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 MOSCOW – The social-democratic Just Russia party issued an ultimatum Thursday to four members who are leaders in the anti-Kremlin protest movement, warning them to quit leadership roles in other organizations or face dismissal from the party.
The demand threatens to further weaken and divide the already splintered opposition, which is struggling to find a purpose for its Coordination Council and to harness public discontent with President Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia party. |
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MOSCOW – A cocktail-party chat that lasted only minutes has triggered hopes that the country's troubled relations with Georgia might be headed for substantial recovery. |
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MOSCOW – Four American families have filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights over Russia's recently passed adoptions ban.
In an interview with Interfax on Friday, Karina Moskalenko, a representative for the families, said the American families were at varying stages of the adoption process to adopt Russian children, but that the children had already bonded with their American parents.
"You know, when a child is already saying the words "mama" and "papa," that's already a family; you can already talk about rights to a private family life being violated," she said.
According to Moskalenko, the American families aim to have the violation of their rights acknowledged by the court and amendments made to the ban on adoptions. |
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 MOSCOW – A State Duma deputy's assistant and local lawmaker who battled development in Moscow region forestland is in critical condition after being stabbed in the chest by an unidentified assailant near her home in the village of Zelyony on Wednesday night. |
 MINSK — If not for the occasional foreign-language billboard or a foreign car passing by, this city could easily be mistaken for the set of an old Soviet movie.
The extras smile and politely give you directions. Some even take you where you need to go for free or will provide you with change for your fare on public transportation, where you can ride with equally polite commuters.
The central thoroughfares of the Belarusian capital carry familiar Soviet names. |
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 MOSCOW – Improving the work of the government and fighting corruption should be key priorities on Russia's reform agenda for the next few years, participants in the World Economic Forum said Wednesday. |
 MOSCOW – Suffocating bars, smoke-filled restaurants and ash-laden office stairwells could soon be a thing of the past if legislation aimed at banning smoking in public places passes the remaining few hurdles and gets signed into law.
But not everyone is rejoicing at the prospect of a government-led crackdown on smoking.
“Smoking is a habit for millions of Russian adults who buy legal products in licensed shops with money they have earned honestly and on which they have paid taxes,” said Andrei Loskutov, executive director of the All-Russia Movement for Smokers’ Rights. |
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 MOSCOW – A demonstration outside the State Duma on Tuesday ended in fisticuffs as Orthodox activists clashed with opponents of a bill targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. |
 MOSCOW – The federal government will submit its final Arctic territorial claims with the United Nations by the end of the year, the country's leading Arctic scientist said.
Artur Chilingarov, the veteran explorer who led the expedition to plant a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, told Rossia 24 television that Russia's claim to a portion of the Arctic shelf would be filed with the United Nations Commission on the Law of the Sea by December. |
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MOSCOW – The Defense Ministry's central administration on work with military personnel has developed a technical guide that urges leaders of military units involved in work with the troops to check the sexual orientation of conscripts and contract soldiers entering the military, a news report said Thursday. |
 St. Petersburg authorities said Wednesday that they had shelved a plan to transform a local hospital into a clinic for officials after a huge public outcry against the initiative.
But in a sign of how deeply the plan’s opponents mistrust city officials, disgruntled residents said they did not believe assurances that the hospital would be left untouched and protested anyway. |
All photos from issue.
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 More than 85,000 people have already signed a petition addressed to President Vladimir Putin to defend St. Petersburg’s City Hospital No. 31, which is under threat of relocation. The hospital, one of the city’s most successful clinics in the treatment of child cancer, is currently in danger of being designated as a medical center for the judges of the country’s federal Arbitration and Supreme Courts, which are due to move to the city from Moscow during the next few years.
The list of those who have signed the petition includes not only medical personnel at the hospital and the desperate parents of young cancer patients, but also well-known figures from the worlds of art and science, as well as ordinary Russian citizens. |
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IN THE NAME OF JESUS
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A man climbs out of the water from a hole cut into the ice in the shape of a cross in the village of Tyarlevo in the Pavlovsk Park on Saturday night. The
temperature was minus 20 degrees Celsius. Russians across the country take the plunge every year to celebrate the Orthodox holiday of Epiphany. |
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In a surprise move, the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly last week refused to consider a controversial bill on amendments to the law on public assemblies that would effectively ban any protests in most of the city, including bedroom communities.
Backed by City Hall and pro-Kremlin party deputies, the proposed law would ban public assemblies on Palace Square, St.
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Yabloko Seeks Growth
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Forty-four people have annulled their membership of the St. Petersburg branch of the Yabloko Democratic Party, Interfax reported, citing information from former Yabloko member Vitaly Shtager. The news agency did not say during what period of time the annulments had taken place. |
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MOSCOW — Friends and lawyers over the weekend accused the Netherlands of complicity in the suicide of opposition activist Alexander Dolmatov in a Dutch extradition center.
Dolmatov, a member of radical writer Eduard Limonov’s Other Russia movement, was found dead in his cell early Thursday in an extradition center in the port city of Rotterdam. He had fled to the Netherlands last summer to seek political asylum after being sought by police in connection with the violence during a May 6 protest against President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration.
His lawyer Yevgeny Arkhipov accused Dutch authorities of grave rights violations. He explained in a telephone interview Sunday that Dolmatov had been sent to the extradition center even though he had appealed an earlier decision to deny him asylum. |
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 MOSCOW — Russia urgently needs to attract immigrants over the coming years to avoid labor shortages, the country’s top migration officer said Monday.
“Even if we manage to stabilize or increase the population by raising the birth rate, the only source for increasing the labor force for the coming 15 to 20 years will be migration,” Federal Migration Service head Konstantin Romodanovsky told Interfax in an interview. |
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MOSCOW — State-controlled NTV television Sunday aired its latest documentary-style film targeting prominent opposition figures, this time for allegedly being part of an organized information campaign to discredit the Russian Orthodox Church.
The film, “I Don’t Believe It,” accuses popular blogger Rustam Adagamov — a member of the opposition Coordination Council — TV hosts Leonid Parfyonov and Vladimir Pozner, and others of links to an anti-clerical campaign partly run out of Ukraine. |
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MOSCOW — One of the hardest things for an opera reviewer to do is to describe the lead singer’s voice. The reviewer could list off notes or compare the voice to that of a bird. |
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MOSCOW — A European bison, whose sudden death at a Moscow region nature reserve earlier this month sparked outrage among conservationists, died not of food poisoning, but of an overdose of speed, according to a forensic study, RIA-Novosti reported.
The bizarre death of Shponti, a mating bull imported from Germany to boost Russia’s breeding program, was initially chalked up to rotten fruits.But an independent study revealed that the 1,300 kilogram animal had elevated levels of amphetamines in his kidneys, enough to cause cardiac arrest.
It was not immediately clear how Shponti could have ingested the powerful drug.
The Priosko-Terrasny reserve has been at the center of efforts to save the European bison since Soviet times, but has been scandalized in recent years by apparently open warfare between employees and the park’s management. |
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 MOSCOW — A presidential election in Russia isn’t scheduled for another five years, but the people who will run the polling stations and count the ballots are already being selected. |
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MOSCOW — The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said his party is preparing legislation that would impose fines on officials who use foreign words at work when there is a Russian equivalent.
“The Russian language must be freed from trash and foreign words,” Zhirinovsky told journalists, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Bolshoi Theater artistic director Sergei Filin will undergo two more surgeries after an unknown attacker splashed his face with sulfuric acid last week, doctors said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow Exchange announced Monday that it will shun the foreign stock markets traditionally tapped by Russian companies
and go ahead with an initial public
offering on its own Russian trading platforms.
The size of the stake in the unified exchange being offered to foreign and domestic investors was not disclosed, but the company is looking to raise at least $500 million, said a source familiar with the situation. |
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MOSCOW — A group of United Russia lawmakers have accused a colleague, world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, of lobbying on behalf of a tobacco company, and they asked the Justice Ministry to see whether he can be labeled a foreign agent. |
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MOSCOW — The Cabinet has rejected a proposal to reinstate government officials on the boards of state-controlled companies.
It has also nominated several newcomers to sit on the boards at such behemoths as Gazprom, the Federal Grid Company and Svyazinvest, Vedomosti reported Monday. |
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MOSCOW — How popular discontent will play out is one of the key uncertainties that the World Economic Forum identified for Russia’s long-term economic development in a report released Tuesday. |
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 A dysfunctional family with spouses living separate lives but staying together only for the sake of the children. Huge debts from the couple’s small business. A family of five crammed into a tiny, rented two-room apartment. No chance to start a new business or find well-paying jobs. |
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The first weeks of 2013 have already shown that relations between Russian authorities and society will be no better this year than they were in 2012.
The large-scale “March against Scoundrels” rally in Moscow on Jan. |
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 Twelve months after feminist punk collective Pussy Riot’s “Putin Has Pissed Himself” breakthrough protest performance on Red Square, group member Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was freed by an appeal court in October, came to St. Petersburg to take part in a roundtable organized by the Center for Independent Social Research.
Called “Class, Gender, Politics: Russia After Pussy Riot,” it was dedicated to the imprisoned group member Maria Alyokhina, whose appeal was heard — and rejected — last week in Berezniki in the Perm Krai, some 2,000 kilometers away. |
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 Benjamin Britten’s 1961 opera “Billy Budd” will see its Russia premiere on Jan. 24, 25 and 26 on the stage of the Mikhailovsky Theater. The theater is staging the Vienna State Opera’s production from 2001, directed by the eminent German theater director Willy Decker. |
 A cultural guide to St. Petersburg that was published in October by Academia Rossica in cooperation with Oxygen Books in London, “City-Pick St. Petersburg” offers a fascinating view of Russia’s northern capital as seen by more than sixty writers, poets, dancers and artists from different eras.
“It is an essential read — slip it into your bag alongside a Rough Guide,” is the advice to readers from Waterstones Books Quarterly, a literary magazine published by the U. |
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 The celebrated Russian émigré ballet dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, who celebrates his 65th birthday this month, is being paid tribute to in St. |
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Dilligent dining
Those faced with the predicament of where to take vegetarian — or, even more dire, vegan — guests in the city, or who want to go out to dinner and still feel good about themselves, will be glad to find the new vegetarian café Ukrop (Russian for “dill”) on the map. Diners are also sure to appreciate the eatery’s hip eco-friendly aesthetic: Think tree house taken over by home makeover show. |
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 It’s the middle of a December afternoon, and in a spartan hall in northwest Moscow, a group of men and women of various ages are lying on the floor, while others are defending themselves from opponents wielding whips. This is not some sado-masochistic ritual, but a seminar devoted to a form of the Russian martial art Systema.
Originally developed as a military practice for Russian special forces, Systema remains a relatively unheralded practice. |
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 Salvatore Ferragamo, one of Italy’s most renowned and successful fashion companies, has become the first member of the association of the Friends of the Hermitage Museum in Italy. |
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Issues Archive