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 "We first heard the news of the coup when we were at our dacha, about 40 kilometers from St. Petersburg," recalls Tatyana Sallier, an associate professor of English at St. Petersburg State University. "A neighbor was walking along the street and shouted to us to switch on the television. |
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Ever since Vladimir Putin was named prime minister and then acting president in 1999, rumors have periodically surfaced concerning the role that he played in St. |
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Two Swedish diplomats visiting St. Petersburg as guests of acting Swedish Consul General Stefan Eriksson have said that they were punched, bloodied and detained by local police for not carrying their passports. Police have refused to confirm any details about the incident or even that it happened at all, pending an investigation into the matter. The diplomats allege that the incident began at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, when a patrol officer approached them while they were walking along Kanal Griboyedova and asked to check their documents. According to Jonas Bergstrom, one of the diplomats involved and currently assigned to the Swedish Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, the men produced their driver's licenses. |
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 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree ordering that the All-Russian State Television and Radio Co. be split into two parts, one in charge of programming, the other in overseeing transmissions for state and private broadcasters. |
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President Vladimir Putin made an unexpected stop in St. Petersburg Wednesday for late-night talks with the region's political leadership on his way to a vacation in Karelia. Between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., the president held first a group meeting with Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, Lenin grad Oblast Governor Valery Ser dyu kov and Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov. He then met individually with each of these leaders. By 5 p.m. road blocks began springing up around the Mariinsky Palace on St. Isaac's Square, and police refused to comment about what was going on. Participants have declined to elaborate in detail about the content of the midnight talks or the reason behind their apparent urgency. |
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 While Bill Gates has been studying the byte-sized details of his XML Web Services program, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, reported to be worth around $30 billion, has been planning another one of his extravagant parties to be held this weekend in St. |
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Palace Nudity ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Seven tourists were detained Tuesday evening by police in St. Petersburg after part of the group posed nude for a photograph on St. Isaac's Square in front of the Mariinsky Palace. After the five male members of the group -aged 28 to 30 - stripped down for the photo and posed for the camera, aimed by their female companions, they were detained by police and fined for minor hooliganism, police press officer Alexander Rostovtsev said. The five nudists were fined about 50 rubles each and soon released, Rostovtsev said. "The men were drunk," he added. The men all reside in London, but do not hold British citizenship and were in St. |
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 A coup of another sort took place Aug. 19, 1991, on Channel 1, the main state television channel in the Soviet Union. From early morning, the anchors dutifully read official documents announcing that the new leadership had taken over to prevent "chaos and anarchy" and to save the Soviet Union, but their black clothing and gloomy expressions communicated a darker development. |
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 MOSCOW - Local holding Telecominvest got a marvelous face-lift Tuesday, slipping into the capital city by absorbing Moscow's mobile operator-in-waiting, Sonic Duo. It did so by becoming the anchor in a new holding, for now called Megafon, together with two leading Nordic operators - Sonera and Telia - and Moscow investment boutique LV Finance, Sonic Duo's major shareholder. |
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MOSCOW - Leading Moscow cellular provider Mobile Telesystems posted higher-than-expected profits in the second quarter, notwithstanding a onetime write-off of $26 million connected to previous customer acquisition costs. |
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MOSCOW - A Moscow court has frozen a 32.5 percent stake in steel giant Severstal after the former wife of Alexei Mordashov, the company's director and main shareholder, contested their divorce settlement. Nikulinsky Interregional Court prosecutor Vladimir Ponevezhsky, who has been involved in several high-profile and unusual cases, was responsible for getting the stake frozen on behalf of Mordashov's ex-wife, Yelena Mordashova. |
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MOSCOW - The government plans to meet its debt payments in 2002, even if oil prices fall, with no talk of debt restructuring, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - Russia's largest oil producer LUKoil barely beat out No. 2 Yukos in announcing Tuesday the largest annual profit ever posted by a Russian oil company. As well as setting a record for the oil major itself, the results beat market expectations and helped the company's shares rise 1. |
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Arms Sales at $3 Bln MOSCOW (AP) - Russia expects to earn $3.2 billion from weapons sales this year, down from last year's figure, officials said Wednesday. |
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WHEN the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, or GKChP, dismissed Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Aug. 19, 1991, I was the chief military correspondent of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of the few uncensored newspapers at the time. As the tanks slowly moved into Moscow that morning, I headed to the White House - the seat of the Russian government, parliament and President Boris Yeltsin. |
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THE Russian press of late is filled with articles devoted to the 10th anniversary of the August 1991 putsch. I join my voice to the choir of memoirists and analysts. |
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"WHAT we feared has come true," Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in Israel's leading newspaper. Jews and Palestinians are "regressing to superstitious tribalism; war appears an unavoidable fate," an "evil colonial" war. |
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IT is amazing how sometimes situations that seemed so clear-cut as they unfolded later become clouded in doubt and uncertainty. In recent years, there has been no more vivid example of this phenomenon than the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow. |
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 A new Babslei video for the song "Ispanskaya" (Spanish) will premiere in September, but it is already a hot topic in music circles. The all-girl folk-punk group appears with some of the most famous local rock personalities, such as Leningrad's Sergei Shnurov and Tequilajazzz's Yevgeny Fyodorov, and is based on the classic Soviet war film, "The Dawns Here Are Quiet." Shot on an island on the Vuoksa River by video director Alexander Rozanov in late June, the landscape is similar to the swamps of "The Dawns," where a poorly equipped Soviet all-female volunteer regiment led by a starshina, or sergeant major, dies fighting the Germans. |
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 Reforms in Russia are often wildly varied in their conception and execution. They have not always enjoyed sufficient popularity to enable them to survive long enough to produce the desired effect. |
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When The Beatles sang "Back in the U.S.S.R." in 1968, they could hardly have imagined the effect it would have in the Soviet Union. The parody of the Beach Boys' "Back in the U.S.A." was seen as further proof of the fact that The Beatles had in fact visited the Soviet Union. |
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The 6th and 7th linii of Vasilievsky Island have seen a lot of changes over the past year. What used to be a haven for the homeless to gather over a bottle of portwein, and try to sell their remaining possessions to buy another is now a swish pedestrian zone - or will be, that is, when the buildings have been refurbished. |
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It seems incredible that seven years after Russia first intervened in Chechnya to suppress its bid for independence, it is still waging a war there. It is no longer surprising that Russia's politicians and generals are so cynically careless about the suffering of the Chechen people and of their own soldiers, but it is hard to understand how the Russian public puts up with it. Even if Russia was so weary and beaten up that it embraced Vladimir Putin and his new war in the 2000 election, I cannot help thinking that the public outcry at the Kursk disaster last August was not just about the sailors drowned in that submarine, but about all the young lives lost in service to a cruel and indifferent state, the tens of thousands killed over a decade in Afghanistan, and now thousands more in the Caucasus. |
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 The dinosaurs are getting smarter. The people are getting stupider. A lot stupider. But really, what did you expect? This is "Jurassic Park III," not Henry James, and after two previous films detailing the unstoppable savagery of what grumpy paleontologist Dr. |
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No More Castes? KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) - The Nepalese government said Thursday it would outlaw discrimination against lower-caste Hindus and pledged to pass a law ending the centuries-old system that deems certain people "untouchable." "Effective from this day, the practice of untouchability and any discrimination based on it will be considered a crime punishable by a severe sentence," Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba told Parliament. |
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Sound Off NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) - A minor-league baseball team fired its sound-effects operator when he ignored warnings and played "Kung Fu Fighting" to try to upset a South Korean batter for a visiting club. |
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