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MOSCOW — As the unprecedented nationalist protests continued over the weekend, police again resorted to mass detentions to prevent violent clashes between Slavs and ethnic minorities. About 2,000 people — including many schoolchildren — were detained on Saturday in Moscow and the surrounding region alone, news reports said. City police detained 1,192 people in the capital between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Saturday, an unidentified police official told Interfax on Sunday. In the surrounding Moscow region, another 800 people were detained to prevent them from carrying out unsanctioned protests, regional police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev told national news agencies. Officers confiscated numerous weapons from the detainees, including two handguns, 13 nonlethal guns, 21 knives, and pyrotechnic devices, the reports said. |
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HEADHUNTED
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Russia’s first interactive science museum is due to open in St. Petersburg on Saturday on Ulitsa Lva Tolstogo on the Petrograd Side, giving children and adults alike the opportunity to experience hands-on interaction with science. See article, page 4. |
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MINSK, Belarus — International observers and Western governments accused Belarus’ strongman leader of using fraud and violence to remain in power after more than 16 years of repressive rule, saying Monday that President Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election had been seriously flawed. Seven of the nine candidates opposing Lukashenko were taken into custody, including one whom witnesses said was beaten by government forces, then dragged from his hospital bed by men in plainclothes.
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Mikhail Trukhin, one of Russia’s most popular film and television actors, who gained fame as Senior Lieutenant Volkov in the “Menty” (Cops) television series, has sent an indignant open letter to Governor Valentina Matviyenko, comparing the streets of his native town of St. |
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MOSCOW — An Ivanovo doctor fears being fired or beaten after he told Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on a call-in show last week that a local hospital had faked a display for a visit by Putin, installing borrowed equipment, dressing up staff as patients and forcing nurses to lie about their salaries. |
All photos from issue.
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 A letter-writing campaign urging President Dmitry Medvedev to save the Literary House on Nevsky Prospekt from the threat of demolition is underway in St. Petersburg after news broke that developer AvtoKomBalt is planning to tear down the building in order to construct a hotel with an underground parking lot on the site. The four-story red building is located right in the center of the city, at 68 Nevsky Prospekt, on the corner with the embankment of the Fontanka River, next to Anichkov Bridge. Preservationist organization Living City says that the reason for the planned demolition is not the poor state of the building — which was previously the developer’s official line — but the fact that it will be easier and cheaper to build an underground parking lot if the building is demolished. |
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BRING & BUY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Visitors crowd the regular Garage Sale at Loft Project Etazhi on Sunday. Participants can buy and sell unwanted items and handicrafts, on the condition that they cost less than 500 rubles ($16). |
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7 Hunters Killed ROSTOV-ON-DON (AP) — Police said seven hunters and forest rangers were shot dead in a wooded area in the North Caucasus on Saturday. All victims had two to four gunshot wounds to the head in the shootings in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, said a police official, who declined to be identified because the investigation was still at an early stage.
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 MOSCOW — Aeroflot will buy $4 billion worth of Boeing airliners to expand its long-haul fleet, the airline said Thursday. The flag carrier confirmed that it has sealed a deal with the U.S. aviation giant for 16 Boeing 777s to be delivered over a six-year period between 2012 and 2017. |
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MOSCOW — Repair costs at the country’s biggest coal mine, Raspadskaya, which stopped operations after a fatal explosion in May, stood at 5 billion rubles ($162 million), or half the initial forecast, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday. |
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BRUSSELS — The European Parliament urged EU governments Thursday to freeze the assets of Russian officials involved in the prison death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and pressed the Russian government to do more to punish those who commit crimes against Kremlin critics. The parliament also encouraged European Union states to ban visas for the officials but, after Russian lobbying in recent days, softened the language of the resolution focusing on Magnitsky’s death. The resolution is nonbinding, and EU governments did not immediately comment on whether they would take action against Russian officials. Magnitsky’s lawyers, however, called the resolution a key step toward bringing justice and pressuring Moscow to show its commitment to rule of law. |
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 MOSCOW — The 2010 annals of corruption stories took a creative twist last week when the public learned that Moscow’s metro chief is also a talented inventor. |
 MOSCOW — Russia is never abandoned by the watchful eye of one of its two rulers, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday during a record Q&A marathon in which he lashed out at the opposition, called former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky a criminal, and denounced the intelligence officer who betrayed Russian agents to the United States as a “brute” and a “pig. |
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Universities across the country are taking advantage of a law passed last year allowing them to invest directly in small, innovative businesses — with mixed results. The legislation, supported by President Dmitry Medvedev, helps create jobs, additional income and stimulate technological innovation. Formerly, higher education institutions could only create noncommercial partnerships or rent space to companies, but the new law allows for direct investment, a greater role in the business and a share in success. Nikita Petrov, a post-graduate student at Novosibirsk State Technical University, works up to four days a week in a small business developing novelty lighting. |
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 NEW DELHI — Russia and India are expected to sign billions of dollars worth of defense and nuclear deals during President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to India starting Tuesday. |
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GENEVA — Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG says it plans to invest $500 million in Russia over a five-year period. Novartis says the investment will include the construction of a drug production plant in St. Petersburg as well as research and development partnerships with local companies. |
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New GM at GHE ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Orient-Express, the company that owns the Grand Hotel Europe, has appointed Leon Larkin its new managing director for Russia and general manager for the five-star hotel, the company announced in a press release last week. |
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LONDON — Leaked U.S. Embassy cables reveal that the BP oil company was “fortunate” to have evacuated workers from a platform in Azerbaijan after a gas leak similar to the Gulf of Mexico disaster. The cables published by The Guardian newspaper on Thursday also reported that Azeri President Ilham Aliyev accused the London-based company of stealing billions of dollars of oil from his country and using “mild blackmail” to secure the rights to develop gas reserves in the Caspian Sea. |
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MOSCOW — Inteko president Yelena Baturina on Saturday discussed the sale of assets to Vasily Anisimov’s real estate holding Coalco, but the meeting was brief because the two billionaires could not agree on a price, sources close to both sides told Vedomosti. |
 MOSCOW — The ruble will weaken, oil prices will go up, personal incomes will grow slowly and GDP will freeze — but more than 500 billion rubles ($16 billion) will be added to state revenues, according to an updated forecast from the Economic Development Ministry. |
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BILLINGS, Montana — Cowboys, quarter horses and 1,434 purebred beef cattle — just add grasslands, and you’ve got a transplanted Montana ranch. Those livestock basics — plus some training in animal care — is what Montana cattle producers have shipped to southwestern Russia, where the landscape is similar to the grassy high plains of eastern Montana. |
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Gazprom Neft may rent out the new Quattro Corti business center managed by Megapolis Property Management. Gazprom Neft subsidiaries have agreed to rent premises in the A-class business center, which opened in October at 3-5 Pochtamtskaya Ulitsa, two real estate consultants told Vedomosti. |
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MOSCOW — A majority of Russians say they would rather not see their children follow in their professional footsteps, according to a survey released Friday. |
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 Twenty years after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost brought about the end of the Soviet Union, the government of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is again embarked on a strategy of openness. Only this time they are banking on economic glasnost to attract the investment flows that Russia needs to both create greater diversity in the country’s oil-dependent economy and to rebuild its aging infrastructure. |
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I have just received a three-year multiple entry Russian work visa — without leaving the country — which until recently was not possible. Changes in the law, however, may have just made life a bit easier for foreign nationals working in Russia. |
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 Russia’s first Interactive Museum of Entertaining Science will open in St. Petersburg on Dec. 25. The LabyrintUm museum will give children and adults in the city the chance to create lightning or an artificial tornado, get inside a giant bubble or find their way through a mirrored labyrinth. About 60 of the museum’s exhibits enable visitors to become acquainted with the laws of physics, chemistry and nature in practice and in a humorous way. |
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 Deidre Clark, the Moscow expat lawyer-turned-raunchy novelist, is suing her former firm, Allen & Overy, for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. She is fighting for the case to be heard in a London court after the firm sacked her for gross misconduct, and wants ?3. |
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 LONDON — Frustrated travelers in Europe expressed fury Monday at transportation officials’ inability to clear snow and ice from planes, runways and high-speed train tracks, failings that have caused holiday travel chaos and fears that many will not get home in time for Christmas. |
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YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea — South Korea’s military staged live-fire drills from an island just miles (kilometers) from rival North Korea’s shores Monday, but Pyongyang said it would not strike back despite earlier threats to retaliate for the maneuvers. |
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LONDON — British police on Monday arrested a dozen men suspected of plotting a large-scale terror attack — the biggest anti-terrorist sweep since April 2009, when 12 men were detained over an alleged al-Qaida bomb plot in the northern city of Manchester. |
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TAIPEI, Taiwan — A senior Chinese envoy arrived in Taiwan on Monday to sign an agreement on sharing medical information and cooperating in the development of new drugs, amid rapidly improving ties between the once bitter foes. |
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 The attraction of neighboring Helsinki — in some ways so Russian, in other ways a world away — shows no sign of fading, as 2010 looks set to see record levels of tourists. According to data from Travel.ru, the number of Russians visiting the Finnish capital increased by 8 percent this year. By the end of this year, the consulate services in Russia will together have issued about one million Schengen visas, most of them in St. |
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Issues Archive