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MOSCOW — Attendance vastly improved in the State Duma on Wednesday after a television report exposed poor turnout, but some deputies complained that fellow lawmakers were chatting so loudly that they drowned out the speakers. Viktor Ilyukhin, a deputy with the Communist Party, urged Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov at the opening of Wednesday’s session to force lawmakers to stop discussing their private affairs and quiet down. “The hall is buzzing, the hall is discussing some other problems,” Ilyukhin said, RIA-Novosti reported. “It’s impossible to speak if you are the first to speak.” Each Duma session traditionally begins with a five-minute speech on politics delivered by the Communists, RIA-Novosti said. |
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FOR A SONG
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Club of Singing Diplomats and Co. performs during a charity concert at the Renaissance Hotel on Thursday. Proceeds from the event will go to the SOS Children’s Village in Pushkin. |
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MOSCOW — Primorye authorities on Thursday claimed that a member of a gang likened to “Russian Rambos” had been arrested, following reports that the group had killed at least one policeman and injured several others in a month-long campaign of self-described vigilante justice against corrupt law enforcement officers. The suspect, Roman Savchenko, 18, faces charges of illegal weapons trafficking and an attempt on the life of a law enforcement officer, said investigators in the far eastern region.
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 Designers from the U.K. company Grimshaw Architects presented their vision Thursday of the new Pulkovo terminal, which will see its official groundbreaking ceremony on June 26, to His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York. The presentation was the final event of the Duke of York’s three-day visit to the city, which included visits to a number of Russian-British enterprises, including the local headquarters of HSBC bank and two companies of the Unilever holding, in his capacity as U. |
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MOSCOW — Russia may indefinitely delay construction of an oil pipeline across Bulgaria and Greece if Sophia does not complete its revision of the plan in the next few months, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said Wednesday. |
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VLADIVOSTOK — At least 495 skeletons, many with head gunshot wounds, have been unearthed in a mass grave probably dating back to purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, Vladivostok authorities said, Reuters reported. At least 3.5 tons of bones were extracted from the site on the outskirts of the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok after it was discovered by workmen building a road, City Hall said in a statement. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday ordered the government to draft a proposal on reducing the federal bureaucracy by 20 percent, a politically risky idea floated by the Finance Ministry to help patch the budget deficit. A decision will only be made after a final proposal has been submitted and studied, Medvedev said at a government meeting on federal targeted programs. |
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MOSCOW — Ingush rebel leader Ali Taziyev appears to be cooperating with authorities after being seized by the Federal Secret Service this week, Kommersant reported Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev are already considering their roles in the 2012 presidential election, Putin told French media on Wednesday. “Naturally, I am already thinking about this issue with President Medvedev but have decided not to make much fuss about it, not to let ourselves be distracted by this problem,” Putin said. His comments to the French media were carried by Russian news agencies. Putin, president from 2000 to 2008, anointed Medvedev as his successor when his second and last term in office expired. Putin can run for president again in elections in 2012 and stay in power until 2024. Since 2008, the Medvedev and Putin duo have been running the country in tandem. |
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 MOSCOW — The fact that Russians carve ice into sculptures makes some kind of sense for obvious reasons. But sand? Currently there is a thousand tons of sand — next to the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow — that has been transformed into a phantasmagorical yellow sculpture that takes viewers on a tour of Russian history. |
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MOSCOW — Russia will celebrate a new holiday next month under a decision backed by the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church that is stirring up decidedly unholy feelings among non-Orthodox Russians. Christianization of Rus Day on July 28 won’t be counted as a day off work, but it will be recognized on calendars as the country’s ninth so-called “memorial holiday,” which also includes Cosmonauts Day on April 12 and Constitution Day on Dec. |
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MOSCOW — The Interior Ministry acknowledged on Tuesday that a car owned by Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky was in the vicinity of a crash that injured a woman, but it denied that the car was responsible for the accident. |
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 MOSCOW — The Finance Ministry has proposed increasing the excise tax on hard alcohol, in a rate hike that would double the minimum vodka price to 200 rubles (about $6) per half liter by 2013. The tax hike would mean that the price of the cheapest vodka would be increased from the current 90 rubles to 120 rubles in 2011, 160 rubles in 2012 and finally 200 rubles in 2013, Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — Rosatom agreed to sell a stake in one of its uranium enrichment plants to the Kazakh state company Kazatomprom in a deal that would for the first time unlock a Russian nuclear fuel maker for partial foreign ownership, both companies said Tuesday. |
 MOSCOW — The government should support small energy-generating projects that use biofuel by giving them tax breaks and subsidized interest rates, presidential economic adviser Arkady Dvorkovich said Tuesday. Dvorkovich has been a key advocate of President Dmitry Medvedev’s goal to make Russia 40 percent more energy-efficient by 2020. |
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MOSCOW — VimpelCom will start selling the new iPhone 4 in September or October, the mobile operator said. VimpelCom and Apple are currently negotiating shipping details on Apple’s latest version of its best-selling smartphone, which was presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Monday. |
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 A distinctive feature of the Russian power vertical is that leaders do not bother determining what government officials have already said on a particular subject before preparing their own remarks. At a meeting on security agency budgets on May 24, President Dmitry Medvedev set the goal of modernizing at least 30 percent of Russia’s weaponry by 2015. |
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In 2004, Vasily Kononov, the former leader of a pro-Soviet commando unit in Nazi-occupied Latvia during World War II, was convicted by Latvia’s highest court of killing nine civilians in the village of Mazie Bati in 1944. |
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 A four-day tango fiesta, complete with Argentinian star dancing pairs, a world-famous tango pianist and even an entire tango-orchestra has descended upon the city. The event kicks off on Friday night with a free open lesson of Argentinian tango for the uninitiated. |
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Áàçàð: marketplace; free-for-all, talk, chatter, an issue to discuss (slang) As a longtime fan of the rock group DDT and its lead singer and songwriter, I was fascinated by the discussion between Shevchuk and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that took place recently. |
 Alexander Sokurov’s latest film has people reading from a book, one after another, for the whole 96 minutes. “Reading Book of Blockade” has children, soldiers, artists and actors reading true stories about the horrors of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II. |
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The Petrograd Side, once an arid wasteland for locals in search of a bite to eat, has yet another decent restaurant to boast of, and again it’s a newcomer from the Ginza Project people. |
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PARIS — Jerome Kerviel’s “stratospheric” stock market risks nearly brought down Societe Generale, an ex-workmate told a Paris court on Thursday at the former trader’s fraud trial. The French bank accuses Kerviel of secretly gambling away 4.9 billion euros ($7.1 billion dollars at the time) in the huge 2008 rogue trading case, seen as a symbol of the excesses blamed for the financial crisis. |
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Issues Archive