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 As speculation swirled after Boris Berezovsky's sudden demise, friends and associates suggested that a series of personal and financial shocks suffered by the former Kremlin kingmaker and billionaire could have contributed to depression and mounting health problems. |
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MOSCOW – Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday intensified his criticism of a plan by European financial authorities to rescue the Cypriot economy, labeling it as "completely absurd," in the most colorful response yet by Russian officials to the controversial measures. |
 MOSCOW – A man professing to be a former government operative has said that police officials, including the former interior minister, were involved in organizing clashes at an opposition rally last year, allegations that members of the Kremlin human rights council say could be trustworthy.
The online television channel Politvestnik posted a video interview on YouTube earlier this week with the man, who called himself Felix. |
All photos from issue.
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 A leading local LGBT activist who was arrested, strip-searched and held in a police precinct and court for over 24 hours after the police detained him and two other men filming an interview inside the Pulkovo 1 airport terminal, was acquitted by a local court late last Friday due to lack of evidence.
Moscow photographer Mitya Aleshkovsky had traveled to St. Petersburg with Moscow LGBT activist Sergei Gubanov for one day in a failed attempt to interview British actor Stephen Fry, who was briefly in the city filming a BBC documentary about LGBT people across the globe. Aleshkovsky himself was interviewed by Yury Gavrikov, the chair of the local Ravnopraviye (Equality) LBGT rights organization and an organizer of the annual St. Petersburg Gay Pride event. |
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BITTER COLD
ALEXANDER LOGINOV / SPT
Despite today being the vernal equinox, the date when night and day are of approximately equal length, and the official start of spring, temperatures are forecast to remain below freezing for the coming week. The increased sunlight won’t have much impact on the snow still on the ground, making it feel more like winter than spring. |
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St. Petersburg oncologists have developed a unique method of diagnosing and eliminating small tumors. The discovery, made by scientists from the city’s Oncology Center located in Pesochnoye, represents a major medical breakthrough, the news website Fontanka.ru reported last week.
Until recently, cancer diagnostics did not allow doctors to detect and accurately diagnose cancerous tumors of less than 10 millimeters.
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300 Million Stolen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Investigative Committee of St. Petersburg has opened a criminal case into the theft of more than 300 million rubles ($9.8 million) from the bank account of striker Alexander Kerzhakov, who plays for FC Zenit and the Russian national football team, Interfax reported.
The money disappeared from the account he holds with Gazprombank.
Kerzhakov could have become a victim of fraudsters who he had met abroad, his lawyer Igor Reshetnikov said.
“In early 2011, when Kerzhakov was in the United Arab Emirates, he met a man from the Voronezh Oblast who proposed that he become a partner in the construction of a number of oil refineries. |
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 St. Petersburg residents in search of a new pet have the ideal chance to snap up a furry friend this weekend at the Burevestnik Cultural Center in the city’s Nevsky district. |
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Movie buffs in St. Petersburg now have the opportunity to enjoy world-class foreign cinema in the rarefied atmosphere of one of the city’s most elegant hotels, following the recent opening of a new movie theater at the city’s Angleterre Hotel.
According to the owners, the new art house cinema will offer local audiences a chance to view films that rarely make it into city theaters. |
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FC Zenit St. Petersburg’s European campaign ended in disappointment Thursday, when the team was knocked out of the UEFA Europa League by FC Basel 1893 in a dramatic Round of 16 encounter at the Petrovsky stadium. |
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 MOSCOW — Four State Duma deputies asked the assembly’s ethics commission on Friday to evaluate former Just Russia Deputy Dmitry Gudkov’s speech that he gave at a Freedom House forum in the United States this month.
In his speech, Gudkov spoke out against repressive Russian state policy, supported the Magnitsky Act and asked the U. |
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MOSCOW — State Duma Deputy Andrei Isayev on Friday appeared to threaten Moskovsky Komsomolets staff, coming under fire from journalists and activists and triggering a scandal in the blogosphere. |
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MOSCOW — The popular microblogging site Twitter has agreed to block access to accounts or posts that have been blacklisted by Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, a statement posted on the watchdog’s website said last Friday. |
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WASHINGTON — Newly appointed U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. will scrap part of its European missile defense shield, which has faced major Russian opposition. |
 MOSCOW — Bolshoi Theater dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko called on his friends and colleagues “not to believe anyone” about his alleged role as the mastermind of an acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet chief Sergei Filin, in what investigators say could be an attempt to soften his potential sentence. |
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KAZAKHSTAN — A Soyuz space capsule carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed last Saturday morning on the foggy steppes of Kazakhstan, safely returning the three men to Earth after a 144-day mission to the International Space Station. |
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MOSCOW — Russia has begun to publish its own sovereign debt ratings in a move that is widely seen as a challenge to the grade given to Russia by U.S. rating agencies, which the Kremlin has said is not completely fair.
Domestic rating agency Expert RA issued its first sovereign debt ratings this week, with Russia receiving an A- grade – higher than its current BBB rating assigned by U. |
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 For Vitaly Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg legislature and author of the law against homosexual propaganda, his meeting with author and gay activist Stephen Fry on Thursday was, in his words, “fascinating, like contact with an alien civilization. |
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Could President Vladimir Putin benefit politically by disbanding the State Duma and calling an early parliamentary election?
A recent report by Governance and Problem Analysis Center, a conservative think tank co-chaired by Putin ally and Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, hints as much. |
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.jpg) Stockers!, a high-energy yet melodic indie rock band from Helsinki, Finland, will make its Russian debut this week with concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Described as “modern rock which falls somewhere between Editors and White Lies” in their official biography, Stockers! was started in 2007 by a group of high school friends after they saw a concert in a Helsinki club together. |
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St. Petersburg meets Las Vegas this week, and the rendezvous has a distinctly gastronomic flavor: Through March 23, the miX restaurant in St. Petersburg is hosting Bruno Riou, an exciting guest chef from Alain Ducasse’s miX in Las Vegas. |
 One of the leading experts in Russian-Dutch relations in Europe, Professor Emmanuel Waegemans, teaches Russian Literature, the History of Russia and Slavic Civilization at the respected Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Author of more than 200 books and articles about Russian history and literature, this scholar has devoted special attention to Peter the Great, who is featured in several of his extensively researched works. |
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 One hundred years ago, in 1913, the work of Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky was first exhibited in Belgium at the recently-opened Georges Giroux Gallery in Brussels. |
 Anew film festival that opened last week at the city’s Erarta Museum and Gallery of Contemporary Art is aiming to draw audiences’ attention to what is generally considered to be cinema’s ancestral art form — painting.
The first E(rarta)Motion Pictures festival, which opened March 15, is dedicated to short films about painting and features work by filmmakers from Russia and abroad. |
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Freeman’s is one of the more recent additions to the long list of European restaurants scattered across the city. The particular combination of cuisine served in many of these restaurants is probably unknown anywhere else in the world, least of all in Europe, and tend to be a catchall for Russian crowd-pleasers from spaghetti carbonara to cream of mushroom soup. |
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