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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Moscow had to cede some of its powers to regional governments if it is to be successful in rooting out the corruption he described as having become a “way of life” in the country. Medvedev’s comments, made during the presentation of an ambitious anti-corruption program to federal officials and lawmakers, would suggest a break with the policies of his predecessor Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, who engineered a huge shift of authority from regional governments to the Kremlin during his eight years as president. Some analysts, however, were skeptical Wednesday that Medvedev’s plans would include any radical measures like the return of gubernatorial elections. |
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EASY RIDERS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Scooter riders demonstrate their skills on Palace Square last Friday. Bikers, cyclists, rollerbladers, skaters and skateboarders regularly assemble on the square at about midnight on Fridays during the White Nights to perform tricks and begin rides round the city. |
 SPITSINO, Pskov Region — Heiner Berr was inspired to start a resort on Chudskoye Lake, a sprawling body of water in northwest Russia, when a local official showed him the site and promised to support the project. “Very naively, we agreed and started,” the German businessman said in an interview. “In the first years, there was only trouble.” Sitting in a wooden cabin, Berr described how he turned a beautiful but barren stretch of land into a European-style resort called Chudskoye Podvorye, which now has 43 cabins amid a landscape of sand dunes and forests.
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All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Five years on, the circumstances surrounding the death of Yury Shchekochikhin, a liberal State Duma deputy and one of the country’s most fearless investigative journalists, remain an enigma. Shchekochikhin, who penned exposes of official corruption for Novaya Gazeta, died five years ago Thursday at the age of 53 after several days of intense fever, during which his hair fell out and his skin peeled away in layers. The official diagnosis showed that Shchekochikhin died from Lyell’s syndrome, also known as Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis, a grave dermatological condition often caused by an allergic reaction. |
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EURO HERO
Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters
President Dmitry Medvedev (r) and national soccer player Andrei Arshavin share a laugh at a news conference on Wednesday. On Thursday media reported that Arshavin may move to Chelsea FC. |
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MOSCOW — An explosion ripped through an apartment building in Sochi on Wednesday morning, killing two people and injuring more than 30 in the city scheduled to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, police and emergency services said. The explosion, which occurred at around 5 a.m., tore through four floors of an apartment building in the suburb of Blinovo, killing a 67-year-old woman and her 14-year-old grandson, police said.
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 Construction of a multi-functional commercial and residential complex including an intercity bus terminal, park-and-ride lots, and shopping center is to begin soon in the northwest of St. Petersburg by STEP Construction Group and affiliated companies. |
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MOSCOW — National oil output edged up 0.3 percent in June from the previous month, but was down almost 1 percent in the first half of the year, casting further doubts over the government’s goal to sustain growth this year. |
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Ferrari to Open Base ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Ferrari SpA, Fiat SpA’s luxury sports-car unit, will create a company in the next 15 months to oversee its vehicle imports into Russia, Vedomosti reported, citing Fiat Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. Ferrari sold 65 vehicles in Russia in 2007, or 67 percent more than the previous year, according to the Moscow-based newspaper. Meat Products Banned MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia suspended meat and livestock imports from Brazil’s Pernambuco and Goias states after an outbreak of vesicular stomatitis there, the food safety watchdog said. The ban, which doesn’t affect other Brazilian states, will be lifted as soon as the disease is brought under control, Alexei Alekseenko, spokesman for the watchdog, said by phone from Moscow on Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov said Wednesday that he would soon create a foundation to support scientists, joining a growing chorus of businessmen eager to invest in new innovations. |
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 Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 of these cycles since the reign of Tsar Ivan III. In the past, however, the Kremlin’s sharp anti-Western turns were reversed — usually out of simple necessity — after relations reached rock bottom. |
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Stability has become the catchword of the Putin era. The country’s political life is now so predictable that most people no longer take any interest whatsoever in politics. |
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 U.S. opera star Renee Fleming was in St. Petersburg this week to launch the Russian translation of her book “The Inner Voice,” an autobiographic take on the various sides of her artistic identity. “The book is meant to tell the audience and young singers about how one becomes a singer,” she said at the presentation of the book at the Grand Hotel Europe on Sunday. |
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In March, rock bands such as Mashina Vremeni, Splean and Nochniye Snaipery shocked many fans by performing at a free open-air concert in the Red Square celebrating the presidential election that the opposition describes as “illegitimate” due to multiple violations in the campaign and election itself. |
 Irina Baronova, an international ballet star who was one of three celebrated prodigies known as the “baby ballerinas” after George Balanchine discovered them in Paris in the 1930s, died on Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. She was 89. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, the actress Victoria Tennant. Australian news accounts said she died in her sleep. With her vivacious wholesome beauty, indelible classical style and virtuosic technique, Baronova was one of ballet’s most acclaimed stars until she chose to retire at 27 in 1946. |
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 In strange circumstances, Deborah Harry and Chris Stein, formerly of the seminal New York band Blondie, spent two weeks in wintry St. Petersburg in 1996, having arrived to perform at the opening of a shady nightclub that has since then folded. |
 “A work of art has no importance whatever to society,” Vladimir Nabokov insisted. “It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.” Nabokov was in fact notoriously averse to groups or “movements” of any sort, whether political, artistic or social. So it’s hard not to be amused at Nina Khrushcheva’s contortionate attempts to recruit him as a sociopolitical figurehead for the land of his birth in her earnest and urgent “Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics. |
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 Judging from the news lately, Russia is well on its way to restoring that old Evil Empire image. Military parades have returned to Red Square. Key businesses are choked by corruption or are under state control. |
 Russia is more known for Soviet-era environmental disasters than for environmental successes like its system of nature reserves, or zapovedniks. But the zapovednik system was what brought Laura Williams here in 1993, when she was sent by the World Wildlife Fund to open the organization’s first Russian office in Moscow. |
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Don Pepe Restaurant and Tapas Bar // 19 Bolshoi Prospekt (Petrograd Side) // (Access from Ulitsa Lizy Chaikinoi) // Tel: 498 0349 // Menu in Russian and Spanish // Dinner for two 2115 rubles ($90) With the Spanish team winning the Euro 2008 soccer championship last weekend and the piratical Spaniard Rafa Nadal storming through the All England Open Tennis Championship in Wimbledon this week, Spain is very much the flavor of the month. |
 The money shot in “Wanted,” its piece-de-special-effects-resistance and reason for green-lighted being, appears in the opening minutes of this noisy, ultraviolent shoot-’em-up with Angelina Jolie, her many tattoos and some guys. A man has soared onto the roof of a high-rise where he has laid a handful of others to waste. |
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MEXICO CITY — The severed heads of four men were found dumped on a Mexican street on Wednesday with a message accusing a drug gang kingpin of treachery, police said. Neighbors in the northern city of Culiacan found the men’s bodies wrapped in plastic sheets and a blanket, with their heads stuffed into white plastic bags. |
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PARIS — A French judge has ordered U.S. carrier Continental Airlines and five individuals to stand trial over the crash of an Air France Concorde that killed 113 people, a prosecutor’s statement said on Thursday. |
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 SILVERSTONE — Former grand prix winner David Coulthard, at 37 the oldest driver in Formula One, announced on Thursday his retirement at the end of the season. “I would like to announce today my decision to retire from racing in Formula One at the end of this season,” the Red Bull driver said in a statement issued before his home British Grand Prix. |
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