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 MOSCOW — Thousands of riot police patrolled downtown Moscow on Wednesday, detaining at least 800 people, conducting pat-downs and closing the Yevropeisky shopping center and access to the nearby Kievskaya metro station to stave off violence in the area. |
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Reports are divided over mass arrests that took place on Sennaya Ploshchad in central St. Petersburg on Wednesday, with some media and analysts saying that the police effectively prevented an ethnic conflict between ethnic Russians and migrants from the Caucasus, and others calling the incident a provocation beneficial to the authorities. |
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MOSCOW — Construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway is too far advanced to be stopped and will run through the Khimki forest as originally planned, President Dmitry Medvedev said through his spokeswoman on Tuesday. The announcement comes as a bitter disappointment to environmentalists, who thought they had won a rare victory when Medvedev ordered a halt to road construction in August and set up a commission to consider alternative routes. |
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MOSCOW — Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov on Wednesday fired a senior regional official over the gruesome murder of 12 people, including four children, in the local Kushchyovskaya village. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A judge weighing the state’s case against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev postponed his long-waited verdict Wednesday by two weeks without explanation. The decision was reminiscent of the first 2005 trial against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, when the verdict was abruptly postponed in the same manner, from late April until May 16. The court also gave no reason for the delay, but analysts speculated that then-President Vladimir Putin did not want to be asked uncomfortable questions during forthcoming Victory Day festivities, when he would host many foreign leaders. Dozens of journalists and supporters arrived at Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court on Wednesday morning to find a brief note on the door stating that the reading of the verdict had been put off until 10 a. |
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 At least two St. Petersburgers died this week as an indirect result of the heavy recent snowfall and failures to clear the city’s sidewalks of snow. On Wednesday morning, a two-year-old girl died after being hit by a garbage truck on Prospekt Bolshevikov, local news agencies reported. |
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Two new computer centers for elderly people will open in St. Petersburg in December and January with the aim of raising computer literacy among elderly people and enabling them to communicate with their friends via the Internet. The computer training given at the centers will be free, said Anatoly Vereschagin, director of communications, charity and sponsorship projects at the company JTI in Russia, which sponsored the opening of the centers. “This project is oriented toward elderly people, many of whom suffer from loneliness — a problem that the Internet can help to solve,” Vereschagin said at a press conference Thursday. Leonarda Pchelina, head of the Alternativa Internet Club — the first computer club for elderly people opened by JTI in the Moskovsky district of the city in 2007 — said it was “a great opportunity” for older people to start using modern communication means. |
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 BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — As a Soyuz spacecraft slowly rolls to its launch pad on the icy cold steppes of Kazakhstan, even the most seasoned space fan cannot help but be spellbound by the sight. |
 Pop star Filipp Kirkorov has been summoned to appear in court after he failed to reach an out-of-court settlement with a television producer he first apologized to but later denied assaulting. The Moscow City Court on Wednesday sent out notices to both Kirkorov and the producer, Marina Yablokova, that a hearing would be held Thursday, said court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova, Interfax reported. |
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700,000 Questions MOSCOW (SPT) — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held his annual live conference call Thursday, with some 700,000 questions submitted by the public by e-mail, phone and text messages as of Wednesday, Interfax reported. |
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St. Petersburg’s Krupskaya Confectionary Factory, a leading producer of chocolate in the northwest region owned by Norwegian company Orkla Brands, opened its new Pekar production line at its Peterhof branch in the Leningrad Oblast on Tuesday. Philip Way, general director of the plant, said the firm was glad it had been given the opportunity to move Pekar from the city center to a new spacious facility. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday that a number of problems are hampering efforts to modernize the economy, including organization and financing. |
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MOSCOW — The latest restructuring at state-owned oil giant Rosneft took a high-profile twist Monday as a sleeper agent exchanged with the United States in July’s infamous spy swap was appointed to a top position in the company. Andrei Berzukov, known in the United States by his alias Donald Howard Heathfield, will advise Eduard Khudainatov, Rosneft’s president, and may assume the responsibilities of the company’s vice president for international projects, an unidentified source within the company told Kommersant. |
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 How did Putinism — that distinctively Russian blend of authoritarian politics and dirigiste economics — happen? And, now that it has, how can Russians move beyond it to realize the rights and liberties promised to them in the country’s Constitution? An active civil society, which seemed to appear out of nowhere in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union of 1989-90 after the long Soviet hibernation, receded far too quickly. |
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Is there a big difference between gangsters killing an entire family — including several children — in one of the Russian regions, and an individual from the Caucasus killing a member of a football fan club? From a legal point of view, there is not much difference, because in both cases people died, and those found guilty should be punished. |
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 Somewhere at home Yekaterina Kondaurova still has her first pointe shoes, soaked in blood. Back in Moscow, where she was born, she joined a dance class as a child. The ballerina remembers the class when the girls stood en pointe for the first time. “Our teacher simply commanded: “Stand up!” and we put our pointe shoes on our bare feet and started the class,” she remembers. “At the end of the lesson the slippers were covered in blood. I don’t consider them to be relics, but I could never throw those pointes away. They are a very touching reminder of childhood — like my first essays and my first math exercise books, which are covered in scribbles. |
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Anna Flegontova
Children take part in a craft workshop given by artist Dina Khaichenko and organized by the Solntse charity fund last weekend. |
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Ìóæèê: peasant, husband, worker, rustic, man, guy Ìóæèê is considered an almost untranslatable Russian word. In fact, in older translations of 19th-century literature, it’s often transliterated as moujik or muzhik. Without a footnote, I wonder what 19th-century English-speaking readers made of it. Perhaps they were used to reading about fellah in Egypt and paesan in Italy, so for them the Russian muzhik was just another (objectified) crude peasant laborer.
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 The 18th-century Mikhailovsky Castle started off a very 21st-century festival when its facade became the backdrop for a spectacular light show that started the country’s first large-scale festival devoted to the audio-visual art. The building seemed to fold itself up, as if it wanted to put itself in a suitcase for a holiday, during the light show. |
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Something of a two-in-one with this week’s restaurant review — we’ve visited the Trattoria Stefano both for a proper meal and to sample the business lunch over the last few weeks, and so a well-considered verdict is in: This new eatery on Malaya Morskaya is unlikely to blow you away, but it’s a welcome addition to the local dining scene, with some excellent dishes at very reasonable prices. |
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 NEW DELHI — The leaders of India and China called Thursday for a stronger partnership, committed to a huge increase in trade and hailed the creation of an emergency hotline as they stressed a spirit of cooperation — not competition — between Asia’s two rising powers. |
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ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Security forces firing tear gas and stun grenades clashed with stone-throwing protesters Thursday, with at least three people shot dead as a tense political showdown between supporters of the two men claiming the nation’s presidency turned violent. |
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DUBLIN — Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion violates the right of pregnant women to receive proper medical care in life-threatening cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday in a judgment that harshly criticized Ireland’s long inaction on the issue. |
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LONDON — Julian Assange will be freed on bail and sent to stay at a British country mansion, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday, rejecting prosecutors’ attempts to keep the WikiLeaks founder in prison as he fights extradition to Sweden. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive