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The Federal Tax Police are accusing two of Russia’s most important cultural institutions — the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum — of tax evasion and of misappropriating millions of rubles. For the Hermitage alone, the list of alleged misappropriations amounts to 149 million rubles ($4.57 million). On top of that, the authorities claim the museum never paid taxes on that sum. The money in question was spent, among other things, on foreign trips by the Hermitage’s director Mikhail Piotrovsky and a number of its curators to Milan, London, Paris, Berlin and other international cultural Meccas. Exchange programs, visits by foreign experts, private medical treatment, private dinners, banquets and entertainment costs were also listed among the inappropriate expenses. |
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TOEING THE LINE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Students from St. Petersburg's military academies and institutes preparing to place flowers at the Piskarevsky Memorial on Thursday to commemorate the inhabitants of Leningrad and its defenders during the Siege during the Second World War. |
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MOSCOW — After President Dmitry Medvedev was elected last year, then-President Vladimir Putin made a rather telling promise about his chosen successor. “Medvedev is no less a Russian nationalist than I am, in the positive sense of the word, and I do not think that our partners will have it any easier with him,” Putin said at a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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In a conflict between a high-ranking City Hall official and TV Channel Five over the official’s allegedly insulting statements about the channel’s staff, Smolny officials are standing firm in support of their counterpart and clear his of all the embarrassing charges. |
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MOSCOW — Ukrainian Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko was detained by police at the Frankfurt airport and prevented from boarding his flight because of drunken and disorderly conduct, police said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court has convicted an American who once worked at oil firm TNK-BP and his brother of spying on Gazprom and handed them suspended sentences, the Federal Security Service said Thursday. Ilya Zaslavsky and his brother Alexander received one year suspended sentences and two years probation on charges of industrial espionage, filed last year during a high-profile power struggle between the Russian and British owners of TNK-BP. |
All photos from issue.
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St. Petersburg will buy 5,000 sets of the anti-flu medicine Tamiflu and equip the city’s Pulkovo airport with thermal imaging devices to protect against the spread of swine flu to Russia. The emergency anti-epidemic commission of the St. Petersburg city government commissioned Smolny’s core committees to buy more than 5,000 Tamiflu sets, Interfax reported last week. Although no swine flu cases have been confirmed in Russia, the Russian government has stopped the import of meat products from all Central American and Caribbean countries and some U.S. states, as well as the import of raw pork and pigs from Spain, Great Britain, and some Canadian provinces. |
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WAR GAMES
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Enthusiasts take part in a reconstruction of a military engagement staged to mark Victory Day by the Petrovsky Pond close to the Petrovsky Stadium on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry announced Wednesday that it is expelling NATO’s top representatives in the country as a tit-for-tat retaliation for the expulsion of two diplomats from its representation at the alliance amid accusations of espionage. Isabelle Francois, head of the NATO Information Office in Moscow, and her deputy, Mark Opgenorth, will have their accreditations revoked, the ministry said in a statement on its web site.
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MOSCOW — A suspect in the slayings of a French winemaker and his family in central Moscow last month was detained Thursday in Kazakhstan, investigators said. Frenchman Thierry Spinelli, his wife and their daughter were murdered in their apartment April 20 in central Moscow in what investigators described as a case of homicide and arson. |
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MOSCOW — Oleg Deripaska’s GAZ Group said Wednesday that it would sell its British van maker, LDV, to Malaysian company Weststar after the British government stepped in to help finance the transfer. GAZ agreed to sell the company to Weststar after the British government said late Tuesday that it would provide a short-term loan of $7. |
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MOSCOW — Direct government support of the country’s stock market did not accomplish anything, President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday in a meeting with deputies from the party A Just Russia, where he also urged caution in making changes to the country’s tax code. |
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MOSCOW — An Azeri businessman was gunned down in full view of pedestrians as he sat in his Mercedes in a trendy neighborhood in central Moscow, the victim of an apparent contract murder. Two unidentified assailants riddled the man’s car with bullets at about 10 p. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday criticized the country’s strategy of developing its technology sector through state-owned corporations, singling out the State Nanotechnology Corporation, or Rusnano, as an example. |
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 European Union policy toward its neighbors to the east is in trouble, despite the launch of its new Eastern Partnership. European public opinion is increasingly introspective and sporadically protectionist. So what is to be done about the “gray zone” to Europe’s east — the six countries that now lie between the EU and Russia? Inaction is unacceptable. |
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On April 21, a judge made an unprecedented ruling when he sentenced a man to one year in prison for fighting fascism. Your first thought is that this case happened in Latvia, where former Waffen SS members march freely on their favorite holidays commemorating Latvian veterans who fought alongside the Nazis in World War II. |
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 Magic and gaiety reigned on stage on Saturday at the premiere of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Mariinsky theater’s concert hall. Responsible for the cheery new production was guest director Alexander Petrov from the Zazerkalye theater, and the recruitment of Petrov, who went away with two top prizes — his rendition of Cinderella won him the best operatic show award — in the opera section at this year’s prestigious Golden Mask Awards, has been a triumph for Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky’s artistic director. |
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Sometimes it is good to have Western labels’ representatives in Russia. This week, Moscow-based S.B.A/Gala Records, which represents E.M.I., caught some crooks trying to pass of another band as Enigma. |
 From the depths of dark-green-lined peer the empty eyeholes of ancient objects. Antiquity stares directly into the face of Hermitage visitors, and offers only questions and wonder. That, at least, is the theme that the Hermitage has chosen to showcase their latest exhibition, centered around a golden mask found by the Russian archeologist Anton Baltazarovich Ashik 170 years ago in Kerch (in modern-day Ukraine). |
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Summer is almost upon us, and so we’ve ventured well off the beaten track, 100 kilometers up the coast to be precise. There, at the 47th kilometer along the road from Zelenogorsk, with a little help from the management’s map (to be found on their internet site listed above), you’ll find the Australian Farmstead, home to an ostrich and a flock emus. |
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×òî is one of Russian’s wonder words. It has a number of meanings and plays several grammatical roles. And it can be combined with a variety of other one-syllable words – and then pronounced in various intonations – to express just about every emotion known to human beings. Think of it as the Meryl Streep of the Russian language. |
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 LONDON — Chelsea on Thursday rallied behind Didier Drogba as the striker came under fire for his furious confrontation with a referee in the wake of the club’s Champions League exit at the hands of Barcelona. Captain John Terry and manager Guus Hiddink both voiced their support for the Ivory Coast international but that will not help him avoid potentially severe sanctions from UEFA in the aftermath of a match which can only have tarnished the image of football. |
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Issues Archive