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 MOSCOW — Dubai police on Sunday accused State Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov of masterminding the assassination of former Chechen commander Sulim Yamadayev and said they would seek his arrest. Delimkhanov, a first cousin of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and a former Chechen deputy prime minister, denied the allegation and criticized the police investigation as shoddy. The Prosecutor General’s Office said it would not extradite Delimkhanov. Yamadayev, an enemy of Kadyrov, was shot dead near his Dubai home on March 28 in what police have described as the first political killing on Dubai soil. The announcement that Delimkhanov has been implicated in the murder could have significant ramifications for Kadyrov, whose strong-arm tactics have been tolerated by the Kremlin because of the calm he has brought to Chechnya. |
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PIPED IN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A worker stands on the housing for the organ at the Glazunov Maly Hall of St. Petersburg’s State Conservatory. A new organ, manufactured by the company EULE, is being installed, the previous organ having stopped working over 20 years ago. The organ will take six months to install and tune. |
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Human rights activists appealed to Russia’s Interior Minister about alleged police beatings and humiliation of protesters in St. Petersburg last month, while the police broke up a peaceful rally against police arbitrariness and arrested a number of participants on Saturday. Four protesters were held in custody for 48 hours until they were released by a court on Monday afternoon.
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MOCOW — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has postponed a visit to Moscow after an earthquake of 6.3 magnitude shook central Italy early Monday morning, leaving more than 90 dead and thousands injured. (For related story, see Page 12.) Berlusconi declared a state of emergency and has not announced a new date for the visit, the Italian Embassy in Moscow said. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Executives from hundreds of small banks flocked to Moscow on Friday to lobby against a new law that could force them to close by the end of the year, but Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin insisted that the government would not budge. At an annual conference of the Association of Russian Banks, the small banks begged lawmakers and state officials to amend the law requiring them to increase their net worth to 90 million rubles ($2.6 million) by Jan. 1 and to 180 million rubles by 2012. “Our colleagues have announced, and with good reason, that this law will lead to the closure of many successful small banks and bring harm to many honest small and medium enterprises,” the association’s president, Garegin Tosunyan, said in his opening remarks. |
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WATERWORLD
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Mikhailovsky Gardens covered in water left by melting snow. The Mikhailovsky and Summer gardens have been closed and will remain shut for a month while their grounds dry out. |
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MOSCOW — Sochi mayoral candidate Boris Nemtsov accused police of illegally confiscating tens of thousands of campaign pamphlets Saturday as part of a drive by regional authorities to derail his bid. The complaint from the opposition politician came a day after Sochi election officials unveiled the final list of candidates for the April 26 election. The original list of 26 candidates was reduced to nine, including Nemtsov, wealthy businessman Alexander Lebedev and Acting Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov, who is backed by United Russia.
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MOSCOW — A former Moscow police officer acquitted in the 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been detained on suspicion of extortion. Sergei Khadzhikurbanov is accused of extorting $350,000 from a key witness in Politkovskaya’s murder trial, which saw Khadzhikurbanov and two others acquitted in February, Interfax reported. The witness, city police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, owed money to Khadzhikurbanov but could not pay it back, Novaya Gazeta reported in February. In lieu of the cash, Khadzhikurbanov tried in vain to force Pavlyuchenkov to spy on Politkovskaya shortly before her death, the newspaper said. Khadzhikurbanov was charged in the purported extortion attempt before he was released from custody in late February following his acquittal in the Politkovskaya case on condition that he not leave the city, Novaya Gazeta said. |
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 More than 500 people gathered at a Communist protest meeting in front of the Finland Railway Station in St. Petersburg on Saturday. The meeting was part of Russia-wide protests held by Communists demonstrating against high unemployment rates and the consequences of the economic crisis in Russia, as well as a recent act of vandalism carried out on the statue of the former Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. |
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This week sees the opening of the sixth international dance cinema festival in St. Petersburg. Featuring long and short films from as far afield as Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and Zimbabwe, the festival promises to serve up a tantalising array of the creme de la creme of dance cinema from around the world. |
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 About 20 percent of the offices in one of St. Petersburg’s oldest A-class business centers — the Atrium, located at 25 Nevsky Prospekt — have become available to rent, after the center lost two of its biggest tenants in March — Regus and KIT Fortis. The Belgian company Regus, which specializes in the renting out of office space, was due to leave the premises by the end of March. |
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Wal-Mart Eyes Lenta MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Wal-Mart Stores has renewed talks on buying a controlling stake in Russian food retailer Lenta, Kommersant reported, citing unidentified minority shareholders. |
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 “The best present we can give to future generations is a clean Baltic Sea,” announced Finnish President Tarja Halonen on a recent visit to St. Petersburg. One of the biggest environmental problems in St. Petersburg is indeed the state of the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland on which the city is situated. |
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Russian ecologists regularly take to the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow to protest the transportation of nuclear waste from other countries to Russia. |
 A conference held in the city last week focused on the issue of waste management technologies and problems in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The forum, titled “Effective Waste Management and Recycling and Use of Innovative Technologies,” was organized by Chadbourne & Parke, a U.S.-based legal firm that has a practice focusing on climate change headed by former New York State Governor George Pataki. |
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Last Wednesday was the 200th anniversary of Nikolai Gogol’s birth. One hundred fifty-seven years have passed since his death. Yet at times, it seems that there is no author in Russian who is more modern than Gogol. This is not because Gogol’s works are timeless. It is because Russia has not changed. The same foolish customs Gogol poked fun at then are still with us now. As he wrote in the last lines of the first volume of his book “Dead Souls,” Russia is heading somewhere, but nobody knows where, and is “overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!” It’s a shame that fewer Westerners are less familiar with Gogol than with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but the reason is clear enough — Gogol is more difficult to translate, his images and flights of fancy are at times too phantasmagorical for a person with a rational European mindset. |
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 The promise by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration to “press the reset button” in its relations with Russia holds promise for rapid progress in the near future as well as for dealing with serious problems down the line. |
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Iran is the Cuba of the Middle East. Long ostracized and under sanctions, both are ripe for change. We will probably see breakthroughs with Cuba and Iran in U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term. Cuba will be easier, but Iran is more important to U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With few exceptions, the world agrees that it is not desirable for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. |
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 MIAMI — Andy Murray beat Serbia’s Novak Djokovic 6-2, 7-5 to win the Miami Masters and clinch his third title of the year. The world number four wrapped up victory after reeling off the last five games of the second set having seen Djokovic, the world number three, throw away his chance to level the final. |
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MADRID — Florentino Perez, the favourite to win June elections for Real Madrid president, has reached an agreement with AC Milan to sign Brazilian star Kaka, a newspaper reported Monday. |
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Issues Archive