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SAMARA — Young and the old alike, most residents of Samara’s rundown neighborhood of Zheleznodorozhny made no effort to conceal their support for Dmitry Azarov, a slick-looking 40-year-old who ran against the incumbent mayor, Viktor Tarkhov, in Sunday’s elections. “I don’t care for what Tarkhov has been doing,” said German Prokopov, 62, a retired tractor driver, as he walked out of a polling station. “The garbage is still around my area, and nobody takes care of it.” “I voted for Azarov, we need younger people,” said Natalya, 45, a candy factory employee, who refused to give her last name. “The incumbent mayor was not doing anything for the city. |
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 An estimated 3,000 rallied against the construction of Gazprom’s planned skyscraper and the destruction of historic buildings on Saturday, as news broke that the controversial Okhta Center project had been given state approval. |
 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow’s next mayor will be one of four candidates nominated by United Russia over the weekend, and analysts said the clear front-runner is Sergei Sobyanin, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff. Medvedev, who actively participated in deliberations with United Russia over the mayoral shortlist, said Saturday during a meeting with the party’s leadership that he had pushed strongly for all four candidacies and would pick one as a successor to former Mayor Yury Luzhkov within 10 days as required by law. |
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Court Backs Gay Pride ST. PETERBURG (SPT) — The Moskovsky district court in St. Petersburg has partially upheld the complaint of the city’s gay community against the banning of a gay pride event last summer, Interfax reported Monday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Election officials reported unexpectedly high turnout, early United Russia victories and at least one death Sunday as voters took part in 7,865 polls involving about 100,000 candidates in 77 of the country’s 84 regions. Early results indicated that turnout topped previous regional elections, exceeding 50 percent in the Belgorod region alone, said Leonid Ivlev, deputy head of the Central Elections Commission. The elections, a last rehearsal before the 2011 State Duma vote and the 2012 presidential poll, ended without any serious violations but, like last year’s regional elections, was tarnished by violence in Dagestan, the elections commission said. |
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HOMEWARD BOUND
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Departing British Consul William Elliott (kneeling) poses for a photograph with the Mitki art group at a Mitki-themed party to mark the end of his tenure in St. Petersburg. |
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The European Court of Human Rights has begun investigating one of the most high-profile organized crime cases in Russia — that of Yury Shutov, a former lawmaker and advisor to the late St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Shutov was sentenced to life imprisonment by a St. Petersburg court in 2006 for a series of contract killings and organized crime convictions.
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Suicide Bombing Case MOSCOW (SPT) — An announcement by the National Anti-Terrorism Committee that a ring of female suicide bombers was busted in Dagestan this summer proved to be exaggerated, with only two of the 10 detainees facing charges — for illicit possession of firearms, Kommersant reported Saturday. |
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Maxim Sushinsky scored twice in the third period and led SKA St. Petersburg to a 5-3 victory over the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2010 Compuserve NHL Premiere exhibition game last Monday night at the Ice Palace. |
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MOSCOW — Russia may be associated more with long, dark winters than sun-drenched days. But that is not stopping private companies from tapping into a growing market for solar energy. The jury is still out as to whether the sun can compete long term with traditional energy sources, but some industry players say solar energy has good potential — even though the government largely ignores renewable energy sources and Russia’s economy is firmly based on the petrodollar. Then there’s the issue of a lack of sun. “Russia has been considered as a northern country for a long time. … There was an opinion that it’s better to use solar energy in countries where there’s a lot of sun,” said Marat Zaks, chief executive of Solar Wind, a Krasnodar-based solar panel manufacturer. |
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 An outfit of American cardiac surgery experts finished a weeklong trip to St. Petersburg on Saturday for the Healthy Heart Foundation, formerly the Almazov Foundation for the Development of Medical Science and Education. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Monday that it had not received any complaints over a state tender offering $1.8 million to create a web site in just over two weeks, even after a top blogger asked his readers to complain. The Health and Social Development Ministry is seeking bids to build a social networking site for doctors, and it posted details of the tender on the main web site for state purchases Oct. 5. The ministry required that the site be ready within 16 days and that the bid be no more than 55 million rubles ($1.8 million). Alexei Navalny, a prominent lawyer and anti-corruption activist, posted details of the tender on his blog over the weekend and asked readers to file complaints with the anti-monopoly service. |
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 MOSCOW — Pay television executives have predicted that the industry will remain modest as many households are unwilling to accept bills for the service. |
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MOSCOW — Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony announced on Thursday that his country would make hefty purchases of military aviation produced jointly with Russia. India will buy 45 multipurpose transport planes and 250 to 300 fighter planes, Antony said at a news conference in New Delhi after the 10th meeting of the India-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — An additional 91 billion rubles ($3 billion) will be funneled into the federal budget by year’s end to “solve a number of acute problems without waiting until January,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at a Presidium session last Tuesday. |
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The Krugly Rynok building on the River Moika embankment was sold for 200 million rubles ($6.7 million) to Sovkomflot, Russia’s largest shipping company, at auction last Wednesday. Two bidders applied to take part in the auction for the property, which comprises a 4,326-square meter building and a 1,883-square meter piece of land at 3 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki. But the lot went without bids to Sovkomflot Barandei, the local subdivision of state-owned Sovkomflot, for its starting price of 200 million rubles, said Maxim Klyushin, head of Sovkomflot’s new projects department. The company signed a 49-year rental agreement for the premises, classified as a federal monument, back in 2006 with the aim of transforming them into its headquarters. |
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 City Hall issued a decree on Sept. 13 allowing the transformation of the Trezzini House at 21B Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya into a 2,000-square-meter four-star boutique hotel of 40 rooms. |
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MOSCOW — Russian uranium producer Atomredmetzoloto maintained a calm front Friday in the face of objections by powerful U.S. legislators to a deal that would give it control over a uranium mining operation in the United States. The Rosatom subsidiary is completing a complex transaction with Canada’s Uranium One that would raise its share in the Canadian company to 51 percent. |
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MOSCOW — French industrial gas producer Air Liquide said Thursday that it planned to start construction of an air separation unit worth 60 million euros ($84 million) in the Nizhny Novgorod region and that it would increase investments in Russia over the next five years. |
 MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday that German companies were now considering joining South Stream and that a number of new European firms were showing “great interest” in entering the gas pipeline project. Putin repeated the statement about German participation during a meeting Saturday with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in St. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow Arbitration Court has ruled that unpaid tax claims against the now-bankrupt cosmetics chain Arbat Prestige were illegal, raising the hopes of defense lawyers that criminal charges against former owner Vladimir Nekrasov and reputed crime boss Semyon Mogilevich will be dropped. |
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MOSCOW — AvtoVAZ will begin production this month of three-door Lada 4x4s for export that comply with Euro-5 environmental standards, Interfax reported Thursday, citing the company’s press service. “Apart from the SUVs, automobiles in the Lada Kalina and Lada Priora families … also certified under the new standards. |
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MOSCOW — Russia ranks ahead of the United States in disclosing government revenue from producing oil and mining minerals, a new study says. The study by Revenue Watch Institute and Transparency International put Russia at No. |
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 On the day President Dmitry Medvedev fired Yury Luzhkov, reporters asked Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to comment on the reason. “The Moscow mayor didn’t get along with the president,” Putin said. Medvedev’s own explanation wasn’t any more substantial. |
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Sometimes what doesn’t happen counts most. In late September, President Dmitry Medvedev issued a decree banning the delivery of the S-300 air-defense system to Iran after Moscow had signed a contract for the system in 2007 worth $800 million. |
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 BEIJING — Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo has tearfully dedicated his award to victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, activists said, as his wife was held under house arrest on Monday. “This award is for the lost souls of June Fourth,” the U. |
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SAN JOSE MINE, Chile — The operation to bring 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for more than two months back to the surface neared its final stage on Monday as engineers worked to reinforce a shaft through which the workers will be hoisted. |
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AMFISSA, Greece — A Greek court sentenced a policeman to life in prison on Monday for murdering a 15-year-old schoolboy in a shooting nearly two years ago that sparked rioting across the country. Epaminondas Korkoneas, 38, was convicted of culpable homicide by a court in the town of Amfissa over the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos during a December 2008 night patrol in the Athens district of Exarchia. |
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WASHINGTON — Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed in a U.S. television interview that his administration has been holding unofficial talks with the Taliban “for quite some time” to try to end the nine-year war. |
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 While the image of springtime in Paris may be the city’s official calling card, the considerable pleasures of the French capital in autumn are overlooked at the risk of any experienced traveler’s reputation. October and November are in fact when the city truly reveals itself. Gone are the heaving throngs of tourists, long queues and sweaty midday rests that the blazing sun demands, to be replaced by crystalline days that morph into cool, crisp nights. |
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 There is far more to Finnish tourism than shopping trips to Helsinki, as more and more Russian tourists discover every year. Retail therapy is far from the only attraction of neighboring Suomi, which offers a diverse range of holiday activities from relaxing spa-breaks to energetic activity holidays. |
 “Dear Mum, couldn’t stand the loneliness any longer. Gone off to see the world. Don’t be worried, I’ll be back soon. Love Bilbo xxx.” Thus read a note found by a woman in the space formerly occupied by a gnome in her garden in a suburb of Sydney. The story was reported in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald in 1986. |
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Issues Archive