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MOSCOW - Three years after sinking nearly $2 billion into Svyazinvest, minority shareholders could get left out in the cold just as the government finally implements a desperately needed overhaul at the telecommunications giant. Thanks to maverick mogul Vladimir Potanin, investors like financier George Soros and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell looked set Thursday to lose the power afforded them by jointly holding a blocking stake at Svyazinvest. Soros' Quantum Fund joined forces with Potanin and a handful of smaller investors to place a winning bid of $1.9 billion for a stake of 25 percent plus one share in a privatization auction for Svyaz invest in 1997. |
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 MOSCOW - In 1896 Tsar Nicholas II ordered a church to be built on wheels to bring Russian Orthodox Mass to the farthest reaches of Siberia. More than a hundred years later the second of those evangelical vehicles was born when a light-blue wagon was blessed by Patriarch Alexy II under the metal arched roof of Kievsky Station on a cold Wednesday afternoon. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Media-MOST announced Wednesday that it has reached an "amicable agreement" on part of its debt to the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom. Company officials said the deal would ensure its journalists' independence, and would also involve bringing in an unspecified major foreign investor. |
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A prohibition on the evening sale of hard liquor in certain neighborhoods on Vasilievsky Island has had less-than-bone-dry results as both police and city officials seem to have watered down their rhetoric following pressure from shop owners to reconsider the ban. |
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Fire swept through a three-story wooden apartment building in the northern Leningrad Oblast village of Mo rozov on Wednesday night, killing four and displacing all 128 of the building's residents, fire officials said. The fire, which broke out at 1:30 in the morning and drew 78 fire fighters, also sent five of the building's residents to the hospital with burns. |
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NEW YORK - Gus Hall, the lumberjack, iron miner, steelworker and union organizer whose name became synonymous with the American Communist Party that he led for 40 years, has died at age 90. |
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Sub Project Unveiled SEVERODVINSK, Far North (Reuters) - Russia and the United States unveiled Wednesday their first joint project to render harmless Moscow's rusting fleet of disused nuclear submarines, which has raised serious fears of pollution. The U.S.-funded facility in the town of Severodvinsk on the White Sea will help Russia reduce the risk of polluting its own and international waters as it takes hundreds of nuclear vessels out of service under disarmament agreements with Washington. |
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LONDON - Internet metals marketplace Metals-Russia.com has launched live trading via its Web site, www.metals-russia.com, company president and CEO Dmitry Tseitlin said Monday. "The system is fully operational," Tseitlin said. The company, based in Israel, aims to connect the Russian metal industry to consumers worldwide via online trading and supply chain management plus a range of support services including trade finance and logistics. |
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The speaker of St. Petersburg's Legislative Assembly has called for the foreign business community to participate in a rethink of the city's investment laws. |
 STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The merger was announced last week of Danish brewers Carlsberg with the joint Swedish and Norwegian group Pripps Ringnes - brewers of Pripps, Lapin Kulta and Ramlosa mineral water. The deal, which has yet to be approved by the European Union's anti-monopoly bodies, will result in the world's fifth-largest beer company. |
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MOSCOW - Responding to a UN request that member states use Tuesday's International Day for the Eradication of Poverty to escalate a war on poverty, Russian officials unloaded reams of statistics but offered few solutions. |
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Merloni Buys Stinol MOSCOW (Vedomosti) - Italian company Merloni Elettrodomestici has completed its acquisition of a 100 percent stake in the Stinol refrigerator factory worth $119.3 million, the companies announced at a news conference on Tuesday. However, the Interros holding, a shareholder in NLMK, issued a press release the same day saying the deal to buy the factory - Russia's largest refrigerator producer and a subsidiary of the Novolipetsk metals plant, or NLMK - was illegal. |
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MOSCOW - World oil No. 3 British Petroleum wants half of state-owned oil company Rosneft's 40 percent stake in the massive Sakhalin 1 offshore oil and gas project, The Wall Street Journal Europe reported Tuesday. |
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Counterfeit coffee and tea makers masquerading their products as name brands have lost ground in the capital over the last six months, market participants say. Law enforcement bodies and industry leaders have banded together to push out the fakes. The pirates have, however, moved out into the regions. Tea and coffee manufacturers maintain their best defense lies in expensive and sophisticated packaging. Ultimately, the consumer may have to foot the bill for the struggle with counterfeiters. Manufacturers only start to take on pirates when illegal sales volumes increase, as they did a year ago. At the time 13 companies, including major coffee manufacturers Nestle, Kraft Foods and Tchibo as well as Lipton tea producers Unilever, formed the informal Brand Protection Group. |
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 MOSCOW - Russian gas giant Gazprom officially announced plans to build a new export pipeline bypassing Ukraine on Thursday. Ukraine shrugged off fears the plans would hit its economy while Poland, whose agreement is vital, urged an international conference grouping all the countries affected. |
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The country's financial markets, potentially lucrative for investors but no place for the faint-hearted, should become less risky as a result of new regulatory measures, the main market watchdog body said. The head of the Federal Securities Commission welcomed a presidential order this week abolishing obligatory membership of self-regulatory organizations and said this was just one of a series of steps aimed at improving market regulation. |
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MOSCOW - Trailed by riot police and a court bailiff, the man ruled the rightful director of Moscow's Kristall vodka distillery took control of the plant's head office and said the long ownership dispute had ended. |
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The people have spoken: Their tastes have not changed all that much in two years. In the third People's Mark contest, in which consumers from across the country vote for their favorite brands in 20 categories, the same makers of fruit juice, toothpaste, candy and chewing gum that won in 1998 again appeared in the top spots this year. |
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A GROUP of House Republicans in the United States has assailed the Clinton administration for supporting Russia's former president, Boris Yeltsin, whom they accuse of fostering corruption and allowing undue influence to big business during his time in office. Similar views are expressed by some reviewers of Yeltsin's memoirs, just published. |
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VOLOGDA REGION, Northern Russia - Deep in the Russian hinterland, far from the museums of St. Petersburg and Moscow, lies one of the nation's greatest art treasures. Some 600 kilometers northeast of Moscow, hidden within the vast forests and scores of lakes in the Vologda region, stands the Russian Orthodox Ferapontov monastery. The small and - from the outside - unimpressive monastery is home to 16th-century frescoes in the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. Painted by one of Russia's greatest icon painters, Dionysius, with the help of his sons in the summers of 1502 and 1503, the frescoes cover about 300 square meters and depict scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. |
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 Twenty-three-year-old St. Petersburg tenor Daniil Shtoda keeps going from strength to strength. Last week, he took the Grand Prix of the 4th Rimsky-Korsakov international vocal contest. |
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Dostoevskians may be surprised to see another novel-to-stage adaptation being offered in St. Petersburg, although the Maly Theater's triumphant production of The Devils proved that Dostoevsky is versatile, if (in that case) lengthy. The Priyut Komedianta's new production is thankfully a great deal shorter and has both a strong cast and sharp direction to recommend it. Perhaps a strange choice for a theatrical adaptation, The Eternal Husband is a rather light-hearted novella very unlike Dostoevsky's long novels. Moreover, the narrative is one of memory rather than of event and thus does not naturally suggest itself for the stage. Petr Shereshevsky's production proves itself to be skilful, however, managing to keep the play - much of which involves monologues - moving along with enough momentum to maintain interest. |
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 The exhibition "Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987). His Life and Art" which opened at the Hermitage earlier this month, turned out to be a sensation that stimulated the city's contemporary arts scene, instigating a series of accompanying shows, lectures and film screenings. |
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The first thing that fascinated my companion and me as we entered the new Caravan restaurant on Voznesensky Prospect was its interior, furnished as it is in Central Asian style, with even a life-size artificial camel on the carpet. On our way to the table we passed a surprisingly big mangal, the Central Asian device for frying meat above glowing coals, where an Azeri chef was cooking lula kebab with lamb. |
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Leningrad Rock Club will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this weekend with an eight-hour stadium show. The now-inactive Rock Club stems from the times when there was only one rock club (not only in the city but in the Soviet Union) - the result of new tactics by the local KGB. |
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 LONDON - Scientists in the United States have revived a 250-million-year-old bacteria that is believed to be the oldest living creature ever discovered. The bacterium that lived millions of years before the dinosaurs was in a state of suspended animation in an ancient salt crystal in an underground cavern near Carlsbad, New Mexico. |
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Britain To Open Dialog SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said Thursday that Britain planned to open diplomatic ties with North Korea for the first time since the creation of the communist state over 50 years ago. |
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WASHINGTON - The two men squared off on Tuesday night in St. Louis in what many observers thought was the most combative and lively of their three face-to-face encounters this month. Despite both the Democratic vice president and the Republican governor of Texas expressing confidence that they performed well, there was no clear winner. |
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Issues Archive