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 MOSCOW — The European Parliament announced Friday that the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought would go to two jailed Iranians: human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and filmmaker Jafar Panahi.
Among the nominees for the award, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was punk band Pussy Riot and members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich.
The trio was nominated for their unsanctioned protest in a Moscow cathedral in which they denounced President Vladimir Putin, a performance for which they were jailed and convicted of hooliganism inspired by religious hatred. |
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 MOSCOW — Legislation to criminalize trafficking in endangered species or their body parts could be put before parliament as early as next summer, Deputy Natural Resources and Environment Minister Rinat Gizmatulin said earlier this week. |
 NOVO-OGARYOVO — President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Thursday that he had to make a difficult choice when he approved the purchase of TNK-BP by state behemoth Rosneft, as the decision contradicts the government's policy to reduce its presence in the economy.
But he made it clear that the government had to intervene after numerous requests from BP to help resolve a long-lasting dispute between the shareholders of the Russian-British joint venture. |
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 MOSCOW — The Investigative Committee on Friday said it had charged Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov with plotting riots, making him the second prominent opposition figure to be implicated in a criminal case in recent months. |
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MOSCOW — When Europe turns its clocks one hour back this Sunday, two countries are going to have it their own way: Russia and Belarus will move out of step with much of the northern hemisphere by sticking with "eternal summer time," introduced last year by then-President Dmitry Medvedev. |
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MOSCOW — Two Islamist gunmen killed in a special operation in Kazan were planning a major terrorist attack in the city on an upcoming Muslim holiday, the Federal Security Service said Thursday. |
 MOSCOW — Investigators raided the office of a Defense Ministry agency Thursday in a $95.5 million fraud case that could send a signal that the Kremlin won't tolerate corruption in the armed forces as it significantly boosts defense spending.
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov arrived at the Moscow office of Oboronservis, which manages public companies like Voentorg, Oboronstroi and Spetsremont on behalf of his ministry, after the Investigative Committee started the search for evidence in the case. |
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 MOSCOW — EasyJet will operate flights between London and Moscow from next year after Britain's Civil Aviation Authority granted the low-cost airline a license for the route over Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic. |
 MOSCOW — Opposition leaders and human rights groups Wednesday lambasted the apparent kidnapping and torture of Left Front activist Leonid Razvozzhayev as a return to Stalinist political repression and an unprecedented escalation in the crackdown against dissenters.
“Our country has entered a new era of Stalin-like repressions,” veteran rights activist Valery Borshchyov told reporters after visiting Razvozzhayev in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo detention center. |
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 MOSCOW — Russians view the ruling elite as aggressive and predatory and believe that revolution is one of the only realistic ways to change the government, according to a report released Wednesday by an influential think tank. |
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MOSCOW — Senior lawmakers Wednesday criticized a resolution by the European Parliament to establish a list of banned Russians similar to one under discussion in the U.S. Congress.
"This is yet another gross attempt to interfere in Russia's internal affairs and [constitutes] bold pressure on our judicial system," said Leonid Slutsky, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the European Parliament and a Liberal Democratic Party member in the State Duma. |
All photos from issue.
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Hermitage Pickpockets
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The director of the city’s State Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, has complained about pickpockets operating in the halls of the museum, stealing tourists’ purses, wallets and cell phones.
“The director of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Nikolai Burov, told me that they had caught pickpockets stealing tourists’ belongings in the cathedral. So, it looks as if those thieves have now come in our direction. We catch pickpockets, too, though,” said Piotrovsky, adding that for that purpose the museum’s security guards use recordings from the video cameras fixed in the Winter Palace, Interfax reported.
St. Petersburg Expands
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A bill on the expansion of St. Petersburg’s city borders passed Sept. 19 came into effect last week, Interfax reported.
The bill extends the city’s territory to include several settlements and residential areas that were previously part of the Leningrad Oblast.
As a result of the changes, the city now covers land in and around the village of Pesochnoye to the northwest of the city, as well as artificial land near Sestroretsk to the north of the Kronstadt flood barrier, the reclaimed land on the western edge of Vasilyevsky Island, and the village of Novogorelovo in the Lomonosovsky district to the southwest of the city. |
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SLICK DEAL
MIKHAIL METZEL / AP
An employee of a BP gas station attends to a customer in Moscow in this file photo from 2006. Russia’s state-controlled oil company Rosneft announced Monday that it would buy the British oil company’s 50-percent stake in TNK-BP as well as the other half owned by the AAR consortium. See stories, pages 8 and 12. |
 Johan Bäckman, who presents himself as a Finnish human rights activist drawing the attention of the Russian media to the alleged harassment of Finland-based Russian mothers due to what he calls Finnish “Russophobia,” has admitted his reports were exaggerated and should not be “taken literally.”
Russian media have repeatedly published information provided to them by Bäckman, who has even gone so far as to describe the treatment of Russian children in Finland as “genocide,” without any fact-checking.
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 Outspoken Russian gallery owner Marat Guelman said Tuesday that he had canceled an art exhibit in St. Petersburg that was scheduled to open on Nov. 15 after appeals by the show’s promoter.
The Rizzordi Art Foundation, which had offered to display “Icons,” a religious-themed exhibit, in Russia’s second-largest city, asked to consider postponing the exhibit until late 2013, keeping all preliminary agreements, Guelman wrote on his LiveJournal blog. |
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 It was intended as a friendly guide to Russia for labor migrants from Central Asia, but instead it turned into an insult. The brochure with practical advice on how to deal with border guards, police and other authorities was illustrated with depictions of migrant workers as paint brushes, brooms and other tools of low-skilled work. |
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SKA St. Petersburg extended its winning streak to seven games with a 3-2 win over Atlant Moscow Oblast on Monday night in Mytishchi.
U.S. National Hockey League lockout signing and team captain Ilya Kovalchuk scored a goal and an assist in the victory and has been a key element in the team’s success since his arrival on Sept. |
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City Dying, Says UN
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — has been included on a UN list of the most rapidly dying cities in the world. According to the Business Insider agency, the city was ranked 11th out of 28 on the list drawn up by UN experts, web portal Fontanka. |
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MOSCOW — Well-known opposition figures like anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny and former chess champion Garry Kasparov joined lower-profile personalities like former Kremlin G8 sherpa Andrei Illarionov and political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky in a new 45-member “shadow government,” according to election results released late Monday.
The online election, extended into a third day after hacker attacks disrupted voting, saw a turnout of 83 percent, the head of the shadow elections commission, Leonid Volkov, said on Twitter.
Of the 170,012 people who registered to vote, the identities of 97,727 were verified and 81,801 ended up voting, according to the elections commission’s website, cvk2012. |
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 MOSCOW — An opposition activist shown on national TV plotting with a Georgian power broker to cause “mass riots in Moscow” has turned himself in to police and written a 10-page confession, investigators said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Bloggers have ridiculed the head of the Udmurtia republic after his pricey golden wristwatch mysteriously disappeared from a billboard at the entrance to the capital’s zoo.
Earlier this month, a LiveJournal blogger nicknamed pravdorub-rus spotted that on the billboard in Izhevsk, Alexander Volkov had his left hand decorated with a luxurious Breguet wristwatch in a picture of him holding a leopard cub. |
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MOSCOW — Russian officials cranked up their warnings about U.S. child adoptions on Monday as a long-awaited U.S.-Russian agreement neared implementation. |
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MOSCOW — A senior Foreign Ministry official harshly criticized United States authorities Monday for alleged human rights abuses while presenting a report on human rights in foreign countries.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov condemned what the report described as the often harsh conditions in American prisons, the use of the death penalty and the mistreatment of adopted children in American families.
“Washington’s attempts to become the world’s tutor on democracy are baseless,” Ryabkov said during a hearing by the Duma International Affairs Committee on the human rights situation in the U.S.
The report, which was presented Monday without actually being released, is the second such paper authored by the Foreign Ministry on human rights abroad and comes in the run-up to a U. |
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 MOSCOW — Two Pussy Riot musicians were sent to separate prisons over the weekend to serve out two-year sentences for their anti-Putin performance in Moscow’s main cathedral. |
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MOSCOW — The German government offered the Kremlin a spy swap involving the exchange of a couple arrested in Germany on charges of being Russian sleeper agents, a news report said Sunday.
German officials asked Russian Ambassador Vladimir Grinin in March to swap Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag for two Russians sentenced to jail time on charges of spying for the West, newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag reported. |
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MOSCOW — A suicide bombing killed a police officer and injured four other officers early Tuesday at an internal border checkpoint in North Ossetia.
The explosion occurred at about 4:30 a. |
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MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry has received a request from Ireland’s Foreign Ministry to allow Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair to operate flights between the two countries, a Transportation Ministry spokesman told Interfax.
The document does not list any possible routes or flight frequency.
“Details will be announced after the two countries’ aviation authorities have held talks,” he said.
Vedomosti reported last week that First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov welcomed foreign budget airlines’ expansion into the Russian market.
“We are talking about allowing low-cost airlines to fly to some destinations where their technology, investment and experience of managing this business could increase competition and, of course, lower costs,” the paper said, citing a spokesman for Shuvalov. |
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 MOSCOW — Rosneft chief Igor Sechin proclaimed the “third-largest deal” in history as the state-owned oil firm put together a $61 billion scheme that will see it take over 100 percent of TNK-BP. |
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KRASNOGORSK, Moscow Region — With counterfeits making up perhaps as much as a quarter of manufactured goods sold in Russia, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called Monday for the market to become “more civilized” and urged officials, retailers and consumers to uphold copyright laws. |
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Possible Russian participation in the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) was the main item on the agenda at a roundtable discussion at the ITAR-TASS press center in St. |
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 Rosneft confirmed on Monday that it will acquire full control of TNK-BP in separate deals concluded with international oil major BP and AAR, the investment vehicle owned by several Russian billionaires. The total cost to Rosneft will be close to $60 billion. |
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Rosneft will buy BP’s 50 percent stake in TNK-BP for $17 billion plus 13 percent of Rosneft, and will purchase the AAR consortium’s 50 percent stake for $28 billion. |
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 The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review, which returned in its fourth incarnation and with its third lead singer earlier this year, will perform at Dada club this weekend.
Dada is where new vocalist Margarita Kasayeva first performed with the band — formed a decade ago to perform Jamaican music from the 1950s and 1960s — in February. Kasayeva also sang on “Water Taxi,” the three-track CD single released in May.
The band had to look for yet another singer late last year, when Yulia Kogan, a vocalist with stadium rockers Leningrad, quit due to a ban on performing with acts other than Leningrad reportedly imposed on her by frontman Sergei Shnurov. |
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ANDREI STEPIN
THE ST. PETERSBURG SKA-JAZZ REVIEW HAS A NEW SINGER AND A NEW SINGLE, AND WILL PLAY IN THE CITY THIS WEEKEND. |
 An exhibit by the contemporary British sibling duo Jake and Dinos Chapman will leave visitors to the General Staff Building of the State Hermitage Museum shocked or delighted, but certainly not ambivalent.
The central piece of the exhibit — named “The End of Fun” — is a work titled “Fucking Hell.” It is, in short, hellish, but that does not do it justice.
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Ïîäëûé: loathsome, despicable, contemptible
Once upon a time, everyone living in what is now Russia had to pay a bunch of taxes, first to the grand prince and later to the state. These taxes were collectively called ïîäàòü (tax, assessment; stress on the first syllable). Then Peter the Great assumed the throne and decided to give a tax break to the rich and noble. Over time, the only folks still burdened with ïîäàòü were the lowest merchant class in towns and the peasants in the countryside. They were called ïîäàòíûå ñîñëîâèÿ (the tax-paying classes) — you know, poor working stiffs who always seem to bear the largest tax burden.
Ïîäëûé was originally used to describe these folks and was a neutral word meaning lower-class or poor. |
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 It is no secret that Russians love to idolize their poets.
In recent weeks the city has seen a resurgence in events dedicated to the works and lives of Russia’s favorite poets and bards, such as Kino frontman Viktor Tsoi and Soviet legend Vladimir Vysotsky. |
 The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture has set up home in an innovative “temporary” pavilion in Moscow’s Gorky Park designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
The structure, located near the park’s Pionersky Prud, uses locally produced cardboard tubes for its distinctive columns and continues the park’s tradition of temporary structures. |
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For young Americans, the phrase “meat head” is likely to conjure up images of the cast of Jersey Shore dressed in wife-beater shirts and with greasy hair and fake tans. |
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 PLYOS, Ivanovo Region — This small town on the Volga River has long been famous for its serene atmosphere, picturesque hilltop views of a 3-kilometer-long quay and the house-museum of Isaac Levitan, a prominent landscape painter of the 19th century.
But Plyos, population 2,800, may turn into an elite resort amid frequent weekend visits by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and efforts by regional authorities to develop local infrastructure to attract more tourists. |
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 Of the wide range of tools available in modern marketing, Internet promotion is becoming more and more popular, as online communication and social networking account for approximately a quarter of people’s daytime activity, according to research carried out by several agencies, including Nielsen market research agency. |
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