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MOSCOW — Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev ordered an investigation Sunday of the Novorossiisk police after a local officer made a personal appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin complaining of bad working conditions and being ordered to arrest innocent people. Nurgaliyev also ordered that the officer be suspended pending the investigation, while the Krasnodar region police chief fired him for slander, Interior Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin said Sunday, Interfax reported. “Nurgaliyev will report on the results of the check to the president and prime minister,” Gribakin said. The incident is the latest embarrassment for Nurgaliyev, who has been struggling to reign in corruption in his ministry and deal with fallout from a police officer’s shooting rampage this spring that left three people dead. |
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SIMPLY RED
David Tsogoev / The St. Petersburg Times
Communist supporters carry banners as they walk from the Finland Railway Station to the Avrora Cruiser on Saturday, marking the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. About 1,500 communists turned out for the traditional march in St. Petersburg. |
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MOSCOW — As deeply indebted United Company RusAl sweet-talks foreign investors ahead of a planned initial public offering, it has launched a “terror” campaign at home against a business newspaper. Vedomosti said RusAl and its lawyers were bombarding its journalists with threatening cell phone calls and e-mails after it published a front-page article on Oct.
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With the coldest days of winter yet to arrive, anticipation is in the air — and perhaps nowhere more so than at 112B Borovaya Ulitsa, where a large heated tent has opened designed specifically to warm the city’s homeless as average daily temperatures drop below zero. |
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MOSCOW — Yandex, the country’s leading search engine, has announced plans to stop ranking popular blog posts after several entries exposed problems that embarrassed government officials. |
All photos from issue.
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 Seasonal flu has not yet reached epidemic levels in St. Petersburg, the city’s chief public health physician, Igor Rakitin, said on Monday, Interfax reported. Rakitin described the situation as “under control,” but noted that 15 of St. Petersburg’s 760 schools have been placed under quarantine since Oct. |
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LONDON — New world heavyweight champion David Haye said his title defence against John Ruiz would be like another cruiserweight contest after he took the WBA title off the giant Nikolai Valuev. |
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MOSCOW — Shabtai Kalmanovich, a patron of the arts and sports, a wealthy businessman and a double agent who worked for the KGB and Israel’s Shin Bet, was laid to rest at a cemetery in Petakh Tikva, near Tel Aviv, on Thursday. Kalmanovich, 60, was gunned down in central Moscow last Monday in an apparent contract hit that authorities said might be connected to a debt deal gone bad or an ongoing gangster turf war. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Thursday authorized the arrest of two suspects in the January murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov as signs emerged that the killing was motivated by revenge. |
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Cruise tours to Finland, Sweden and Estonia will start leaving from the new terminals on Vasilyevsky Island for the first time at the end of this year. The first of four cruises will depart on Dec. 30, and the last on Jan. 4. Tourists embarking on four-day trips to Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn will be among the first passengers to depart from the new terminals of the Marine Facade port, which is opening in stages. The tourism company Expo Tour, which is organizing the trips, says that the new terminal will offer an increased number of passport checkpoints, which should decrease the time spent going through passport control. |
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HOMING IN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Farid Nagayev, head of the Aerial Research Laboratory, demonstrates GLONASS satellite navigation receptors at the Radio and Navigation Scientific Research Institute in St. Petersburg on Monday. |
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Artur Kirilenko, the co-owner of Stroimontage construction company, is suspected of premeditated bankruptcy and siphoning off the company’s assets. Last Tuesday, employees of the Ministry of Internal affairs searched Stroimontage’s offices as part of an ongoing case opened in September by Baltiisky Bank in accordance with article 196 of the Criminal Code (premeditated bankruptcy), a law enforcement source told Vedomosti.
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MOSCOW — The government has almost finished creating an agency to insure export loans in a measure aimed at boosting the country’s trade, Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said Friday. “We have come to the final stage of the creation of an export agency,” Nabiullina told the State Duma, adding that she had already discussed the project with the Finance Ministry. Nabiullina said the creation of the agency would in part help to increase the number of instruments that support Russian enterprises exporting manufactured products. First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov ordered the Economic Development Ministry in May to prepare proposals on the creation of such an agency. |
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 MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Saturday that it was time to begin discussing the eventual withdrawal of economic stimulus packages, after his G20 colleagues pledged to keep their support in place until a global economic recovery is assured. |
 MOSCOW — Naftogaz Ukrainy has paid Gazprom for October gas supplies on time, but the process proved “extremely difficult” because of opposition from the president and Central Bank, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Friday. Naftogaz later confirmed that it paid the October bill. |
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MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin led a government delegation Thursday to meet investors in London for a “non-deal road show” to discuss a planned issue of $17. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has opened a case against Sberbank, which is suspected of breaking the law on competition, the service said on its web site Friday. Following an investigation in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region, the anti-monopoly service found that Sberbank, Russian Post, a local municipal bank and several providers of communal services colluded to limit the number of ways that Odintsovo residents could make payments for communal services to Sberbank, Odinbank and Russian Post. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service fined LUKoil 6.5 billion rubles ($225 million) on Thursday for breaking anti-monopoly law, the service said on its web site. |
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It seems that professional observers of Russia’s endless political antics have something new to add to their list. People have long ceased to be amazed by the fact that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has a habit of meddling in Russia’s military affairs, national security and foreign policy — all of which belong to the constitutional domain of President Dmitry Medvedev. But the president has unexpectedly stuck his nose into an area that had previously belonged to Putin alone. Last week, Medvedev visited the NPO Mashinostroyenia missile design bureau in Reutov, located just outside Moscow. Amazingly, the head of state did not limit himself to simply inspecting new missile programs. |
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 Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this is a good time to look at the lessons we learned from it. I recall how I walked into work one day about six weeks after the Berlin Wall fell. |
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Friends of mine wanted to buy a house in Tarusa, an old town on the Oka River in the Kaluga region. They sold the husband’s apartment for much less than it had been valued before the crisis and set out for Tarusa confident that house prices would be lower there, too. They found plenty of picturesque homes, but also discovered that prices in Tarusa had not come down at all. |
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 Boris Moiseyev is Russia’s campest pop star, who makes much of his sexual orientation in interviews and an outrageous stage act. So when he confided to a Moskovsky Komsomolets reporter last week that he’s about to marry his long-term girlfriend, eyebrows were raised and his web site crashed. A former dancer for pop diva Alla Pugachyova, Moiseyev has carved out a solo career despite the obstacles of being outspokenly gay and, it has to be said, not really having a singing voice. |
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 On the last day of October, while many city dwellers were preparing for Halloween, a crowd of people of different ages could be observed in front of a yellow building on Ulitsa Tkachei, not far from Yelizarovskaya metro station. The celebration here had nothing to do with Halloween, and for these people it was far more meaningful. |
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Issues Archive