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MOSCOW — Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said Monday that he approached then-President Vladimir Putin three times for an explanation on the Yukos crackdown before Putin indicated that it was because Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky had bankrolled the Communist Party. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has urged St. Petersburg authorities to reconsider the height of the controversial skyscraper that Gazprom plans to construct in the city. |
 Local artists held a collective open-air painting session Monday in an attempt to save the historic Lopukhinsky Gardens on the Petrograd Side from plans to build a multistory hotel on the site. Participants came with easels to paint the park’s picturesque trees, duck pond and early 19th-century wooden mansion. |
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MOSCOW — Bureaucrats will be banned from accepting gifts, officials will lose their immunity and bribe-takers will have their assets seized as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to stamp out corruption. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian Chess Federation has been evicted from its premises after refusing to back Kremlin aide Arkady Dvorkovich in his bid to elect Kalmyk President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov to a new term as head of an international chess organization. The security guards at the Central House of Chess Players building in downtown Moscow were replaced and its rooms were sealed Friday, Anatoly Bakh, the federation chairman, told Ekho Moskvy radio. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A new seven-kilometer bridge over the Volga River has staged a surreal dance, sending cars swirling and bouncing in gale-force winds in a puzzling accident that prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to order an investigation Friday. The bridge has not been damaged and will be reopened Tuesday morning, Governor Anatoly Brovko said. The bridge spanning the Volga River was tested over the weekend by a fleet of KamAZ trucks and ultrasonic devices as inspectors checked for signs of damage, Brovko told reporters Monday. The tests concluded that the bridge was “structurally sound,” and it will reopen to passenger cars at 6 a. |
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CORKED UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Two models pose in outfits made of cork by students at the design faculties of St. Petersburg’s State University of Technology and Design at the Matisse Club Art Gallery on Saturday. |
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A large charity store named Spasibo! (Thank you!) has been opened by a group of volunteers on 9th Sovetskaya Ulitsa. The store copies the format of charity stores that have already been successfully operating in the U.K. and many other countries for more than 50 years. “It’s quite a successful, unusual and highly motivated kind of help,” Yulia Titova, coordinator of the new charity, was cited by Fontanka as saying.
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MOSCOW — Two Russian sailors abducted from their ship off Cameroon are in good health and may have been taken by their captors to neighboring Nigeria, said the ship’s owner and the Seafarers’ Union of Russia, Reuters reported. Unidentified gunmen raided the Greek-owned cargo ship North Spirit on May 16 while it was at anchor off the port of Douala, taking the captain and chief engineer in an attack that analysts say marks an expansion in the range of West African piracy. |
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MOSCOW — The Cabinet on Thursday backed a plan to pack all federal spending into long-term programs in an effort to drastically cut the costs of running the country after it exhausts cash reserves inherited from years of an oil boom. |
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MOSCOW — Grigory Grabovoi, a self-proclaimed miracle worker who promised to resurrect Beslan children, was released on parole Friday and has offered to use his “powers” to help victims of the Raspadskaya mine blasts. Grabovoi was whisked away from prison gates in a new BMW sedan driven by his wife, Yelena, as policemen barred the media from the prison entrance. Grabovoi had “mended his ways,” his lawyers said earlier. But he will continue his “healing practices,” Grabovoi’s lawyer Vyacheslav Konev told the Perm Regional Court on Thursday. Grabovoi could help locate miners missing in the Raspadskaya mine in Kemerovo region, free of charge, Konev said. |
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 MOSCOW — Mosfilm, the leading state-owned film studio, has launched an online service that will eventually offer 2,500 old and new movies. Thirty films with English subtitles will go up on the site in the next few weeks as the movie studio hopes to attract an international audience. |
 This week, a former Miss Russia beauty queen, Anna Malova, was arrested in New York as she came out of a pharmacy, on suspicion of forging prescriptions for painkillers. The “leggy, blond beauty” was arrested as she walked out with 85 Vicodin painkiller pills, after her psychiatrist tipped off police that Malova had swiped blank prescription forms, the New York Daily News wrote. |
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 Travelers from St. Petersburg will soon have the chance to fly to Tokyo, Beijing and Johannesburg on the new Airbus A380 after Germany’s flagship airline Lufthansa saw the delivery of its first A380 in Frankfurt last week. The aircraft — the biggest passenger plane in the world — is the first of 15 that Lufthansa has ordered from Airbus in preparation for launching routes to Tokyo, Beijing and Johannesburg. |
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Steelmakers Hike Prices MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest carmaker, said steelmakers Severstal and Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel will raise prices 25 percent from June while they continue negotiations over longer-term charges. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Saturday conceded that a Russian-led customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan would not come into force by the planned July 1 deadline, casting serious doubts on Moscow’s commitment to the plan. Several key disagreements were not resolved Friday when Putin met with the Belarussian and Kazakh prime ministers in St. Petersburg, including Moscow’s desire to keep protectionist measures for its auto and aerospace industries. The union “cannot come into full force,” Putin told Mir, a television channel for the Commonwealth of Independent States, in an interview posted on the government’s web site. “If we allow this or that product into our customs zone, de facto without import duties, this will have long-term effects. |
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 Having to go to hospital in any foreign country is inevitably a stress, and Russia is no exception. While Russians are used to the system and know how to operate within it, it may seem like a quagmire of unfamiliar medical practices, bureaucracy and corruption to foreigners. |
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About 25 percent of medical advertising in Russia is unethical or non-informative, analysts say. The MedPharmConsulting health and beauty advertising agency which conducted research into the topic said that “every fourth medical advertisement requires correcting, violates ethical norms regarding patients, or is inaccurate in its use of terms and slogans, alienating potential clients. |
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MOSCOW — Yandex launched its new foreign-language search engine on Wednesday, in a move aimed at taking on Google. Yandex opened the alpha version of a search engine for foreign web sites at Yandex. |
 MOSCOW — Legislation prohibiting the arrest of businessmen won’t help many of them, as courts are refusing to acknowledge that some suspects were engaged in entrepreneurial activity. Vedomosti has obtained a copy of the Tverskoi District Court’s decision extending the arrest of Alexander Volkov, director of Eurasia Logistics, who was accused of fraud and property laundering, as well as document forgery committed as part of an organized group. |
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The “secret plans” of the Kremlin and Foreign Ministry to improve relations with the West is a topic of heated discussion among foreign policy analysts and journalists. This was sparked by the appearance of a Foreign Ministry document released to Russian Newsweek last week on how Russia could exploit certain external factors to help modernize the country and strengthen its position in the global arena. The document assumes that the global financial crisis has created new conditions in which the traditional global leaders — the United States and the European Union — are losing their advantage and new global power centers are emerging. Russia should take advantage of these trends and should create “alliances for modernization” to promote its own development and strengthen its positions domestically and globally. |
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 The euro area is being confronted by a fundamental crisis, and attacks on financial speculators will do nothing to resolve that problem. The European Council of Ministers had to promise hundreds of billions of euros to its financially imperiled member countries, even though the European economy as a whole is not really in crisis. |
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Russia is always behind, and the usual reasons for this include geographical unwieldiness, the drag of the unassimilated past and top-down control that discourages innovation. Like Peter the Great’s opening to the West, the Soviet drive to overtake and surpass the decadent West stemmed from the awareness of being dangerously behind. |
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KINGSTON — Jamaica’s prime minister vowed tough action against a frenzy of gang violence in Kingston, imposing a state of emergency to curb armed supporters of an alleged druglord sought by the United States. Premier Bruce Golding said that criminals “will not be allowed to triumph”, as gang members rampaged through the capital, clashing with police and burning a police station to the ground. |
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Issues Archive