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 A Russian refrigerator trawler sank on Wednesday after being rammed by a cargo vessel, spewing fuel into the harbor near Kotlin Island where the town of Kronshtadt is located. The 1,500-ton Nortlandia capsized after the collision with the Panama-registered E. |
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Financial tycoon Boris Berezovsky - who has chosen to remain abroad rather than return to Russia and face questions about alleged embezzlement - has said President Vladimir Putin used foreign financial resources to gain election in March this year. |
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St. Petersburg police raided the headquarters of Promyshlenno-Stroitelny Bank early Thursday as part of an ongoing criminal investigation by city prosecutors. The bank, near the Moscow Railroad Station in the city center, was surrounded by dozens of armed police while 15 to 20 investigators searched the building for documents. |
All photos from issue.
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Prosecutors are investigating the attempted smuggling out of Russia of $2.5 million worth of cigarettes, which were seized in a port west of St. Petersburg over the weekend. A shipment of cigarettes bearing the Regal and Super Kings trademarks, but lacking excise stamps, was seized Sunday in the commercial port of Lomonosov. |
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Porn Man Gets Jail HELENA, Montana (AP) - A Russian man has been sentenced to 51 months in prison for downloading pornographic pictures - some involving children - to a computer at a local college. |
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BRUSSELS, Belgium - Russia has no need to fear that underwater NATO spies are snooping around the sunken Kursk submarine, an official speaking for the Western Alliance said on Thursday. Responding to news that the Russian navy was setting off small explosions to keep any prying eyes away from the wreck in the Barents Sea, he told reporters, "They have no need to worry about NATO snooping. |
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MOSCOW -George W. Bush is more impulsive than Al Gore and will not be as good a partner for Russia if he becomes U.S. president, a Russian astrologer said on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Russian naval reconnaissance planes twice caught a U.S. Navy battle group off guard in the Sea of Japan and hovered over the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, photographing its deck, commanders said Wednesday. Two Su-24MR planes spotted the group of U. |
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MOSCOW - Experts summoned by a Moscow court said Wednesday that data on Russian torpedoes obtained by U.S. spy suspect Edmond Pope were classified as secret. |
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MOSCOW - The newly elected governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Mikhailov, apologized Wednesday for his recent statements, that appeared to have been deeply anti-Semitic. Mikhailov, a Communist, said he was misunderstood in an interview to Kommersant when he spoke of a Jewish conspiracy and bragged of receiving presidential support in his fight against it. |
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MOSCOW - The all-but-achieved peace between Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding and state-controlled Gazprom-Media fell through Tuesday when Gazprom-Media general director Alfred Kokh suddenly withdrew his signature from the deal. |
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The Legislative Assembly passed the first reading of a 41.8 billion-ruble ($1.5-billion) budget this week, but with two more readings to go, the squabbles and amendments promise to continue. Even though some lawmakers haggled with City Hall last week for a 668-million ruble increase in social spending for schools and social and food programs, the budget still posted an expenditure line of 40. |
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MOSCOW -The spread of AIDS could reach catastrophic proportions in Russia unless officials take quick action to reduce runaway growth rates of the killer syndrome, Russian and foreign experts said on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Russia and Belarus still can't agree on who will mint rubles if their economies are merged, and Minsk has been paying off a $227 million debt to Moscow partly with shipments of tractors. But in an effort to keep the controversial Russian-Belarussian reunification drive alive, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov announced Tuesday that Russia would loan Belarus another $100 million to help support the wobbly Belarussian ruble. The loan was announced at a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Russian-Belarussian Union, an organization set up to oversee the assimilation of Belarus into the Russian economy. At the end of this month, President Vladimir Putin and his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko are expected to sign a treaty on unifying their national currencies. |
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 MOSCOW - Even some of the poorest former Soviet republics are ahead of Russia when it comes to the transformation of their agricultural sector, an international conference on agriculture in the Commonwealth of Independent States heard this week. |
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MOSCOW - Pulling the final plug on the frequency scandal that erupted in mid-September, the Communications Ministry finally sent an official statement to Mobile TeleSystems and Vimpelcom this week confirming their right to the frequencies. Vimpelcom announced Tuesday that it had received a letter "stating that the validity of its frequency permissions has been restored. |
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MOSCOW - International credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Tuesday launched its new global project to score businesses in emerging markets based on corporate governance. |
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MOSCOW - Top oil producer LUKoil is building a new export route through western Siberia to free itself from dependency on state pipeline monopoly Transneft, the company announced this week. The project, dubbed Northern Territories, calls for the construction of a land and sea pipeline system with an initial capacity of 7. |
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Baltika Investment ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg-based Baltika brewery has announced plans to invest $26 million into it's Baltika-Don facility, in Rostov-on-Don, in an effort to increase production from 1. |
 Kimmo Sasi, Finland's minister for external trade, spent Monday and Tuesday in St. Petersburg talking about customs arrangements, investment laws and the ecology, and praising Russia's economic recovery. Talks with St. Petersburg Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev and Leningrad Oblast Gov. |
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MOSCOW - Ukraine's gas debts will be at the top of the agenda as Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov meets with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko on Friday. |
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President Vladimir Putin visited Mongolia this week to ban the free movement of cows between the two countries. He then went on his way to Brunei, where he taught various Asian and Pacific leaders how to make money in Russia, while his wife swapped domestic tales with the sultan's wives. |
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EVEN as the votes in the state of Florida are being recounted and the result of the U.S. presidential election remains up in the air, Russian politicians have been quick and joyful in pointing out the supposed flaws in the American system. |
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BORIS Berezovsky finally seems poised to get his just desserts. The prosecutor's office is ready to make him account for the pillaging of Aeroflot. But let's look more closely. In 1995, Berezovsky took control of the state-owned company Aeroflot. He did not buy any shares in the company, and he did not privatize it. |
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AFTER the 1917 Revolution, the old tsarist judges - contemptuously referred to as zakonniki or "legalists" - were dismissed and replaced with new "proletarian" adjudicators. |
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 Composer Andrei Petrov - who turned 70 this September and is still celebrating with an impressive musical festival which is being held all over Russia - has perhaps the longest history of affinity with Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "Master and Margarita" than any of his colleagues. |
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The sexually explicit U.S. magazine Penthouse is being relaunched in Russia, but readers hoping to just look at the pictures may be disappointed. In a move to pacify guardians of the nation's morals, the publishers of the new local edition have blurred many of the photos. |
 Vladimir Menshov's new film, "Envy of the Gods" (Zavist bogov), currently showing at the Avrora, may seem like a throwback to Soviet times. Best known for 1980's "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (Moskva slezam ne verit), which won that year's Oscar for best foreign film, Menshov turned to a story set in 1983 for his latest project - one that would have been distinctly unacceptable 20 years ago. |
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griffith in re-hab LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actress Melanie Griffith has entered a hospital program to treat an addiction to prescription drugs, her publicist said this week. |
 Cyclops (James Marsden) unleashes bolts of energy from his eyes and has to wear shielding glasses to keep those rays in check. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is telepathic and telekinetic. Storm (Halle Berry) can control the weather, conjuring lightning bolts to do with as she will. The hotheaded, confrontational Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has superstrength, healing abilities that allow him to recover from almost any injury, and a metal alloy grafted onto his skeleton that gives him claws he can project from his knuckles. |
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 Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) looks to have an enviable life. Consider the stunning Vermont lakeside house, the sympathetic friend, the spacious SUV, the swell daughter who's just off to college. |
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Russia's best-known and best-preserved dead body, Lenin, is a leading character in Catherine Merridale's Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, an ambitious, broad-reaching look at how his and millions of other corpses were rendered, treated and remembered in the Soviet Union. |
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When the Soviet regime began persecuting Joseph Brodsky, eventually packing him off into internal, and then external exile, Anna Akhmatova let drop one of her famous bon mots: "What a biography they [the KGB] are writing for the red-headed one!" As I was reading Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English, I was inclined to think that Anna Andreyevna's comment might be acute but not quite relevant. |
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Boris Akunin - that literary trickster straddling the 20th and 21st centuries - has conquered the heart of a demanding Russian public. His works are everywhere: at lectures, over tea, in the metro - even on the Internet. Soon his wildly successful "Adventures of Erast Fandorin" are to be released as a pocket book so that Akunin may nestle next to the very hearts of grateful readers. Continuing to ride the wave of his rising popularity, Akunin has crafted a new hero in his recently released novel "Altyn-Tolobas: The Adventures of a Master of Humanities." Seamlessly shifting back and forth between the 17th and 20th century, the book opens in Moscow before the days of Peter the Great, where events unfold like a Steven Spielberg "Indiana Jones" screenplay. |
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 The Pink Ruble may finally have arrived in St. Petersburg, if the hectic round of new gay venues opening throughout the city recently is anything to go by. |
 The connections between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam are multifarious. Some are strong, historical and direct, others are tenuous but quietly intriguing nonetheless, almost like ragged fragments of a parallel universe. One of these types of connections is the existence of two clubs - Spartak in St. Petersburg and Paradiso in Amsterdam - each with striking similarities and important differences. The building that now houses the Spartak cinema and club was one of a number of Lutheran churches built in the 19th century. |
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 Best known as the creator of Petrovich, the beloved cartoon character who first graced the pages of the Kommersant daily 10 years ago, Andrei "Petrovich" Bilzho started his career on an entirely different path - psychiatry. |
 Kirpichi, one of the most high-energy and popular local club bands, released its third album last month, but is preparing to present it to local audiences at a full-length concert at SpartaK on Friday. "Kapitalizm OO," released on Moscow-based Gala Records on Oct. 23, has been conceived as a study of Russian capitalism. Originally "OO" stood for the year 2000, but as time passed the meaning has changed - now the title reads "kapitalizm oh, oh. |
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 The State Mussorgsky, or Maly, Theater premiere of La Bayadere, which took place on Oct. 21, was this season's first ballet premiere in St. Petersburg and could be compared in its grand production scale with the premiere of Sleeping Beauty at the Maly in 1995. |
 A new art venue, which threw a great opening party last Friday, boasts ambitious plans, but as always in such cases it is hard to say how long it will last. Called Art Spirit, the club plans live concerts, dance parties, art exhibitions and seminars. |
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If you haven't already discovered it yourself, there's a new dining option to explore in town - the James Cook Pub and Cafe, named after the famous British explorer who discovered, among other things, Australia and New Zealand. |
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I have never been in a Russian-style restaurant abroad, but I should imagine that, if the Shury-Mury tavern - not to be confused with the Shury-Mury on Galernaya Ul. - were located somewhere in Western Europe, it would definitely include colorful waitresses dressed in sarafans and kokoshniks (a Russian woman's headdress), as the restaurant has a very consciously traditional Russian theme. However, Ul. Belinskogo in St. Petersburg is pretty far from Western Europe, and it's probably for this reason that the tavern owners, advanced in such aspects of the Russian mentality, decided to avoid stereotypical Russian attributes such as vodka dominating the menu, live bears and singing gypsies. |
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 Valery Gergiev gave what may have been the concert of a lifetime at the beginning of this month. The Russian premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina's St. John's Passion, performed in the composer's homeland on Nov. |
 Only a few of Russia's avant-garde theaters, which first appeared around 1990, still exist. Some were adopted by theater mainstream,while others like Anton Adasinsky's " Derevo" are based abroad and occasionally tour here. One true survivor of the movement is the Formal Theater, though its director Andrei Moguchy finds the label is no longer relevant. "There is no theater avant-garde movement in Russia," he says. |
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 With her rendition of "The Tales Of Hoffmann" which premiered last weekend at the Mariinsky Theater, Martha Domingo created just what she wanted with this unfinished work by Jacques Offenbach - a romantic, magic tale of a poet caught in an eternal choice between his muse and romantic relationship. |
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"Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it - I do believe it's true." Simon and Garfunkel once wrote a song entitled "At the Zoo" about the wonders the zoo has to offer as an outlet for rainy-day activities - but as delightful and entertaining as their "fine and fancy rumbles" to the zoo may have been, we can be assured that they were not referring to the St. |
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LONDON - It is a mystery that has perplexed the world's top scientists for more than a century. But a British Egyptologist believes she may have solved the puzzle and figured out how the ancient Egyptians aligned the pyramids of Giza to true north and roughly when they did it. |
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U.S. Election Battle TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - Battling for the U.S. presidency in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, Al Gore and George W. |
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