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MOSCOW — Pleas for justice or clemency are nothing new from the thousands of people in the country awaiting trial in detention at any point in time, but Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak has couched his appeal in the language of Christian ethics and national interests. Storchak, under investigation for the attempted embezzlement of $43.4 million of state funds, said in a letter published in the newspaper Gazeta on Wednesday that, in the eight months he has been behind bars, he has not even had the benefit of a proper questioning. In the letter, he also described the charges against him, which have been broadly seen as a chapter in an ongoing feud between Kremlin clans, as a “calculated move directed against state interests. |
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BOAT SHOW
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Two fishermen early on Thursday morning on the banks of the River Neva where naval vessels are assembling for the annual celebrations of Navy Day on Sunday. The sail-past is planned for 11 a.m. and the ships can be visited by members of the public from 3 p.m to 6 p.m. |
 Two women who had been on a hunger strike since Monday with a group of nine other local investors in off-plan residential property developments were sent to a hospital in separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday. The off-plan residential property investors, or dolshchiki as they are known colloquially in Russian, who had paid for apartments in buildings under construction, are demanding action from City Hall after the apartments were sold to third parties or construction was never completed.
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MOSCOW — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave the go-ahead for expanded operations by Russian oil companies and called for an energy alliance with Moscow during an appearance with President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday, but he saved a personal invitation to visit Caracas for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — A pack of enormous bears searching for food killed and ate two men at mines in Russia’s Pacific Kamchatka region and have kept hundreds of geologists and miners from reaching the mine, news agencies reported Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Prosecutors on Wednesday demanded life imprisonment for former Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin, who is being tried in absentia on multiple murder charges dating back to the late 1990s. Nevzlin, who fled to Israel in 2003, faces 11 charges, including murder and attempted murder, following a four-year investigation led by the Prosecutor General’s Office. Prosecutor Alexander Koblyakov asked the Moscow City Court on Wednesday to convict the self-exiled businessman and sentence him to life in prison, Interfax reported. Nevzlin’s lawyer, Dmitry Kharitonov, declined to comment when reached Wednesday. Nevzlin’s defense is to address the court Thursday, Interfax said. |
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday publicly acknowledged that government posts are sometimes up for sale and vowed to tackle the problem by handpicking bureaucrats and senior officials in the regions. |
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HAVANA — Fidel Castro said Havana owed no apologies to Washington over reports that Russia might start flying long-range bombers to Cuba, and warned that his country “had nerves of steel in times of genocide”. It was the first official comment from the Americas’ only one-party communist government since a US general responded to a report in a Russian newspaper, warning Russia against basing nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba. |
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MOSCOW — Three men were found guilty Wednesday in the deaths of 10 people in a fire at the 911 VIP strip club in Moscow in March 2007. The Tverskoi District Court ruled that Sergei Cherkasov, 42, the former general director of KlabMarket, had violated fire regulations and found him guilty of criminal negligence causing multiple deaths. |
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 The owners of the St. Petersburg-based hypermarket chain Lenta will sell an 89-percent stake that includes all of the shareholders’ shares except for those held by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The global retail giants Wal-Mart and Carrefour and the American investment fund TPG Capital are among the companies bidding for control of the Russian retailer chain stores. |
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MOSCOW — Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko has canceled a planned meeting with Finnish officials this weekend intended to ease tensions over Russian timber duties and cross-border transportation problems, the Finnish government said Wednesday. |
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Experts and consultancy agencies are unanimous — Russia is becoming the most important automobile market in the world. The country overtook Germany as Europe’s biggest auto market in the first half of this year as sales rose 41 percent to 1.65 million cars, swollen by demand for models from U. |
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MOSCOW — BP’s billionaire partners in TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, have told Chief Executive Officer Robert Dudley to cut spending by about $900 million or “personally” face demands for compensation. |
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ISTANBUL — Turkey wants to boost cooperation with Russia, its top gas supplier, ending a frosty period marked by differences over the Nabucco pipeline to Europe, an official and analysts said. Turkey gets most of its gas — 68 percent of 2008 demand of 38 billion cubic meters — from Gazprom under three long-term deals. |
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Karusel Deal Examined MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Anti-Monopoly Service may question X5 Retail Group NV’s purchase of superstore chain Karusel, RBC Daily reported, citing Timofei Nizhegorodtsev, head of the service’s trade department. |
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 The debate between the United States and Russia over U.S. plans to deploy a ballistic missile-defense system in Europe is heating up again. Persistent differences with Poland over its conditions for accepting defensive interceptor missiles have led U. |
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The vast oil deposits located in what the Kremlin believes to be an extension of Russia’s continental shelf in the Arctic will be distributed solely at the government’s discretion, without holding the usual auctions or tenders. |
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 The decadent charm, surreal plot and expressionist score of Karol Szymanowski’s philosophical 1926 opera “Krol Roger” (King Roger) captivated the audience at the Mariinsky Theater on July 16 as the work enjoyed its Russian premiere. The opening night saw Polish soloists Andrzej Dobber (Roger) and Elzbieta Szmytka (Roger’s wife Roxana) joining the Mariinsky cast in this Mariusz Trelinski production with stage designs by Boris Kudlieka that originally premiered at the Wroclaw Opera House. |
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First they forbid you to dress as you like, then they forbid you to say what you think and, finally, they forbid you to think altogether. But punks, goths and emo kids have proved they can get organized when their rights are endangered — at least in Krasnoyarsk, where a reported 200 representatives of various youth subcultures, some with their mouths taped with Scotch, went to a rally on Saturday to protest the State Duma’s attack on what certain deputies see as “dangerous teen trends. |
 The multi-million dollar revamp of the Mikhailovsky Theater during the past year has included a cascade of new productions, eye-catching appointments to key artistic posts in both its opera and ballet companies, as well a spectacular facelift of its building on Ploshchad Iskusstv (Arts Square) in central St. |
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English-speaking readers of Kommersant might have been disconcerted to learn that the new U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation is a bird. In fact, he’s two birds. |
 “We now know” the truth about the Cold War, declared historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University in his 1997 book of that title. In fact, there is still a great deal we do not know, and much work remains to be done on many specific incidents and aspects of Cold War history. Lorenz M. Luthi, one of Gaddis’ former students at Yale and currently an assistant professor of international history at McGill University in Montreal, has written an exhaustive and important study of one of the most critical events of that history, the so-called Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and early 1960s. |
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 In a basement studio in northern Moscow, singer Valentin Ayedonitsky screeches about his broken heart, his asymmetrical bangs flapping with every beat. |
 For anyone interested in the Putin-era resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, an exhibition at the Rumyantsev Mansion branch of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg offers a visual guide to the phenomenon. The show has proved so popular that its run has been extended until the end of August. |
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Miso // 15 Suvorovsky Prospekt // Tel: 271 5967 // Open daily from 11am to 11pm // Menu in Russian // Lunch for two without alcohol 1,750 rubles ($75) Queries about high quality sushi restaurants in St. |
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In terms of quantity, hip hop dance is without question a growing phenomenon here in St. Petersburg, with countless dance schools having multiplied throughout the city over the past five years or so. In terms of quality, however, there leaves much to be desired. Apart from not growing up in a hip hop community, as many dancers do in the U.S., two main obstacles prevent Russian dancers from performing to the highest standards. The first is in the general mindset — achieving one’s own style is not the prevalent goal here. In a beginner’s hip hop class in the U.S., the dancer may be introduced to the concept of adding his or her own style but in Russia, by contrast, it’s all about copying others’ moves as accurately as possible, including styles. |
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 It starts innocently enough. You’re at a party and someone gets out a guitar. Two hours later, you’ve heard the entire repertoire of Zolotoye Koltso and Alexander Rozenbaum, the soundtrack of “Irony of Fate,” and numerous songs about how the train conductor isn’t in a hurry, there are only nine men to every 10 girls and the coach driver can hold his horses. |
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EL GENEINA, Sudan — A smiling Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir pressed ahead with a heavily guarded tour of Darfur on Thursday, with a rally called to defy accusations that he masterminded genocide in the region. Wearing a safari suit and sunglasses, and smiling widely, he sat in a giant armchair in the shade at a rally attended by hundreds of loyalists who fanned themselves under the burning sun in the West Darfur state capital El Geneina. |
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BEIJING — Despite being the world’s most popular sport, soccer usually takes a back seat at the Olympics, dwarfed by track and field, swimming and gymnastics. Even though the likes of Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi are going to China, the spotlight won’t really swing toward them until late in the tournament. |
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As Zenit St. Petersburg was saying it hadn’t received a satisfactory offer for midfielder Andrei Arshavin and that he would probably remain with the club, English club Tottenham Hotspur was reported to be weighing up bids for both Arshavin and fellow Russia international Roman Pavlyuchenko. |
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