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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered federal agencies to simplify the rules for internal migration in a move that could help laid-off Russians to land jobs elsewhere in a country with extremely low labor mobility. Putin instructed the agencies, including the Federal Migration Service, to make it easier for people to obtain the residence permits that tie Russians to a single address in an echo of the Soviet and tsarist past, the Cabinet said on its web site Saturday. “People feel like serfs when they move from one city to another,” said Dmitry Poletayev, who tracks migration issues at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “This has remained intact from the Soviet times. |
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 St. Petersburg has the most polluted rivers of the Volga-Baltic waterways, according to the results of a research expedition carried out by the international environmental pressure group Greenpeace on the Beluga II ship along one of Russia’s key waterways. |
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MOSCOW — Minority shareholders of Sberbank and VTB Group said Friday that they were unhappy with scant dividends from a rocky 2009, which saw surging bad loans take a bite out of the state-run banks’ profits. Both companies held their annual shareholders meetings Friday — Sberbank a few hours earlier — and voted to approve far lower dividends than in 2008, before the global financial crisis had severely dented lenders’ earnings. |
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MOSCOW — Two on-duty policemen have been detained in St. Petersburg after allegedly attacking a businessman and setting his car on fire in revenge for cutting off their patrol car, investigators said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Hundreds of ethnic Circassians gathered over the weekend to call on federal authorities to allow their ethnic group to split off from the Karachayevo-Cherkessia republic to form their own autonomous region within the Russian Federation. The appeal offers a new headache to the federal authorities, who are already struggling with problems of separatism and insurgency in the restive North Caucasus region where Karachayevo-Cherkessia is located. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The 4 billion rubles originally earmarked for the so-called innovation city in Skolkovo was just the beginning. In the federal budget, another 110.5 billion rubles ($3.5 billion) has been set aside for the project, mostly for construction. According to calculations provided by the Finance Ministry and the Cabinet in the budget for 2011, 110. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev’s bodyguards have been left red-faced after a senior Moscow region prosecutor breached security at the Gorki-9 presidential residence in an attempt to meet Medvedev, news reports said. |
 MOSCOW — Yekaterina, 28, a Moscow-based marketing expert, only signed a marriage contract with her husband after they decided to divorce and needed to split their apartment. The property had been purchased with her money, but it was listed in both spouses’ names, she said. Yekaterina’s husband ultimately agreed to leave her with sole ownership of the apartment — a lucky outcome after weeks of worry. |
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 MOSCOW — The State Duma will not punish lawmakers who skip parliamentary sessions, despite a recent investigation that found that one-quarter of all deputies and senators are regular absentees. |
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MOSCOW — The Interior Ministry investigator who put Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky behind the bars where he died was accused Thursday of targeting another lawyer working for the company. Oleg Silchenko had tried to strip Alexander Antipov, 57, a lawyer who replaced Magnitsky as the legal adviser for Hermitage Capital, of his license by claiming that he falsified evidence in a 2006 tax evasion case, the company said. |
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MOSCOW — “Avatar” director James Cameron suggested using Russian deep-sea manned vehicles — Mirs — to fight the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but BP’s management refused, a Russian oceanologist told RIA-Novosti on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — A bill ordering the reorganization of Rusnano, which will be the first state corporation to become a joint-stock company, passed in a first reading in the State Duma on Friday. The bill, drafted by United Russia deputies Yevgeny Somoilov and Khafiz Salikhov, says 100 percent of the shares of the newly formed company would initially be property of the state. If the bill is passed, Rusnano must develop a plan for its reorganization and present it to the government within four months of the law taking effect. Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said in March that Rusnano would be followed by Russian Technologies and Vneshekonombank. |
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 City Hall is trying to exact more than 500 million rubles from the former investor of New Holland after the company abandoned the reconstruction project for the island. |
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MOSCOW — Belarus is ready to join a Russia-dominated customs union on July 1 after outstanding disputes are resolved, Nikolai Snopkov, the country’s economy minister, said Friday. Last month, Russia and Kazakhstan agreed to launch the union without Belarus after negotiations stalled as Moscow refused to abolish export duties on the oil it sells Minsk, something analysts view as a key incentive for it to join the pact. |
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Baltic Plant to Cost $6B MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Baltic nuclear plant may cost 5 billion euros ($6 billion) to build, RIA Novosti said Monday, citing Maxim Kozlov, head of the project for state-run Inter RAO UES, at a conference in Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom reiterated on Monday that it had no plans to tap the giant Kovykta field any time soon, leaving the future of the valuable asset, part-owned by BP, on tenterhooks. BP’s 50-50 venture with Russian billionaires, TNK-BP, agreed to sell the field to Gazprom in 2007 in a deal that collapsed later in the midst of a shareholder feud in the joint company. |
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MOSCOW— McDonald’s said the cadmium-tainted “Shrek” promotional glasses that it was recalling worldwide never made it to Russia, but that did not stop the Federal Consumer Protection Service from warning that it was ready to seize the potentially hazardous collectibles. |
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MOSCOW — General Electric is in preliminary talks to expand its health care and power-generation operations in Russia, in what the company said Friday was a long-term, multibillion-dollar opportunity. GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other government officials in Moscow on Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Russian stock exchanges may soon begin trading bonds from former Soviet states, as a step toward transforming Moscow into an international financial center, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — An additional 10 billion rubles ($320 million) will be provided for the “effective” state cash-for-clunkers program in 2010, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at a government meeting Thursday. But Putin also asked for “proposals for a gradual exit from the program next year. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday backed an oil price proposal that paves the way for greater federal spending next year when the presidential campaign kicks off. |
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MOSCOW — Aeroflot said Thursday that its 2009 net profit more than tripled but came in some way below a target set just two months ago, as full year revenue slumped 27 percent on lower passenger numbers, Reuters reported. The company said net profit for the 12 months to end December was $86 million, below the $100 million forecast by chief executive Vitaly Savelyev in April. |
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 NATO soldiers marching in Red Square on Victory Day. Moscow agreeing on a compromise resolution of the 40-year sea-boundary dispute with Norway. The sight of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin kneeling at the memorial to the Polish officers murdered by Stalin’s regime at Katyn. These are a few glimpses of what the New Europe newspaper two weeks ago described as a kinder, gentler Russia. But three questions immediately arise: Is this real? Why the change? And how to respond to Russia’s new foreign policy? In this case, what you see is what you get. |
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 Aggressive enforcement of anti-corruption laws, particularly the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, is more than ever forcing multinational companies to avoid business practices and business partners that raise corruption risks. |
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With sudden urgency the Kremlin has decided that Russia must modernize its economy to survive in the 21st century, and to do so it must attract capital and know-how from abroad. There are some built-in time parameters to the situation. Russia will hold a presidential election in 2012 and host the Winter Olympics in 2014. |
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 German singer Rene Pape, arguably the world’s most charismatic bass, is in town this week for two performances at the Mariinsky Theater. Pape, who gained international fame singing sophisticated characters such as Mephistopheles (“Faust”), King Marke (“Tristan und Isolde”), Wotan (“Der Ring Des Nibelungen”), Boris Godunov (“Boris Godunov”) and Gurnemanz (“Parsifal”), appeared in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” as King Marke on Monday, and will return to the stage on Wednesday as Wotan in “Das Rheingold” at the Mariinsky Concert Hall as part of the annual Stars of the White Nights festival. |
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 This week, Ren-TV started a new drama series set at what used to be Moscow’s biggest clothing and goods market, Cherkizovsky. The channel says the show, “Cherkizona: Disposable People,” is the first “honest” depiction of the market, which was closed down by the authorities last summer amid a storm of publicity. |
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Issues Archive