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 MOSCOW — When Sergei Shoigu took the reins of the Defense Ministry on Thursday, he officially inherited a military at a crossroads, torn between tradition and the half-completed reforms of his disgraced predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Shoigu will have to decide between maintaining a large, conventional force or pursuing Serdyukov’s goal of creating a leaner, more modern military, analysts said. |
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MOSCOW — Prominent anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has set up a new Internet-based project to help Russians fight poor service and corruption in communal services. |
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MOSCOW — George Blake, a former British spy who doubled as a Soviet agent, has spoken about his career with pride and called himself an "exceptionally lucky man" in an interview published this week.
Blake, who will turn 90 on Sunday and has lived in Russia since his escape from British prison in 1966, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that he has spent his "happiest" years in the country.
"When I worked in the West I always felt a looming threat of exposure. Here I felt free," he said.
During his time as a double agent, Blake passed some of the most coveted British secrets to the Soviets. He said that exposing a Western plan to eavesdrop on Soviet communications from an underground tunnel into East Berlin was his main achievement. |
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 MOSCOW — A prominent State Duma lawmaker who observed the United States presidential election lambasted the vote as “systemically unfair” and riddled with organizational shortcomings. |
 MOSCOW – Sergei Shoigu officially took over his new defense minister duties Wednesday, receiving the so-called nuclear briefcase, while prosecutors announced new findings in a corruption case at a ministry agency that led to the ouster of his predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Shoigu, best-known for his long tenure as emergency situations minister, was nominated to head the Defense Ministry after Serdyukov was fired Tuesday by President Vladimir Putin amid a fraud scandal at the ministry-run Oboronservis supply agency. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Thursday appointed Andrei Vorobyov, head of the ruling United Russia party's State Duma faction, to the high-profile post of acting Moscow region governor. |
 MOSCOW – "I got a little bit of sleep, but I was up pretty early," U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said Wednesday afternoon, shortly after his boss, President Barack Obama, declared election victory.
Fatigue at first appeared to blunt his characteristic cheerfulness, but as the conversation turned to what Obama's second term could mean for U. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has congratulated U.S. President Barack Obama on his re-election, while Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed relief that Russia wouldn’t have to deal with Mitt Romney. |
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MOSCOW — The sixth victim in an office shooting in northern Moscow died Thursday from injuries sustained when a troubled colleague went on a killing spree.
Nikita Strelnikov, who was admitted to the capital's Botkin hospital in critical condition Wednesday, passed away in the early hours of Thursday morning, Interfax reported, citing an unnamed medical source. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — A St. Petersburg-based energy company has filed a lawsuit in the city's arbitration court claiming that one of Russia's oldest film studios is bankrupt because it can't pay up around 2 million rubles ($63,000) that it owes for energy use. |
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A criminal case against one more activist has been dropped as what has been dubbed the “Trial of 12” continued in the Vyborgsky District Court on Tuesday, with the number of activists facing prison terms of up to three years falling to seven.
On trial since April, the activists, who belonged to the National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) before it was banned as “extremist” in 2007, have been charged with relaunching the party’s activities, despite the majority of the defendants claiming they were acting as part of The Other Russia, a new party formed by the NBP’s founder Eduard Limonov following the ban.
Having pled not guilty, they described the trial as politically motivated and based on fabricated evidence. |
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FASHION VICTIMS
A group of OMON officers are distracted by the eye-catching window display at the Stockmann department store at Ploshchad Vosstaniya on Sunday. OMON
riot police units were deployed to monitor the nationalist Russian March which took place in the city center to mark National Unity Day (Nov. 4). |
 After weeks of speculation, the drawn-out conflict between Zenit St. Petersburg midfielder Igor Denisov and the club’s management has come to a close. The player admitted to being the guilty party in the dispute, and committed his future to the club in a public address published Thursday.
“It took time for me to understand what had happened. I acted wrongly in that situation and let my emotions get the better of me, and thus was not able to help my teammates to fulfill the expectations of our dedicated fans.
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In Oct. 2013, St. Petersburg will play host to the Second SportAccord Combat Games, the biggest international sports event in the city since the 1994 edition of the Goodwill Games.
Over 8 days of competition, from Oct. 18 through 26, 2013, St. Petersburg will welcome more than 1,500 athletes representing around 100 countries, ranging from traditional martial arts nations to states where these challenging sports are only emerging.
The first SportAccord Combat Games, which attracted 1,500 athletes from 60 countries, were held in Beijing in 2010. SportAccord is an umbrella organization that connects international sports federations and companies involved in organizing sports events. |
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 A baby box opened in a hospital in the small town of Kirishi in the Leningrad Oblast last week has become the tenth of its kind so far in the country. The box is a window where desperate mothers can leave unwanted babies, and it is hoped that the box could save the lives of babies rejected by their mothers. |
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Sokurov Walks Out
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Award-winning Russian film director Alexander Sokurov has made the decision to leave the board of directors at St. Petersburg’s Lenfilm film studio, Interfax said last week.
Sokurov wrote a letter about his decision to Russian Culture minister Vladimir Medinsky. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday fired Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and appointed Moscow region Governor Sergei Shoigu in his place.
Putin informed Shoigu, a longtime ally who only became governor in May after serving 18 years as emergency situations minister, about his new appointment during a meeting at the president’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — Six months have passed since bloody clashes between protesters and riot police at an opposition rally on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration appeared to mark the end of the street protest movement’s halcyon days. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has used his speech at the Asia-Europe Meeting Summit to warn of the dangers of nuclear proliferation, demand a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and call for religious tolerance.
Speaking at the summit of the Asia-Europe Meeting Summit (ASEM) in Vientiene, Laos, Medvedev appeared to call for a tighter inspections regime and monitoring of nations that had refused to sign up to nonproliferation commitments. |
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LONDON — A British inquest into the killing of former Russian Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko may make public previously unreleased details about the murder investigation, a lawyer said. |
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MINSK, Belarus — Belarus held a burial ceremony Friday for 110 Napoleonic soldiers who died in a major battle in 1812 against the Russian army.
Tens of thousands of French troops died in November 1812 when the Russians attacked French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s army as it fled across the Berezina River on a retreat from Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — Nationalists walked along a downtown embankment Sunday shouting anti-Kremlin slogans in the annual Russian March, which was beset by low turnout and occasionally dangerous antics, including an attempt to shoot at a police helicopter with a flare gun. |
 PARTSA, Mordovia Republic — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the women in the Pussy Riot punk band serving two-year prison sentences should be set free, while a band member’s husband tried to visit his wife in jail in the Mordovia republic.
Medvedev said Friday that he detested Pussy Riot’s performance of a “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral during which they pleaded with the Virgin Mary for deliverance from President Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — The owner of the missing freighter Amurskaya has been arrested on suspicion of negligence leading to multiple deaths.
Police in Komsomolsk-on-Amur said early Tuesday that they had arrested the CEO of the Nikolayevsk-on-Amur Sea Port, the company that owns the missing vessel. |
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MOSCOW — Yury Luzhkov said he feels like a pariah two years after his ouster as Moscow’s mayor, with President Vladimir Putin and other officials going out of their way to avoid him.
Luzhkov, speaking in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets published Tuesday, said he has not met with Putin since then-President Dmitry Medvedev fired him over “a loss of confidence” in October 2010. |
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 MOSCOW — Canadian plane builder Bombardier may become the first foreign aerospace firm to commercially assemble aircraft in Russia.
Executives from the Canadian firm have discussed plans to start building its Q-400 turboprop aircraft with officials at the Industry and Trade Ministry. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday rejected a government plan to develop science and technology after describing its reliance on a surge in private funding as “absolutely unrealistic. |
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MOSCOW — The Communications and Press Ministry was inundated with more than 5,000 requests to ban various websites on the day a new Internet restriction law took effect.
Yet only 190 of the requests were deemed suitable for “expert” review, and fewer than 20 sites have so far been placed on the blacklist, the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service, the ministerial agency responsible for maintaining the list, said on its website Friday, a day after the program began.
Ten websites were banned by Friday, adding to the six that had been blacklisted a day earlier. The agency said the initial six were banned because an “expert opinion” concluded that they contained child pornography, but it didn’t explain the bans for the other 10 sites. |
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 MOSCOW — Driving around Manhattan in early 1991, billionaire Igor Kesayev admired the Chrysler Building and Citigroup Center, thinking that a similar skyscraper should appear in Moscow someday. |
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 Greatness is an odd word because it signifies both quantity and quality. In the case of Russia, the two are easily confused. Even after the huge territorial losses incurred with the Soviet collapse, Russia still accounts for one-seventh of the Earth’s surface. |
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Opposition activist Leonid Razvozzhayev’s luck failed him twice. The first came when he was kidnapped in Kiev by Federal Security Service agents, brought back to Moscow and tortured into incriminating himself. |
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 A new exhibit at the Rosphoto State Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography offers those with an interest in photography a long-awaited chance to see the work of internationally-acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen in Russia.
The retrospective exhibit, titled Shadow Land, is the first major exhibit in Russia of work by Ballen, who is known for his strange, psychological and oddly beautiful pictures, many of which have been exhibited in galleries around the world.
The retrospective presented at Rosphoto covers a long period of his work and allows visitors to witness the evolution of his style. It should be mentioned that the principal feature of his work that has remained constant over the years is his use solely of black and white film. “My pictures are not separated from the fact they are black and white. I like black and white because it is a very minimalist, very reduced and at the same time very abstract art form. Besides, I am a part of the generation that grew up using black and white film,” says Ballen.
The photographer was born in New York in 1950, but for over thirty years he has lived and worked in South Africa. |
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OSA IMAGES
CIRQUE DU SOLEIL’S TRIBUTE TO THE KING OF POP, ‘MICHAEL JACKSON THE IMMORTAL,’ MAKES ITS RUSSIAN PREMIERE AT THE ICE PALACE THIS WEEK. |
 The films being shown in the city this week as part of the Northern Lights international film festival have one thing in common: The Arctic.
In addition to developing a cultural exchange among Arctic countries and showcasing movies made by filmmakers from that region, the festival’s stated aims include promoting movies about small ethnic groups of the Arctic region.
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 This year’s Diaghilev. PS. festival has a twist to it: It is devoted not only to the great Russian impresario himself, but also to the renowned contemporary choreographer and founder of the Hamburg Ballet, John Neumeier.
The festival, which is being held in the city for the third time, kicked off Monday with the presentation of a new book, “John Neumeier in St. Petersburg.” The U.S.-born choreographer, along with his ballet company, was a major presence at the first Diaghilev. |
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 New British cinema at its most inspired — from a documentary drama to a gangster movie, from a novel adaptation to a psychological thriller — comes to town on Nov. |
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Õýëëîóèí: Halloween
Why do you think Russians are getting into Halloween? It’s because a) Halloween goes back to ancient Celtic rituals and everyone knows that Celts and Slavs are related; b) it’s part of the protest movement against the Russian Orthodox Church and state; c) it’s a good excuse to dress up in cool costumes and party.
If you guessed “c,” you might be right. I actually have no idea. I’m just making this stuff up. But judging by my Russian acquaintances, Õýëëîóèí (sound it out) is not very well understood as a holiday by the masses, but nevertheless heartily embraced as a great opportunity to wear scary, silly or sexy costumes and drink a lot. |
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 Cirque du Soleil celebrates the talent of the late king of pop, Michael Jackson, in its new production “Michael Jackson The Immortal” that will see its Russian premiere on November 9, 10 and 11 at the St. |
 The beauty and troubles of the American 1960s come to life at Steve Schapiro’s retrospective exhibition “Living America,” now on at the Lumiere Brothers Photography Center in Moscow. The exhibition features over 100 works by the photographer often referred to as the chronicler of modern America’s formative years. |
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My Thai, the latest incarnation of the Thai Express fast-food cafe on Finlyandsky Prospekt, calls itself a “bungalow cafe,” though the illusion of a thatched hut on a pristine Thai beach is never really effectively created. |
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 After just two and a half hours on the Allegro high-speed train from St. Petersburg, you step off in quiet Kouvola. This serene Finnish town is a nature-lover’s paradise. A weekend here is a quiet escape, a dive into nature and a striking contrast to touristy Imatra and Lappeenranta, with their crowded superstores and spa-centers: Although Kouvola also offers opportunities for shopping, it is a much calmer experience here than in the border towns. |
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 LAGESSE, France — Deep in the Champagne region, on a stud farm surrounded by vineyards lain fallow and turning to mud in the autumn rain, Pavel Moshchalkov sits silently. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive