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 MOSCOW – The culture and education ministers Thursday presented a list of 100 Soviet and Russian films that schools will be advised to show students to strengthen their cultural values and to build bonds with their parents and teachers from older generations. |
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MOSCOW – Germany put a married couple thought to be in their mid-40s on trial this week on suspicion that they spied for Russia for more than two decades under the cover of being an ordinary middle-class family. |
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MOSCOW – An unknown assailant threw acid in the face of Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin in an attack that police have linked to his professional activities.
Filin was hospitalized with severe burns after the attack, which occurred near his apartment in the city center Thursday just before midnight, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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MOSCOW – A 42-year-old resident of Bratsk fell off a train heading from Moscow to the Sakha republic and chased it for 7 kilometers to survive the minus 40 degree Celsius temperature, a news report said Friday. |
 MOSCOW – Russia is on the right path to radically improve its business environment and move up 100 notches within the next five years in the global rankings of the favorability of countries' investment climate, a World Bank official said Thursday.
But its eventual position in relation to other countries in the Doing Business rankings is less important than the actual progress it is making to become more friendly to investors. |
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MOSCOW – The Investigative Committee has opened a fourth criminal case against opposition activist Leonid Razvozzhayev for knowingly providing false information to police, a statement on the committee's website said Friday. |
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MOSCOW – Experts sharply criticized children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov’s proposals Thursday to create an orphan agency and inspect orphanages in Moscow, measures that appeared aimed at addressing concern over orphans’ welfare in Russia after the country renounced U.S. adoptions.
“An agency with that name, explicitly for orphans, that’s the end of the world,” said Boris Altschuler, head of the children’s rights watchdog Rights of the Child. He said a bureaucracy predicated on the existence of orphans would have little incentive to reduce their numbers.
Astakhov told Izvestia that he supported the creation of an orphan agency, adding at a news conference that the current system involves 19 agencies and is ineffective, Interfax reported. |
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 Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday urged the Cabinet to ensure stable economic growth of at least 5 percent a year in the near future, a goal some officials said might require changes to current budget policy. |
 MOSCOW – State-owned power giant Inter RAO fired a midlevel executive who helped lead an opposition party outside of office hours.
Marat Davletbayev left the company after being a fixture of the recent street protests and taking a leading role at the opposition December 5 Party. |
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MOSCOW – A Moscow region priest who supported Pussy Riot has been suspended from service for five years, ostensibly for repeatedly failing to show up to church and for traveling abroad without the blessing of his bosses. |
 MOSCOW – A top judge in the restive Dagestan republic has been gunned down outside his home in what observers called revenge for rulings against local insurgents.
An assailant fired at least five shots at Magomed Magodemov, 55, as he approached his car at roughly 9 p. |
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BEREZNIKI, Perm Region — A Russian court has turned down the attempt by an imprisoned member of the Pussy Riot feminist punk band to defer serving her sentence until her preschool son becomes a teenager. |
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One of the country's purportedly most influential crime bosses was killed by a sniper in broad daylight Wednesday, police said, prompting fears of a return of 1990s-style gang wars in the capital.
Aslan Usoyan, better known as Grandpa ("Ded") Khasan, was hit in the head by a single bullet around 2:30 p. |
All photos from issue.
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The activists who were on trial for allegedly belonging to a banned organization in the infamous Trial of 12 appealed last week the bizarre verdict, in which the court found them guilty and sentenced them to hefty fines but then lifted the punishment.
The defendants had pleaded not guilty and described the case as “fabricated.”
“They consider themselves innocent,” lawyer Olga Tseitlina, who is defending The Other Russia’s Alexei Pesotsky, said Tuesday. “Even if they couldn’t wish for a better verdict, [because acquittals are extremely rare in Russian legal cases].”
The verdict was announced in Vyborgsky District Court — unusually guarded by masked men armed with submachine-guns — on Dec. 28, shortly before the 10-day New Year holidays, amid fears of possible prison sentences, although the prosecutor had earlier asked the court to issue large fines. |
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DOING IT FOR THE KIDS
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP
Women hold posters reading ‘Don’t deprive orphans of the chance to find a mom’ and other slogans during a protest in St. Petersburg against the law banning U.S.
adoptions of Russian children at the end of last year. Last weekend saw more protests across Russia as outcry over the controversial law continues. |
 The eminent human rights lawyer Yury Schmidt, who was regarded as a moral authority by thousands of democratic-minded Russians, died in a St. Petersburg clinic on Friday. He was 75.
The founder of the Russian Committee of Lawyers in Defense of Human Rights, which he established in 1991, Schmidt had been head of the defense team for imprisoned former Yukos Oil owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky since 2004.
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Kontinental Hockey League club SKA St. Petersburg has signed Finnish forward Teemu Ramstedt on an 18-month contract in the wake of the exodus of star players back to North America following the resolution of the NHL lockout.
Ramstedt, who has spent his career in Finland with Helsinki area teams Espoo Blues and HIFK, fills a gap at center. |
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Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his newly appointed Ukrainian counterpart, Leonid Kozhara, had a series of meetings Sunday and Monday to underline the importance of fostering strategic ties between the two countries, with Ukraine’s potential accession to the Russia-dominated Customs Union a central topic.
Relations have been strained since Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych canceled a Dec. 18 trip to Moscow to discuss Ukraine joining Russia’s trilateral Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Accession to the union would likely hinder Ukrainian hopes for membership in the European Union, but Ukraine is nevertheless lured by lucrative gas deals and promises of prolific investment. |
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 The Health Ministry’s chief narcologist, Yevgeny Bryun, warned Monday that it would take a month for many Russians to recover from the excesses of New Year’s celebrations. |
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A State Duma committee discussed Monday an online petition opposing the “Anti-Magnitsky Law” passed late last year, but it appeared to delay until at least April any action that could result from the petition.
The petition, published on the website of opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta last month, was signed by more than 100,000 people and demanded the repeal of the law, which went into effect Jan. |
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Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich has retracted from the Moscow Chamber of Lawyers her complaint calling for disciplinary action to be taken against her former lawyers, Nikolai Polozov and Violetta Volkova. |
 Actor and newly minted Russian citizen Gerard Depardieu belittled the country’s opposition as disoriented and attacked foreign critics of the prosecution of the punk band Pussy Riot.
“The Russian opposition has no program, nothing,” he said in an interview Sunday night on state television channel Rossia 1. |
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Around 50 local residents protested Monday at a construction site in the Selyatinsky Forest outside Moscow, where environmental activists and construction workers are locked in a battle over pristine woodland. |
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The Central Bank said net capital outflow in 2012 was $56.8 billion, a drop from 2011 but the fourth-highest annual figure since the fall of the U.S.S.R.
Experts link the flight of funds to Russia’s investment climate, the country’s current account surplus and fears of political instability. Net outflows were observed every year after 2007, and inflows are on record for two only years since 1994. Other emerging markets, including India and Brazil, recorded inflows in 2012.
During the last quarter of 2012, $9.4 billion left Russia, according to preliminary data published on the Central Bank’s website.
That was a slight uptick from the second and third quarters, which saw outflows of $6. |
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 The impoverished Ryazan region is on the verge of bankruptcy amid speculation about the governor’s health prompted by his political opponents, a news report said Monday. |
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The Interior Ministry on Tuesday formally charged Russia’s former top representative at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development with attempted bribery for soliciting a kickback of over $1 million from a Canadian company operating in Russia. |
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Stocks in Moscow climbed Monday as the share price of state-owned lender Sberbank rose above 100 rubles for the first time in 10 months.
Global markets have been rising since the U. |
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The commercial property market is poised to notch another multibillion-dollar figure this year as economic factors support the purchases of malls, offices and hotels.
Though many analysts expect this year’s volume of investments to come in below the record-breaking total of $7.5 billion in 2011 — and be roughly even with last year’s more modest figure of about $6 billion — they said the 2013 number will demonstrate the market’s strength. |
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 The Kremlin is conducting its current anti-U.S. campaign according to the same scenario it used in all previous campaigns against countries that irritated President Vladimir Putin and were labeled as “enemies.” Similar campaigns were waged against Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. |
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President Vladimir Putin’s initial response to the Magnitsky Act was right on the money: to accuse the U.S. government of monumental hypocrisy by focusing attention on Washington’s record of torture and illegal rendition of terrorism suspects. |
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 The Russian rock and jazz scenes are in mourning for Yevgeny Guberman, the local drummer extraordinaire who died in St. Petersburg on December 30 at the age of 57.
Guberman played in styles ranging from garage rock to mainstream jazz and was reputed as the city’s —or even Russia’s — No. |
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St. Petersburg will demonstrate solidarity with Maria Alyokhina, an imprisoned member of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, by holding a roundtable titled “Class, Gender, Politics: Russia After Pussy Riot. |
 As popular wisdom in the opera world has it, many directors put on their best work when they follow the composer’s intentions, without turning the ideas inside out for the sake of experiment. The exceptions, some directors themselves often admit, only prove the rule. |
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The groundbreaking documentary project Cinetrain visited St. Petersburg this weekend on its drive to break stereotypes and capture Russian reality.
The Cinetrain project sees foreign film crews travel around Russia for one month, stopping in cities for two or three days at a time and ending up at Lake Baikal in Siberia. |
 For those who haven’t overdosed on sugar plum fairies and nutcracker princes during the recent holidays, the New York City Ballet unveiled a month-long festival Tuesday dedicated to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as interpreted by the iconic choreographer George Balanchine and others. |
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Fifty shades of gray
Brera is a smart new bar that opened at the end of last year on the unassuming Pochtamtskaya Ulitsa. Housed just a few doors down from the upscale gourmet giant that is Ginza’s Mansarda, and around the corner from the row of expensive eateries comprised by the Stroganoff Steak House, Russian Vodka Room No. |
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 Verkhniye Mandrogi, a cozy, peaceful village surrounded by water and woods, is connected to the rest of the world by just one bumpy earth road. The empty muddy streets of the village, its exclusively wooden houses and characteristic smell of woodsmoke recreate the leisurely rural atmosphere and peaceful way of life of an old village in Russia’s north.
The village, located on the banks of the Svir River some 300 kilometers northeast of St. |
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 As the much-anticipated Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games approach, the mountain resort of Krasnaya Polyana is getting ready to host international competitions at its brand new facilities. |
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Issues Archive