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 MOSCOW — It was as though someone had suddenly removed the stopper from an overturned bottle. As the great man’s body, hoisted high by a military procession, made its final turn on the path toward the cemetery, a sea of mourners poured down the church steps like water down a rocky crag. The crowds had to be held back as a salute was fired. They had to be held back as the choir, chanting a hymn about eternal life, hovered over the freshly dug grave. They had to be held back as Alexander Solzhenitsyn was returned to the Russian soil that he loved so much. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author and Soviet-era dissident, was laid to rest in the cemetery of Donskoi Monastery in central Moscow on Wednesday. |
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MODEL WIVES
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Models wearing wedding dresses at a fashion display at the Petrovsky Stadium on Thursday. A spate of weddings will be celebrated on Saturday, it being the 8th day of the 8th month of the year 2008, with many of the ceremonies being conducted around the city in the open air. |
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Environmentalists from the local branch of Greenpeace spoke out on Thursday about their campaigning to stop the construction of solid waste processing facilities in St. Petersburg. The organization argues that the technology used at the plants will severely damage the environment by contributing to air pollution. “Burning silt, for example, means discharging 24 different pollutants into the atmosphere, including benzopyrene as well as dangerous dioxins which cause cancer,” said Igor Babanin, an expert on the effective use of natural resources with Greenpeace, at a news conference.
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Interpol has declared 2,000 Russian nationals to be fugitives, 60 percent of whom were suspects in economic crimes, in the 18 years in which the Russian Federation has belonged to the 186-member International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol representatives said on Thursday. |
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Genetic experts and investigators from the General Prosecutors office arrived in St. Petersburg on Wednesday to begin analysis of blood traces on a shirt that belonged to the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, to assist in the definitive identification of remains believed to be those of the monarch, who was murdered in 1918. |
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MOSCOW — The editor of the Ingush opposition web site Ingushetiya.ru has fled the country and will seek political asylum in a European country, a lawyer for the site said Wednesday. Roza Malsagova, 51, traveled to Germany three weeks ago with her three teenage sons, lawyer Kaloi Akhilgov said, though he refused to say in which country she would apply for asylum. |
All photos from issue.
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 The director of the Tsarskoye Selo museum Ivan Sautov was laid to rest at St. Petersburg’s Volkovskoye cemetery on Wednesday. Tsarskoye Selo, 25 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, is the location of the Catherine Palace, built for Catherine the Great in the 18th Century but laid to ruin by the Nazis in World War II. |
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Governor Valentina Matviyenko has asked St. Petersburg’s banks to help resolve a crisis with local investors who were cheated in off-plan residential property deals and who sought to draw attention to their plight by staging a ten-day hunger strike that ended last week. |
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MOSCOW — A device exploded Thursday on a beach in the Sochi resort which will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, killing two people and wounding three, officials said. The blast occurred in the southern city of Sochi when visitors touched the device on the Black Sea resort beach, the regional branch of the Interior Ministry said. |
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MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov could replace Yury Luzhkov as the mayor of Moscow in early September, the Tvoi Den tabloid reported Wednesday, citing unidentified government sources. |
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In a bid to bring the country’s industry up to western standards, the government plans to give major financial support to companies working in the military sector. The Kremlin’s favorite is Rostechnologies, the state industry corporation set up by a decree from former Russian president Vladimir Putin in November 2007 to develop the Russian machine building industry. |
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City Hall has reallocated a land plot in the Shushary industrial zone and prolonged the exploration terms for the automobile manufacturer Suzuki Motors, which intends to build a plant there and has seen construction costs increase by 30 percent due to the discovery of two million cubic meters of peat that have to be removed from the site. |
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MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday that he still expected net capital inflows in the second half, despite a falling domestic stock market and global financial turbulence. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent shares into freefall in June with an attack on steel and coal firm Mechel. Russian shares extended their losses tracking global commodity prices. “Naturally, capital inflows have shrunk due to a falling market,” Kudrin told reporters. “I believe that we will have net capital inflow in the second half, but today it is difficult to estimate the inflow due to the continuing global financial crisis,” Kudrin added. Russia had net capital inflow of $12. |
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 MOSCOW — Internet advertising in Russia grew 73 percent to $260 million in the first half of the year and may top $600 million this year, according to the MindShare Interaction research agency. |
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Standard & Poor’s on Wednesday became the second major international ratings agency to downgrade its expectations for TNK-BP over its shareholder dispute. S&P said it had lowered its long-term corporate credit and senior unsecured debt ratings on TNK-BP to BB from BB+ with a negative outlook. |
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MOSCOW — The ruble staged its biggest percentage fall versus the euro-dollar basket since mid-May on Wednesday, as a sharp sell-off on the Moscow bourse prompted foreign investors to repatriate their cash. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s decision to raise an oil shipping fee component will increase costs of oil deliveries by pipelines by 10 to 12 percent and further spur the country’s runaway inflation, analysts said Wednesday. The Federal Tariffs Service said Tuesday that it had allowed oil pipeline monopoly Transneft to raise its oil dispatching fee to 15. |
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 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a political figure, was very much in the Russian conservative tradition — a modern version of Dostoevsky. Like the great 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised socialism and yet had no use for Western culture with its stress on secularism, freedom and legality. |
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News agencies reported last week that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov was the target of an assassination attempt. Chechen authorities immediately denied the reports; the president’s press secretary, Lema Gudayev, said Kadyrov had been in Yaroslavl watching Chechnya’s Terek football team play at the time of the alleged attack. |
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Hygiene is real simple in English — at least in terms of language. For the basics, all you really need to know are two verbs: to wash and to clean. You wash with water (your hands, the dishes, clothes, floors, etc.). You clean just about everything else (the stove, your room, the family silver, etc.). I wish Russian were that simple. In Russian, the verb depends on what you are cleaning and how you are cleaning it. Here’s a mini-handbook of hygiene and housekeeping. For surfaces — animate or inanimate, vegetable or mineral — cleaned with water: ìûòü. Òû ïîìûëà ðóêè? (Did you wash your hands?) ß õî÷ó ïîìûòü ãîëîâó (I want to wash my hair — literally, “head”). |
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 U.S. rock legend Patti Smith is worried about ongoing destruction of historic buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg and urging people to act fast if they want to prevent redevelopment. |
 A growing trend to make and exhibit short films has meant that short film festivals are experiencing an upsurge in attendance around the world, and traditional festivals are having to include shorts sections to keep up with demand. This is a trend worth taking a closer look at, in part to understand where St. Petersburg fits into the scheme of things. Not only are short format film programs a platform for emerging artists, but established artists are choosing this means of expression as well. |
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 Like his earlier novel, “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company,” Brian Hall’s latest work is that fashionable hybrid: a “bio-fiction” which sets out to explore, with a novelist’s freedom, the inner world of a real person. |
 The headquarters of Nuclear.ru are located in an uninspiring building near Moscow’s Paveletsky Station. The company is an independent Internet portal providing the latest developments in the field of nuclear energy. But that is not what it is best known for. Inside the small office sits Yulia Nagayeva, a tall, striking brunette. She is a senior manager for business development at TVEL, a manufacturer of nuclear fuel. |
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 The headquarters of Nuclear.ru are located in an uninspiring building near Moscow’s Paveletsky Station. The company is an independent Internet portal providing the latest developments in the field of nuclear energy. |
 The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will get the Summer Games — billed as the greatest show on earth — off to an explosive start on Friday. You would not expect anything less from the nation that invented gunpowder, and fireworks are certain to play a major role in the 3-hour spectacular that China hopes will help dispel political controversies dogging the Games. |
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NEP 37 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki // Tel: 571 7591. www.neprestoran.ru // Open daily from noon until the last customer leaves // Shows at 8.30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with wine 2,785 rubles ($118) About a year ago, rumor had it that the flavor of the month for holding wedding parties was a new Soviet-themed cabaret restaurant on the corner of Palace Square. |
 Leonid Agutin isn’t the most famous Russian pop star. But whenever the curly-headed singer raises a glass of anything stronger than water (although water will do), a Zhizn photographer is likely to be snapping in the vicinity. The tabloid regularly writes stories accusing Agutin of enjoying his tipple too much. |
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ISLAMABAD — Pakistan faced fresh political turmoil on Thursday after officials said the country’s ruling coalition had agreed to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, a vital U.S. ally in the “war on terror.” The agreement came after three days of marathon talks between coalition leaders Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, another ex-premier. |
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BERLIN — Despite being a massive hit with children and adults alike, German lawmakers want to ban Kinder surprise eggs on safety grounds, press reports said on Thursday. |
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The star player of St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit, Andrei Arshavin, has gone on strike, refusing to play in a cup tie against Sibir Novosibirsk on Wednesday, British media reported Thursday. Arshavin, 27, took the decision to strike because he was upset with Zenit’s stubborn stance on his transfer fee to British club Tottenham, the reports said. |
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