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Opposition activists say one of the leading Russian Internet providers is practicing “political censorship” by denying access to oppositional web sites for its clients. Clients of the Internet provider Beeline, the trademark of the Moscow-based VimpelCom group of companies, have been denied access to the web sites of oppositional politician and author Eduard Limonov and his banned National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) since last week. VimpelCom said that the web sites had been blocked by a court order, but the sites in question are not listed as banned in the Ministry of Justice’s Federal Register of Extremist Materials. Speaking on Monday, Limonov’s spokesman Alexander Averin said that Beeline clients have been experiencing problems opening the web sites www. |
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 Anna Samokhina, one of Russia’s most admired film and theater actresses, who was sometimes referred to as the Russian Marilyn Monroe, died of stomach cancer in a St. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin dismissed Nikolai Yurgel, head of the Federal Health and Social Development Inspection Service, from his post on Saturday because of a public disagreement with the government on new legislation to regulate the pharmaceutical market. |
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MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lambasted the present state of European security on Saturday, calling it ineffective and outdated, but he failed to rally significant support for a new security treaty. |
All photos from issue.
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 St. Petersburg’s forensic experts have confirmed that the bloodstains found on the sofa on which the famed 19th-century Russian poet and author Alexander Pushkin is said to have died in 1837 were indeed left by the poet. “The results of our medical research allow us to state that it is the poet’s blood on this historic sofa,” Yury Molin, deputy head of the Leningrad Oblast legal and medical department, said at a press conference in the city’s Pushkin Apartment Museum on Monday. The painstaking year-long research proved firstly that the blood on the sofa was located on the exact spot where Pushkin’s wound would have been bleeding. |
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CITY SAINT
Simon Eliasson / The St. Petersburg Times
Russian Orthodox believers pray at Smolenskoye Cemetery on Vasilyevsky Island on Sunday, the day after the saint’s day of Kseniya the Blessed, who is considered to be the patron saint of St. Petersburg. |
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The St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal investigation into a 50-year-old former history teacher and deputy of the city’s Primorsky district municipal authority suspected of numerous charges of pedophilia. Andrei Smirnov, who also headed a children’s society called Tsarskoye Selo, has been arrested and charged under article 132 part 3 of the Russian Criminal Code (violent actions of a sexual nature committed against an underage person,) according to the web site of the St.
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MOSCOW — Two former senior officials with the Federal Property Agency have been arrested on suspicion of extorting a $340,000 bribe from a Moscow university official, the Investigative Committee said Monday. Sergei Korchagin, former head of the agency’s Moscow branch, and Dmitry Knyazev, head of the branch’s property registration department, are suspected of extorting 10. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday called on United Russia leaders to stay in touch with the people and warned the party against bamboozling voters by making promises it cannot keep, a week after a massive anti-government protest in Kaliningrad. |
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MOSCOW — A group of former United Russia political operatives in the Saratov region have claimed responsibility for smear campaigns targeting political enemies of State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Volodin, a senior party leader. The editors and writers of the web site Conspirology. |
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MOSCOW — The police chief of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, was shot dead in his car Friday, one of 16 people killed in a string of attacks in the North Caucasus. |
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 Local scientists are claiming that the Marine Facade project and other construction on reclaimed land is a threat to the ecological situation in the Neva Bay. In December, the Federation Council approved the enlargement of the territory of St. Petersburg by 400 hectares of reclaimed land between the town of Sestroretsk and the Lisy Nos headland. |
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Bavarian Business ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Days of Bavarian Economics in St. Petersburg will take place this week from Wednesday to Friday. |
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MOSCOW — World markets took a beating last week as problems in several European economies and U.S. jobs data spooked investors, but despite the bad news from abroad, Russian equities are well-poised for recovery. On Friday, the ruble-denominated MICEX posted its biggest single-day drop in more than two months. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow Arbitration Court on Friday dismissed a lawsuit against City Hall filed by exiled tycoon Shalva Chigirinsky’s ST Development, which demanded 4 billion rubles ($132 million) for breaking an agreement on reconstruction of the Hotel Rossiya. |
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 With 2009 — a year of fluctuating currency rates, sagging stock markets and virtually non-existent credit — safely behind us, financial analysts are making predictions for 2010 and even finding a silver lining in the cloud of the global economic crisis. |
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The other day my daughter asked me an unexpected question: “What is innovation?” How can we understand this word so often repeated by Russia’s politicians and economists? The innovation economy that they are talking about does not offer solutions to the problems that the country faces. |
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 Although the official results of the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election have not been announced, it is clear that the country’s next president will be Viktor Yanukovych. Over the past three weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko failed to close the 10-point lead Yanukovych has held since the first round of voting. |
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Four years ago during the 20th Winter Olympics, the Russia House was by far the hottest party venue in Turin. It even had an open-air ice skating rink on the roof, where skaters were treated to free shots of vodka and an unending parade of scantily clad young women. |
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 “Kandahar,” a new blockbuster that looks at an almost forgotten escape from captivity in the heart of Afghanistan, is packing in crowds at cinemas all over the country. The film, which stars a trio of the country’s most famous actors, Vladimir Mashkov, Andrei Panin and Alexander Baluyev, is based on the true story of seven Russian Il-76 pilots who were captured by the Taliban in August 1995 while delivering arms to a Russian ally in Kabul. |
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 Robert Service is professor of Russian studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests cover Russian history from the late 19th century to the present day, and he has written numerous books on the subject. |
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