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The last seven days in January saw foreign investors putting $414 million into investment funds that have Russian portfolios — the highest inflow seen since April of 2011.
Of that inflow, $237 million was specifically targeted to Russia. This represents a change in the direction of capital flows, since the last half of 2011 saw continuous flight from domestic markets. |
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The Defense Ministry plans to spend 729 million rubles ($24.5 million) on eight underwater drones made by Icelandic firm Teledyne Gavia, according to an order posted on the ministry's website. |
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All five presidential candidates will be provided an equal amount of free airtime on state-owned TV channels when campaigning in the mass media begins Feb. 4.
Candidates will be given free airtime on channels Rossiya-1, Rossiya-24, Channel One and TV Center-Moscow for commercials, first-person monologues and debates, Kommersant-FM reported Thursday. |
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Shares of Internet company Mail.ru Group could rise as a result of the initial public offering planned by social-networking site Facebook, a VTB Capital report said. |
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A one-day-old child was left on the ground outside a Moscow apartment building despite a temperature of minus 20 C, before being found and picked up by a passerby, Life News reported.
A closed-circuit camera captured images of a woman placing the child on the ground at 6:15 a. |
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MOSCOW — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he could face a runoff in the March presidential vote, his first acknowledgement that he may fail to muster enough support for an outright victory. |
All photos from issue.
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 “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” — it was Benjamin Franklin, the author of this proverb, who first suggested implementing daylight saving time.
But as Russia reaches the end of its first winter spent on summertime, many city residents complain that they feel anything but healthy.
The practice of temporarily advancing the clock to conserve electricity in the evening has been widely used around the world since 1916 when it was first tried by Germany. In Russia, the practice was only introduced in 1981.
Last February, President Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russia would no longer change the clocks, but would remain permanently on daylight saving time. The clocks were changed — onto daylight saving time — for the last time last March.
“Moving the clocks forward and back every spring and autumn, everyone swears that the human biorhythm is really disturbed; it is annoying, people either oversleep or wake up earlier and do not know what to do during this extra hour,” Medvedev was quoted by Interfax as saying in February of last year.
“I think [not changing the clocks] will be of interest to our country and rather helpful,” he said.
This is not the first time that the country’s rulers have seen fit to put it on permanent summertime, however, meaning that as a result, Moscow’s time zone now has a standard time two hours ahead of that suggested by its geographical location. |
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HOLY LANDS
ALEXEI NIKOLSKY / AP
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (c) walks around the Tikhvin Assumption Monastery near St. Petersburg on Monday. The monastery is a place once visited by almost all of the tsars, who prayed to the Icon of the Mother of God, located inside the church, to bless their rule. |
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The apartment-museum of Russian-born Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Joseph Brodsky may open in the city as a joint cultural project between Russia and the U.S., City Hall said.
Vasily Kichedzhi, deputy governor of St. Petersburg, said that City Hall was ready to take an active part in opening a museum devoted to the poet, who emigrated to the U.
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You Eat, They Give
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — This month, the city’s Courtyard Marriott St. Petersburg Vasilyevsky and Renaissance St. Petersburg Baltic hotels are taking part in a charity event called “You Eat, We Give” in support of the SOS — Children’s Villages charity and its activities in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin.
The main goal of the program is to give young people living in unfavorable social conditions the opportunity to reach their potential while developing their personal and professional skills.
As part of the program, the hotels will donate one euro from every lunch or dinner bought in their Pierro and Kanvas restaurants to the SOS — Children’s Villages foundation. |
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 City Hall conceded to the organizers of the Feb. 4 anti-fraud march “For Honest Elections” during the course of lengthy talks on Monday, agreeing to the original gathering point near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Ligovsky Prospekt and to a downtown route. |
 Deputy city governor Yury Molchanov, who was in charge of St. Petersburg’s investment projects, resigned from his post last week, making him the latest in a growing list of senior administration officials who have resigned since new city governor Georgy Poltavchenko took office. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo Airport customs officers detained a pregnant woman from Tajikistan who was smuggling heroin capsules in her stomach, Interfax reported last week. |
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Guide Dogs in Metro
ST. PETERBURG (SPT) — Visually impaired people will soon be able to enter city metro stations with guide dogs.
A decree on the issue was signed by Stanislav Popov, head of the city’s Transport Committee, but it has not yet been put into effect, Interfax reported last week. |
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A banner with the words "Putin, leave" and an image of the prime minister's face with a black cross over it appeared Wednesday morning on a billboard above a building adjacent to the Kremlin.
Activists from the liberal political group Solidarnost were responsible for the stunt, the group said on its LiveJournal page.
Blogger Ilya Varlamov posted a picture of the banner at 12:30 p.m. on his LiveJournal page. One commenter to the post noted, "Do they know that Putin isn't in the Kremlin?", referring to the fact that the prime minister is based in the White House, located on Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya.
At 1 p.m. workers were in the process of taking the banner down, news website Ridus reported. |
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 MOSCOW — The country’s only independent elections watchdog said it has detected fewer violations in the run-up to the presidential election than the State Duma vote but that one of the main violators is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — The head of Russia’s space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, said Tuesday that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of a Mars moon probe that crashed to Earth this month, suggesting that a low-quality imported component may have been vulnerable to the radiation. |
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MOSCOW — A group of Russian businessmen calling itself the International Anti-Corruption Committee is creating a list of 50 corrupt government officials and plans to present proof that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stole hundreds of millions of dollars, London’s The Sunday Times reported Sunday. |
 MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin laid out his economic vision in the third of a weekly series of articles titled “Ideas for Russia” on Monday and called for a smaller state presence in business, a fight against corruption, institutional reform and a drive to wean Russia off its oil dependency. |
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MOSCOW — Twitter has announced that it now has the ability to censor content in specific countries, leading critics to fear it may cause increased collusion with governments looking to stop opposition groups — like those behind Russia’s recent election fraud protests – from using the site as an organizing tool. |
 MOSCOW — Lawmakers in Moscow have expressed alarm at Customs Union rules that could lift a Russia-wide ban on reusing bottles for vodka and other drinks.
In the latest in an increasingly acrimonious deadlock between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus over alcohol regulation, Alexander Torshin, first deputy speaker of the Federation Council, told Interfax on Friday that lifting the ban would mean a surge in contraband booze and threats to consumer safety. |
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 MOSCOW — Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky is accusing the Central Elections Commission of being overly harsh in its interpretation of the law when it removed him from the presidential race for having collected too many invalid signatures.
Yavlinsky admitted in a blog post late Sunday that more than 137,000 of the signatures presented on his behalf were scanned copies of actual signatures, but insisted that this was legal. |
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MOSCOW — Side frames of freight cars on a train carrying oil through the Amur region in the Russian Far East broke Tuesday morning, causing 17 oil tanks to fly off the cars, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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KIEV, Ukraine — Thirty people, most of them homeless, have died of hypothermia in recent days in Ukraine as the region experiences a severe cold spell.
Of the victims in Ukraine, 21 were found frozen on the streets, five died in hospitals and four in their own homes, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Yulia Yershova. |
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 MOSCOW — The universal electronic card demonstrated by President Dmitry Medvedev in the spring of last year is facing delays, with the rollout that was scheduled for this January being pushed to January of 2013.
The card, which is supposed to serve as a combination of an electronic ID, driver’s license, car insurance certificate, ATM card and migration document, among other possible functions, is the expected result of a project the government estimates will cost as much as 150 billion rubles to 170 billion rubles ($5. |
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MOSCOW — A fund that will rely heavily on Russian money to invest in clean technology has raised the planned 110 million euros ($145.3 million) in capital from its two founders as it prepares to announce its first deal later this year, German co-founder Wermuth Asset Management announced Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The former head of the Moscow- based Unique Objects Development and Reconstruction Administration has been arrested for stealing 1.5 billion rubles ($49.8 million) from the city budget, Interfax reported Monday.
Andrei Barkanov is suspected of having “allotted subsidies to a target inappropriate to the conditions of their issuance, thereby improving the financial condition of his own organization,” an unnamed police source told Interfax. |
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MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who led the Russian delegation at a global economic forum in Davos, condemned his country’s political system, but said any changes should be moderate. |
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 In 2006, an exposé about British “spy stones” in a film by pro-Kremlin television journalist Arkady Mamontov set off a media storm. The story was so advantageous for the Kremlin that many commentators suspected that the device was not real and that the whole story was a fabrication created to justify a government attack on nongovernmental organizations that were active in Russia. |
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Pro-democracy protests in Russia are being organized by writers, journalists, artists and other cultural figures. There are few businesspeople among them who understand the concept of risk-adjusted returns. |
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It is perhaps unsurprising that Putin — under heavy criticism for electoral fraud in favor of his United Russia party at the Dec. 4 State Duma Election and for violations recorded during the ongoing campaign for the presidential elections due on March 4 — should be attacked in a song by the feminist punk band Pussy Riot (see interview, this page).
But surprisingly, some harsh criticism has come from a very different source: A band of paratrooper veterans, who are largely considered to be one of the conservative groups upon which the Kremlin relies. |
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JOHANNES ZEILER STARS
IN ALEXANDER SOKUROV’S
AWARD-WINNING FILM
‘FAUST,’ WHICH PREMIERED
IN THE CITY LAST WEEK. |
 Pussy Riot, a feminist punk collective from Moscow whose members hide their faces behind colored balaclavas, creates waves of protest through its dissident songs and unsanctioned performances — which culminated late last month in a brief unauthorized concert on Moscow’s strictly guarded Red Square.
The group, which performed a freshly penned anti-Kremlin song called “Putin Got Scared” (Putin Zassal) — complete with colored smoke bombs and a purple feminist flag — was arrested and, after being held for about five hours in a police precinct, two members were fined 500 rubles (around $17) each.
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 Pure evil reigns in Alexander Sokurov’s new film “Faust,” which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival and starts screening in Russian movie theaters on Feb. 9. The director plunges audiences into a unipolar world in which all things cruel, brutal and despicable flourish — and have long combated all things positive. The effects of this experience were described by director Darren Aronofsky, head of the jury in Venice, as “a life-changing experience,” a strong compliment that very few works in the history of cinema have been awarded. |
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 St. Petersburg director Vitaly Melnikov presented the premiere of his new film, “The Admirer” (“Poklonnitsa”), at the city’s Dom Kino movie theater last week. |
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Ëåæàòü: to lie
Stand, sit, lie … sit, lie, stand …
I know I sound like a dog trainer on drugs, but bear with me just a little bit longer. You’ll thank me some day. If you use the wrong stance verb in Russian, it’s as if you were saying in English: My keys are standing on the counter. The response is likely to be: Âû îòêóäà? (What country are you from?)
Today’s stance verb is ëåæàòü (to lie). Some things always lie. Hair, for example, lies on your head — that is, êîãäà íå ñòîÿò äûáîì (when it’s not standing on end). Êàê çàñòàâèòü âîëîñû ëåæàòü àêêóðàòíî? (How do you make your hair stay neatly in place?)
Money, when not changing hands or working for you, also lies. |
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 David Remnick says he has been lucky — “preposterously lucky” — twice in his professional life: Once when he was posted to Moscow in 1988 as a correspondent for The Washington Post and once when he was made editor of The New Yorker magazine. |
 Last week, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lined up their teams of celebrity supporters for the presidential race, with pop star Alla Pugachyova still staunchly behind Prokhorov, even if she called him a “wimp” in his love life. |
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Stuck in the middle
Conveniently situated right in the city center across the canal from the Church of the Spilled Blood, the laconically named Dom 7 (House No. |
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 The expanding population of St. Petersburg means that the issue of housing remains one of the city’s key concerns, particularly in light of the fact that the main contributor to the population growth is migration. According to a census conducted in 2010, the population of the northwest federal district decreased by 2. |
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MOSCOW — The World Bank, the United Nations and the Economic Development Ministry emphasized the potential for developing state subsidized home construction, also known as “social housing,” in Russia at a round table. |
 KIEV, Ukraine — He is a descendant of Russia’s last tsar — and has lived in the jungle, starred in Bollywood movies and trained as a stuntman.
Now Scottish photographer Francis Mathew is on a new adventure: finding a bride on a reality TV show in Ukraine.
Mathew, the great-great-nephew of Nicholas II, is the star of the second season of Ukraine’s version of the popular U.S. show “The Bachelor” — in which an unmarried man picks a fiancée through a series of dates and romantic getaways. |
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 Ask Russian top managers and company owners what it takes to succeed in business, and the stories they tell you will generally have little to do with being humane, helping others and caring for the environment. |
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Issues Archive