return home of Algerian prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, the official Algerian APS news agency reported Wednesday. |
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Advocaat Banned ARIS (AFP) — European football’s governing body UEFA on Thursday handed a three-match touchline ban to Dick Advocaat, Dutch coach of Russian side Zenit St. Petersburg. UEFA’s disciplinary commission handed the ban to Advocaat, who was dismissed from the technical zone for gross misconduct in the second half of the UEFA Cup Round of 32 second leg encounter with Spanish side Villarreal on Feb. |
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Issues Archive