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MOSCOW — The last two charges in a controversial case against billionaire Mikhail Gutseriyev were dropped Friday, but political analysts said it remained an open question whether he would return from the safety of London any time soon. A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee, Irina Dudukina, told reporters that charges of illegal entrepreneurship and money laundering brought against Gutseriyev in 2007 had been dropped because there was no evidence of a crime. Dudukina also noted that the case was closed because of recent changes to the Criminal Code initiated by President Dmitry Medvedev. Last month, he signed a package of Kremlin-drafted amendments making it more difficult for investigators to accuse businessmen of illegal entrepreneurship and money laundering. |
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BEST FOOT FORWARD
Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters
A soldier takes part in a rehearsal for a military parade on Palace Square against the background of the General Staff Headquarters last week. The planned parade celebrating victory over Nazi forces in 1945 will take place on May 9. |
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MOSCOW — Austria agreed to join the South Stream project on Saturday, a key step toward beginning construction on a pipeline that aims to increase the flow of Russian gas to Europe. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who presided over the deal, said supplies of Russian gas to Austria would increase by 2 billion cubic meters a year after South Stream’s launch, according to a transcript on the government web site.
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A new fashion event conceived with the ambitious goal of bringing a dash of color to the city’s dull fashion scene is scheduled to kick off at the Manezh Exhibition Hall on May 17. The ambitious organizers of the Aurora Fashion Week want to kill an entire flock of birds with just one stone. |
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MOSCOW — Almazbek Atambayev, deputy head of the interim Kyrgyz government, thanked Russia on Monday for detaining and extraditing the country’s former interior minister, Moldomusa Kongantiyev. |
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The web site of dissident author Eduard Limonov became accessible again for users of a major Internet provider after it emerged that the site had only been unavailable because it shared an IP provider with other sites banned as extremist. The revelation came after more than two months of protests and calls for a boycott of Corbina/Beeline’s services for blocking the site as “extremist. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Alexander Slyusarev, known among his colleagues as “the father of Russian photography” for eschewing the political themes that dominated Soviet art, died in Moscow at the age of 65, his son Maxim said Friday. Maxim Slyusarev wrote on his father’s blog that the burial would take place at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Moscow’s Khovanskoye Cemetery. The cause of death was not specified. Born in Moscow on Oct. 9, 1944, Slyusarev took up photography in the late 1950s. He held his first solo exhibition in 1979-80 at the Dzintarzeme festival in Latvia, instantly becoming the face of the “Moscow school of photography. |
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JUST SAY NO
Konstantin Chernichkin / Reuters
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko addresses supporters on Saturday in Kiev protesting against Russia’s deal with Ukraine over the Black Sea Fleet’s lease in Sevastopol. |
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MOSCOW — United Russia is seeking a one-month speaking ban in the State Duma against Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, for his “rude” criticism of Mayor Yury Luzhkov. Deputies voted 302-67 on Friday to order the parliament’s ethics commission to analyze Zhirinovsky’s words and decide on a possible ban, news reports said. In a heated speech Tuesday, the flamboyant nationalist lambasted City Hall for corruption and called on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to fire Luzhkov and his whole administration.
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MOSCOW — Traffic police provoke drivers to break the rules of the road in order to extort bribes, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika is expected to tell lawmakers in a report this week. Police use road signs where they are not needed in order to fine drivers, Vedomosti reported Friday, citing a copy of Chaika’s report. |
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MOSCOW — Natalya Lavrova, a two-time Olympic champion and coach for the Russian national rhythmic gymnastics team, was killed Friday in a car crash in her native Penza region. |
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MOSCOW — Police have recaptured a suspected pedophile who broke out of Moscow’s notorious Butyrka jail on Friday in the latest embarrassment for the facility’s directors, who allowed another escape last month. Vasily Lokalev, 24, was detained Saturday by law enforcement officers on Zubovsky Bulvar in downtown Moscow, Sergei Tsygankov, a spokesman for the Federal Prison Service, told RIA-Novosti. |
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MOSCOW — While Washington plans to pump unprecedented sums into what critics call a government takeover of health care, Moscow is moving in the opposite direction by backing legislation that could force hospitals and other public institutions to go commercial or close. |
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MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov on Saturday told a delegation from Warsaw that he hoped that the investigation of the April 10 presidential plane crash near Smolensk would help improve ties with Poland. The meeting came a day after the last 21 bodies of victims of the crash were flown back from Russia to Warsaw. |
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MOSCOW — Human rights activists are calling on authorities to open a murder inquiry into the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention in November. |
 Satirist and radio host Viktor Shenderovich on Thursday accused Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s administration of trying to discredit him by posting online a video showing him cheating on his wife. The clip, which also purported to show two other opposition figures having sex with the same woman, is the latest in a series of hidden-camera stings to target prominent critics of the government. |
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MOSCOW — For more than 20 years, the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the controversial founding father of the Church of Scientology, have been widely available for purchase in Russia. |
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MOSCOW — The human rights group Memorial has cleared an initial hurdle in its legal fight to declassify documents on the 1940 massacre of Polish officers by Soviet secret police that still divides Russia and Poland, Reuters reported. The Supreme Court has ordered the Moscow City Court to consider an appeal in which Memorial sought to force the authorities to declassify a 2004 decision by military prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Katyn massacre. |
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St. Petersburg companies have resumed salary revisions, leading to pay increases of 10 percent on average. BAT-SPb, a tobacco company, gave 95 percent of its employees raises in April, said Alexander Liuty, director of corporate relations for BAT-Russia. Heineken plans to reevaluate salaries in May. According to Anna Meleshina, the company’s public affairs director, Heineken expects to increase employees’ salaries by 12 percent. “Last year, Heineken did not cut salaries,” she noted. Astera St. Petersburg, a consulting firm, was forced to make salary cuts in its service departments last year. “Employees in marketing earned 13 percent less for six months, but their salaries have now returned to pre-crisis levels,” said Lyudmila Reva, director of business development. |
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 A government inspection has found that employers in St. Petersburg owe 53.1 million rubles ($1.8 million) in unpaid wages — a sharp increase from the 8 million ($274,000) owed last year. |
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St. Petersburg University of Economics and Finance (FINEC) has created a fund for alumni donations. The endowment fund was established by university alumni in conjunction with Gazprombank and has been in operation since April 2, said Igor Maksimtsev, FINEK’s rector. |
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O’Key Owner in IPO MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Dorinda Holding, which owns O’Key, the St. Petersburg-based food retailer, plans to raise at least $300 million through an initial public offering in London, Kommersant reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. |
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MOSCOW — More foreign investors will flock to Russia this year because the macroeconomic situation is improving as a result of the government’s anti-crisis measures, said Chris Osborne, chief executive of Troika Dialog’s U.S. office. Unlike other emerging markets such as Brazil, China and India, where inflation will grow over the year, Russia will see its inflation rate decrease by the end of 2010, Osborne said in an interview. |
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KALUGA — PSA Peugeot Citroen and Mitsubishi on Friday launched a new car assembly plant in Kaluga, a region roundly praised by officials and businessmen for creating conditions conducive to investment. |
 MOSCOW — The future innovation city in Skolkovo will have a special legal regime, its own special police force and will be run by a fund rather than a mayor, Viktor Vekselberg, who will be president of the fund, told Vedomosti. “We wanted the police force that will serve in the innovative city to be a little different from that in the rest of the country,” Vekselberg said, referring to the future organization of Skolkovo. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian Internet is profitable despite the economic crisis and outperforms Western countries in some categories, Leonid Reiman, an adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev, said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank has asked commercial banks to close their foreign currency correspondent accounts, scrapping another crisis-period tool. The Central Bank launched the accounts in late 2008 in a bid to discourage local banks from shifting money out of the country at a time when companies and individuals alike ditched the devaluing ruble amid falling oil prices. |
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After the tragic death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski on April 10 and the circumstances surrounding the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, we are forced to once again look at the role that history plays in politics. Russia’s reaction to the Polish presidential airplane crash demonstrated that simple human relations are capable of smoothing over even the thorniest historical tensions. Of course, political will is needed as well. In fact, the gradual warming of relations between Russia and Poland did not begin in recent weeks but soon after Donald Tusk became the Polish prime minister in 2007. Generally speaking, Russia’s foreign policy is reactive by nature, and it responds to both positive and negative stimuli. |
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 A new group was recently organized on Facebook under the title “Polish plane crash should be investigated by the International Commission.” Within days, it ballooned to more than 4,500 members, raising the question of whether people really suspect Russia of being involved in the tragic Polish plane crash of April 10 near Smolensk that killed President Lech Kaczynski and more than 90 high-level officials of the Polish government and parliament. |
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U.S. history has two days that will live in infamy — Dec. 7 and Sept. 11. After each attack, the United States found itself fighting in Asia, a more difficult place for it to project power than Europe. For purely logistical reasons, Washington rents the Manas air base, which is only 20 kilometers fr om the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. |
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 Sector 10 is one of many fan organizations devoted to St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit. But it’s not all about soccer. On Saturday, the group visited a boarding school for orphans and children suffering from poor health in Luga, 150 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, as part of a project run in cooperation with the Celebration for Kids charity that has been underway for three months. |
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Issues Archive