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 Since St. Petersburg prosecutors arrested prominent Russian-Israeli businessman Mikhail Mirilashvili on Tuesday, speculation has raged over the possible political and business motives for the arrest. And while the prosecutors are sticking to their story - that Mirilashvili was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping as the result of a criminal investigation begun last September - Russian media and sources close to Mirilashvili are focusing on his connection to two other men who have fallen foul of prosecutors: Media-MOST's Vla dimir Gusinsky, and businessman Dmitry Rozhdestvensky. |
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MOSCOW - Gazprom-Media head Alfred Kokh announced Thursday that he is taking over control of NTV television and planning to install a new board that will not include NTV founder Vla dimir Gusinsky. |
 Lidiya Lifanova, a 77-year-old pensioner, has not thrown away a piece of bread for 60 years. "For me bread is priceless," Lifanova said. "All these left-over odds and ends that we have in our family we give to stray cats and dogs," she said. Nadezhda Samsonenko, another 77-year-old woman, puts seemingly useless scrapings from plates in the fridge with which she magically prepares delicious meals. |
All photos from issue.
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With left-wing deputies staging a walkout in protest, the State Duma on Thursday gave a narrow tentative approval to a bill enabling the private buying and selling of non-agricultural land. The Duma voted 229 to 168 on first reading to add a chapter to the Civil Code regulating business deals involving land. |
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In what has become a cycle of hostility, the Latvian Consulate in St. Petersburg was vandalized early Tuesday morning by a group that smashed windows on the building's first floor, thus touching off a minor diplomatic furor. |
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MOSCOW - The Russian government rejected accusations of high-handedness from Belarus on Thursday after replacing Pavel Borodin, who is under arrest in the United States, as head of the proposed union between the two states. The former Kremlin property manager was due to attend a bail hearing in New York later Thursday linked to Swiss attempts to extradite him. |
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Japanese power companies are considering shipping radioactive waste from Europe to Japan through Russia's northern seas, a Russian official said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - The State Duma passed a bill Thursday that will allow 69 of the men who now govern Russia's 89 regions to seek a third or even a fourth term in office. The legislation had the support of the Kremlin and was seen as President Vladimir Putin's biggest concession yet to the regional elite. |
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Shutov Case Finalized ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Yury Shutov, a local businessman and former aid to Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev, is soon to stand trial on charges of organizing a string of contract hits, prosecutors said at a press conference on Wednesday. |
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NOVOSIBIRSK, Western Siberia - A Russian jet with 89 people on board made a safe emergency landing in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk after the landing gear on its right side failed to lock shut, an airport spokesman said Wednesday. Oleg Shulmin said a Sibir Tu-154 airliner left from Irkutsk for Moscow early on Wednesday with 80 passengers and nine crew. |
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MOSCOW - An Indian oil company is to receive a stake in the Sakhalin-1 offshore oil and gas project in return for an order for Russian armaments in a deal that brings a windfall to state-owned oil major Rosneft, sources said Tuesday. Under the deal, which arose after President Vladimir Putin visited the subcontinent in October, Rosneft has agreed to pass on half of its 40 percent stake in Sakhalin-1 to India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp. |
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St. Petersburg Telephone Network (PTS), through its wholly owned Telecominvest subsidiary, has further strengthened its position in the local market in the last two weeks with the launch of St. |
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HELSINKI - A plan to build a northern-tier pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Western Europe via Finland took a step forward on Wednesday when the Finnish and Russian governments signalled their support. Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen told reporters in Moscow that Finland and Russia had agreed in principle to support the concept of a pipeline from Russia through Finnish territorial waters under the Baltic Sea to continental Europe. But one of the likely builders, Finnish energy group Fortum, said it and Gazprom had not yet made any firm decision to invest in the estimated $3 billion pipeline, and would first seek European partners. |
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 MOSCOW - A loan from the Central Bank is the best way for the government to service its debt to the Paris Club of creditor nations, senior deputies in the State Duma said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - The nation's No. 2 oil major is stepping up its efforts to breach China's energy market with plans to invest $1.5 billion into its West Siberian subsidiary over the next five years. "We aim to extract 7.5 million tons of crude a year from its fields," Yury Beilin, Yukos' head of exploration and extraction, said Wednesday at a conference. |
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Dear Editor, I read the study mentioned in your article ["New Book Casts Some Light on Local 'Shadow Economy,'" Jan. 16] and found it useful for better understanding this vital problem. Having worked with a variety of businesses here, I can confirm the trend noted by the authors. |
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Putin Must Fight for His Reforms "THIS is a big step forward," said former Moscow City Court Judge Vladimir Mironov after President Vladimir Putin had introduced legislation that would finally bring the Criminal Procedural Code in line with the Constitution. |
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The Complex Battle Against Corruption PAVEL Borodin, secretary of the Russia-Belarus Union, is sitting in a New York jail, facing possible extradition to Switzerland. With the notable exception of President Vladimir Putin - who has the habit of maintaining silence about any arrests - the whole nation has reacted with outrage to this event. |
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PRESIDENT George W. Bush appears set to make a potentially costly mistake by politicizing his administration's approach to global financial crises. He announced plans last week to create a White House team to handle such economic problems - but it's one that could spend as much time in inter-agency bickering as in crisis management. |
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The big story this week was the fate of Pavel Borodin, who flew to the United States to attend George W. Bush's inauguration, only to be arrested on arrival in New York and faces the possibility of extradition to Switzerland. At home, a largely indifferent public has ignored a campaign launched by a handful of Borodin sympathizers calling for his immediate release from jail. |
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A new CD compilation demonstrates some of St. Petersburg's most interesting electronic acts, while simultaneously taking a snipe at President Vladimir Putin and his politics. Released in Austria on the Subetage label on Jan. 18, it is called "putINout. Finest Tunes From Saint Petersburg," while its cover shows a submarine sunk in a bottle of vodka, called - you guessed it - "Putin." Robert Jelinek, the director of Subetage, a division of Sabotage Communications, explained that the title of the record - which is intended for distribution outside Russia - expresses the St. Petersburg music scene's feelings about the regime. "To protest against the Putin regime's most recent abuses of power, and in the face of the music scene's political powerlessness, the title and CD cover is designed, at least ironically, to show up Russia's present collective discontent," said Jelinek in an e-mail interview with The St. |
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 The premiere of Racine's Phaedra by Grigory Dityatkovsky at the Bolshoy Drama Theater, which was shown for the first time just before Christmas, was an important event despite having next to no publicity. |
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As old rockers prepare to see what remains of a bunch of once big names from the 1970s such as Slade and T. Rex (i.e.: not much at all), there other bizarre and not so bizarre events happening in the city over the next two weeks. Local hippies have come up with an idea to - as a press release proudly states - "prove once again that the hippie movement is alive" with the Hippie Festival, which will take place at the Valencia Gallery this weekend. |
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The intersection of Grazhdansky Prospect and Prospect Nauki is one of the most heavily traveled crossroads in the city. With a metro station (albeit on the part of the metro line that collapsed in 1995 and has yet to be repaired) and a market, it is an area of commercial possibilities that deserves a decent eatery. |
 Russian opera has always been a priority for the Mariinsky Theater, and unveiling its hidden treasures to the world has been declared the company's prime goal. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Maid Fevronia" may be considered the composer's best operatic creation, but the piece is far from being a favorite in the opera world, and stagings often fail to avoid stereotypes. |
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TRIKORFO, Greece - A group of Greek Orthodox monks, whose rock music has stormed the Greek charts, are ruffling the feathers of Greece's conservative Holy Synod. The 15 monks of the Saints Augustine and Serafeim Sarof monastery high in the hills of central Greece say modern times call for modern methods. |
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Iraq Draws UN Praise BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - UN nuclear experts praised Iraq for cooperating with an inspection completed Wednesday, but refused to say whether they had found any evidence Iraq was restarting banned weapons programs. |
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SYDNEY - Sharks, one of nature's most fearsome killers, are coming in increasing numbers to feed in Sydney Harbor, where every weekend hundreds of sailing boats dot the water and thousands of bathers frolic in the coves. Or are they? Battle lines have been drawn between newspapers and some scientists who claim the cleanest Sydney Harbor waters in many years have boosted fish populations and the predators that feed off them, and sceptics who deride it all as "shark-ploitation." The catch in mid-January of a three-meter Bull shark way up the Parramatta River which snakes from the harbor through Sydney suburbia was seen by some experts as unusual. |
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 VANCOUVER - Markus Naslund became the National Hockey League's first 30-goal scorer this season and the Vancouver Canucks used their special teams to cool off the Phoenix Coyotes, 6-2. |
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HOUSTON, Texas - Tyrone Hill rebounded Allen Iverson's second consecutive missed free throw and put in a lay-up in the final minute that lifted the Philadelphia 76ers to their franchise-record 12th straight road victory, an 85-84 overtime triumph over the Houston Rockets. |
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St. Petersburg hockey team SKA spelled out their recipe for survival Wednesday night enlisting foreign players as they opened the professional hockey Superliga's second stage with a 3-0 loss to Dinamo Moscow. |
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Issues Archive