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Strategy 31 activists who were sentenced to time in jail after the Oct. 31 attempted demonstration in defense of the right of assembly have been released on appeal, but the persecution continued with apartment searches and interrogations. Activists described the sentences and a criminal case opened against members of author and oppositional politician Eduard Limonov’s newly-formed party The Other Russia by the Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee on Oct. 25 as “political repressions.” At appeal hearings on Wednesday and Thursday last week, the Kuibyshevsky district court overruled the verdicts of Judge Alexei Kuznetsov, who sentenced Andrei Pivovarov of the People’s Democratic Union (RNDS) to 29 days in prison, and The Other Russia activists Andrei Pesotsky and Andrei Dmitriyev to 14 and five days in prison, respectively. |
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POLE POSITION
Alexei Druzhinin / Pool / RIA Novosti / Reuters
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sits in a car of the Renault Formula One team as he test drives it at a racing track in the Leningrad Oblast on Sunday. Putin signed a deal last month with Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone to bring F1 racing to Russia starting in 2014. |
 MOSCOW — One of Russia’s best-known reporters, Oleg Kashin, remained hospitalized in critical condition on Monday as journalists and activists increased pressure on the authorities to investigate the savage weekend beating that broke his jaw, fingers and a leg. Kashin, a 30-year-old journalist with Kommersant and one of the country’s most prolific and popular bloggers, was attacked by two unidentified men early Saturday near his home at 28 Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa in downtown Moscow.
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As Russia faces a serious crisis in the supply of HIV medication, HIV-positive patients across Russia have been staging protests since the end of October to try and make their voices heard. “Not a single official from City Hall’s Health Committee came out to speak to us, even though we held our protest meeting outside their headquarters,” said Irina Maslova, one of the participants of a flash-mob that was held in St. |
All photos from issue.
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 The price for entrance tickets to St. Isaac’s Cathedral will be the same for foreigners and Russians from Jan. 1, 2011, said Natalya Koreneva, deputy director of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral State Museum and Monument Complex on Monday. Koreneva confirmed information about the price change published by Vedomosti at the end of October. |
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ROSTOV-ON-DON — Unidentified attackers armed with knives killed 12 people, including three children and a newborn, who had gathered Friday for a celebration at a home in a Krasnodar region village, authorities said. |
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MOSCOW — Stores that use English words in banners outside their establishments are facing a crackdown by antitrust authorities. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has opened investigations into a chain of fast-food restaurants, a cafe and a sportswear store, all of which face fines for using English words in their advertising banners. |
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UNITED NATIONS — Russia and six former Soviet republics have urged NATO-led forces in Afghanistan to end their “ineffective tactics” of pushing militants from combat zones in the south to other areas, including the once relatively peaceful north. |
 MOSCOW — Former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who served as prime minister in the turbulent 1990s as the country was throwing off communism and developing as a market economy, was laid to rest Friday after an emotional eulogy by Vladimir Putin. No cause of death has been released, but Chernomyrdin, 72, had grown thin in recent years and was reported to have been ill. |
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MOSCOW — Western companies are a major force behind the spread of corporate ecological consciousness in Russia, as they try to apply their global standards in local operations. |
 MOSCOW — About 3,000 Communist supporters commemorated the 1917 Revolution by marching from the Finland Station to the Avrora Cruiser in central St. Petersburg on Thursday. In Moscow, 4,000 attended a similar gathering tarnished by scuffles, while 1,300 former paratroopers demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov across town, The Associated Press reported. |
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MOSCOW — In a new sign of the Kremlin’s changing stance on the opposition, President Dmitry Medvedev unexpectedly vetoed on Saturday a bill cracking down on rallies that had sailed through both chambers of parliament. |
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 The opening of two large retail centers in the center of St. Petersburg could redefine the city’s commercial real estate market. Galeria, located on Ligovsky Prospekt with a total area of 192,000 square meters, is due to open on Nov. 25, while Stockmann Nevsky Center, which occupies 100,000 square meters at 114 Nevsky Prospekt, is set to open its doors on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Russia slipped in the latest annual ranking of business-friendly countries because its neighbors were more vigorous in improving conditions for businesses, said a report by the investment arm of the World Bank. |
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2011 City Budget ST. PETERSBURG (Vedomosti) — St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko is proposing to increase the city’s budget spending in 2011 by 10.5 billion rubles to 380.7 billion rubles, and revenue by six billion rubles to 351. |
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MOSCOW — Former presidential IT and telecommunications adviser Leonid Reiman has started a new company, ROSA, that will develop free software. When Reiman worked for the Kremlin, President Dmitry Medvedev often said Russia badly needed its own software for the sake of national security and cost savings. |
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MOSCOW — Chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko has reiterated that the government will ban sales of frozen chicken Jan. 1 in a move that will hurt imports from the United States. Practically all chicken meat now imported into Russia, including from the United States, is frozen. Onishchenko, chief of the Federal Consumer Protection Service, told news agencies last week that chicken meat loses a significant amount of its nutritional value when frozen, according to research conducted in Russia. The decision to ban the use of frozen chicken for the manufacture of all processed products dates back to March 2008, Onishchenko said. The ban now applies only to the production of baby food. |
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 MOSCOW — Russians will spend $19.5 billion online this year mostly to pay for plane and train tickets, mobile services and music, according to the first major research of the market’s value, released Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow police investigators raided the headquarters of billionaire Alexander Lebedev’s National Reserve Bank last Tuesday in what they said was a probe into one of the bank’s clients. About 15 masked riot police armed with automatic rifles rushed into the bank’s office on Prospekt 60 Let Oktyabrya followed by investigators, who initially declined to explain the purpose of the search, said Artyom Artyomov, a spokesman for Lebedev. “People wearing black sacks on their heads and carrying automatic guns have shown up. Apparently, this idea got into their heads after Halloween,” Artyomov told The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from the bank’s office. |
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 MOSCOW — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signed off on a plan last Monday to join the government’s Skolkovo innovation hub, which could see the U.S. software giant investing “tens of millions of dollars” in the project and nascent Russian tech ventures. |
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MOSCOW — Automaker Renault and its partner Nissan are in talks with the government on raising their stake in AvtoVAZ to a controlling 50 percent, Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn said Tuesday after talks with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. “The prime minister informed us that he agrees that Renault-Nissan’s stake in AvtoVAZ’s share capital could increase to as much as 50 percent,” Ghosn said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — On the eve of its initial public offering, the retail chain O’Key has agreed to sell real estate and land plots to shareholders for about 3 billion rubles ($97 million), although the assets’ value on the company’s balance sheet is 5.66 billion rubles. |
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MOSCOW — More Russians than foreigners rent high-end apartments in Moscow for the first time since at least 2007 as an effect of policy changes by multinational corporations, a survey said. |
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MOSCOW — The jump in demand for high-end housing, which had been forecast by many, has failed to materialize, real estate firm Evans said in a report. Rental demand for luxury housing remained unchanged in the third quarter, compared with the preceding three months, while demand to purchase such properties fell by 30 percent over the same period. |
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MOSCOW — Italian fashion house Prada Group is planning to make an independent entrance onto the Russian market and has already leased two locations in Moscow to house its boutiques. |
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 When U.S. voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots Tuesday in favor of a divided government, they did so largely on the basis of domestic issues, such as the economy, taxes and health care reform. But their votes will also have a significant impact on international relations, particularly with regard to Russia, a country that is high on U. |
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China has been taking a periodic census of its population for more than 2,000 years, sometimes as frequently as once every 10 to 20 years. Those records reveal an interesting picture. |
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 MOSCOW — The long-lost way of life of Jews in the Russian empire at the start of the 20th century was thrown in the spotlight by a recent exhibition at Winzavod’s Proun Gallery in Moscow focusing on drawings by artist Meir Axelrod. Combining drawings with photographs, material artifacts and film footage, the exhibit, which closed Sunday, allowed visitors to experience the sights and sounds of the shtetls, or Jewish market towns, before they were torn apart by pogroms. |
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MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia — Frightened residents abandoned their homes in a bustling city of 400,000 at the foot of Indonesia’s rumbling volcano Monday, cramming onto trains, buses and rented vehicles as authorities warned Mount Merapi could erupt again at any time. |
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YANGON, Myanmar — Fighting between ethnic rebels and Myanmar government troops has sent at least 10,000 refugees across the border into Thailand after a widely criticized election expected to usher in a parliament sympathetic to the military regime. |
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CAIRO — A U.S.-born radical Yemeni cleric has called for the killing of Americans in a new video message posted on radical web sites Monday. Anwar al-Awlaki said Americans are from the “party of devils,” and so no special religious permission is required to kill them. In the 23-minute Arabic-language message, entitled “Make it known and clear to mankind,” al-Awlaki said it was “either them or us. |
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Issues Archive