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MOSCOW — Moscow prosecutors on Monday began a check into allegations of extremism lodged against Nezavisimaya Gazeta, after the opposition newspaper published an article last month by jailed former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The check was initiated following a complaint by State Duma Deputy Sergei Abeltsev. The Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker said he found elements of extremism in Khodorkovsky’s March 3 commentary, the newspaper said on its web site. Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion convictions in 2005, is set to testify this week in a second case that could see him sentenced to more than 22 years in prison. In the Nezavisimaya Gazeta article, titled “Authorized Violence,” Khodorkovsky harshly criticized Russia’s judicial system, which he said threatened the government’s stability. |
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EN GARDE!
Jorge Silva / Reuters
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin holding a replica of a sword belonging to Venezuelan hero Simon Bolivar in front of a painting of Bolivar in Caracas on Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Investigators said one of the two suicide bombers who struck the Moscow metro last week was the 17-year-old widow of an Islamic militant killed on New Year’s Eve. The woman, Dagestani native Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, died when explosives she was carrying detonated at the Park Kultury metro station last Monday, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Friday.
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MOSCOW — Self-exiled tycoon Yevgeny Chichvarkin said Sunday that he believed his mother, found dead in her Moscow apartment, was murdered, Reuters reported. Chichvarkin, a flamboyant former mobile phone retailer fighting extradition from London, contradicted official reports of a domestic accident after Lyudmila Chichvarkina was found dead with a head injury on Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media holding has sold its Russian radio stations to Senator Vitaly Bogdanov, the company said Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — A nine-story banner featuring the cover of the April issue of the men’s glossy magazine Esquire was removed from a central Moscow street last week for posing the question, “Why do ballet dancers and gays join United Russia?” The reason, said advertising agency Sunlight Outdoor, which sells advertising space for Esquire, was that it did not want a confrontation with United Russia, which is led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The banner depicts rock musician David Bowie saying “Shh” with a finger over his lips and features the contentious question, which is a teaser for a cover story in which actors, filmmakers and showmen explain why they joined the country’s ruling party. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A Russian Orthodox priest blesses Easter eggs and kulich Easter cakes on Saturday outside the Church of the Fyodorovskaya Virgin Icon in central St. Petersburg. |
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The Estrada Theater denied accusations of political censorship Monday, claiming that a literary performance by Viktor Shenderovich scheduled for April 18 was canceled due to renovation work at the theater and not because the Moscow satirist is a known Kremlin critic. “The theater will close for major renovation work from July 1, and it turned out that the commission coming from Moscow to inspect the premises regarding the renovation work can come only on these days — that’s why not only a concert by Shenderovich was canceled, but performances on April 17 and 19 as well,” program director Nina Podpalova said Monday.
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President Dmitry Medvedev couldn’t resist taking a jab at Russia’s Olympic team as he handed out state awards to the country’s victorious paralympians during a Kremlin ceremony Friday. “We all were very glad to support you, even though the Olympic Games held earlier gave us mixed emotions,” Medvedev told the disabled athletes, according to a transcript published on the Kremlin’s web site. |
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BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has pressed Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan on human rights issues during his first tour of Central Asia. |
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MOSCOW — State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has linked Vedomosti and Moskovsky Komsomolets to terrorists for publishing articles that he called “suspicious.” Gryzlov told a meeting between President Dmitry Medvedev and Duma faction leaders on Friday that the two newspapers had sided with Chechen rebels rather than consolidate society by publishing critical articles between the March 29 attacks and March 31, when Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov claimed responsibility. |
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MOSCOW — Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov says the Moscow metro bombs were in retaliation for the special forces’ killing of “poor” civilians picking garlic on Feb. |
 MOSCOW — Boxing champion Nikolai Valuyev has turned into a United Russia political heavyweight, joining the party’s St. Petersburg branch. Valuyev, 32, whose height of 2.14 meters has earned him the nickname “the beast from the East,” said Friday that he was not planning to give up boxing but had joined the ruling party to expand his range of activities, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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Five companies, including three foreign ones, will take part in a tender for the construction of a new domestic waste processing plant outside St. Petersburg. The foreign firms include companies from Singapore and Austria, as well as a Greek consortium. |
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A merger with Yury Kovalchuk’s Bank Rossia has given a subsidiary of Gazenergoprombank co-ownership of Lenexpo, site of the annual Petersburg Economic Forum. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin oversaw the signing of 31 agreements in oil, nuclear power and trade on Friday during his first visit ever to Venezuela, while President Hugo Chavez said they even held talks on joint space exploration. The announcement — and Putin’s visit more generally — raised eyebrows in the United States, which has had tense relations with Chavez. The former paratrooper regularly denounces what he calls “U.S. imperialism” in Latin America, including close cooperation with his longtime rival, Colombia. Chavez was on hand at Simon Bolivar International Airport to greet Putin, even though he arrived half an hour early, at 6:30 a. |
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 MOSCOW — Russians have been finding it more difficult to pay their mobile phone and housing bills after thousands of instant payment terminals missed government deadlines for re-equipment and went out of service across the country over the past few days. |
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MOSCOW — Stocks finished the first quarter of 2010 ahead of where they started, having weathered a correction and subsequent rally, and are poised to continue their rise well into the second quarter, driven by high oil prices and good news from abroad. The ruble-denominated MICEX Index finished off the quarter at 1450.15, up 5.9 percent from its Dec. 31 close, while the dollar-denominated RTS Index closed at 1572.48, having gained 8.9 percent in the same period. Both indexes suffered a correction in the first part of the quarter as flagging prices for oil, Russia’s main export, brought down stocks, which subsequently regained their buoyancy on the rising tide of oil. |
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 The Health and Social Development Ministry will maintain a list of producer prices and monitor price markups. The government began restricting markups for essential drugs Thursday in a change that will reduce profit margins on a large segment of the multibillion-dollar market. |
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Interior Ministry investigators, escorted by 40 armed and masked riot police, raided Mirax Group’s offices in the Federation Tower on Thursday as part of a probe into the alleged theft of 4.1 million rubles ($140,000) in electricity. Video posted on Mirax president Sergei Polonsky’s blog showed masked OMON riot police posted in the company’s hallways, while bewildered employees stood along balconies overlooking the office’s luxurious atrium. |
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MOSCOW — Major purchases by Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Novatek, Sistema and other companies could be ruled invalid because of a broad interpretation of the phase “a group of entities,” though officials are promising to fix the legal flaw. |
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MOSCOW — The government has come up with a plan to create a national airline champion by merging Aeroflot with six other state airlines, according to a letter from the Transportation Ministry published Thursday. Under the plan, state corporation Russian Technologies would transfer control of its six airlines to the federal government, which would in turn transfer them to Aeroflot in exchange for an increased stake in Aeroflot via an additional share issue, the Transportation Ministry said. |
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MOSCOW — United Company RusAl’s largest shareholder, Oleg Deripaska, could return to the board of Norilsk Nickel, perhaps to raise the question once again of a possible merger of the two Russian metals giants. |
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 It was inevitable that a major terrorist attack would have a direct impact on Russia’s political landscape. Even before the victims have been laid to rest, politicians from every camp are using the tragedy to settle political scores and for PR stunts. |
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A suicide bombing is a special kind of evil. Its horror is intensified by the vision of a human being transformed into an explosive device, mingling in a crowd of strangers and tearing his or her own body with shrapnel while murdering and maiming as many chance bystanders as possible. |
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The gracious Lucia Lacarra of the Bavarian State Ballet has won the newly established Grand Prix of the Dance Open international ballet festival, which ended on Sunday with an international ballet gala concert. The festival, which is in its 9th year, seeks to build bridges between contemporary ballet and the era of the Imperial Russian Ballet. |
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