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At 10 p.m. on Dec. 31, when Yulia Kash and her husband, Sergei, had just started boiling potatoes and frying chicken for New Year's dinner in their apartment in St. Petersburg's Kalininsky District, the electricity went off. With the electricity went their electric stove, telephone, telephone, tape recorder and, for some reason, their cold water. |
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Wednesday saw of the first meeting of the new Legislative Assembly that was elected on Dec. 8, and despite - or perhaps because of - some new faces in the assembly, it seems that everything old is new again. |
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MOSCOW - A regional military court has ruled that Colonel Yury Budanov, the highest ranking Russian officer to be charged with abuses against civilians in Chechnya, cannot be held accountable for the murder of an 18-year-old Chechen woman because he was temporarily insane at the time of the killing. In compliance with a request by defense lawyers, the court ordered that Budanov undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW/TOKYO - Japan and Russia will try to push aside their niggling dispute over the ownership of four barren islands this week, focusing instead on the more pressing issues of a troublesome North Korea and stronger economic ties. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi arrived in Russia Thursday for a four-day trip, the first state visit by a Japanese leader since 1998, including talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday and a visit to the far eastern city of Khabarovsk. |
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MOSCOW - The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is closing its mission in Chechnya after some of the OSCE's 55 participating states refused to endorse a limitation of the mission's mandate as insisted upon by the Russian government. |
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Zakayev on Bail LONDON (AP) - A British judge on Thursday ordered that Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who is accused by Russia of crimes including mass murder, remain on bail while the British government considers whether extradition proceedings should continue. At Moscow's request, police arrested Zakayev, an aide to Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, at London's Heathrow Airport on Dec. |
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 MOSCOW - Eleven years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle continues to fly high over Russia - but not for long. Aeroflot, the former Soviet Union's monopoly carrier, says that it will drop its Soviet-era logo as part of a new campaign to radically modernize its corporate image. |
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MOSCOW - St. Petersburg-based telecoms holding Telecominvest - which owns a 29.81-percent stake in No. 3 cellular operator MegaFon - announced earlier this week that it has sold off a chunk of its non-core assets. |
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MOSCOW - The dollar, the currency of choice for Russian savers, hit a fresh three-year low against the euro on Thursday, as the Central Bank had to spend about $50 million to keep the ruble from strengthening against the struggling greenback. Doubts about the strength of America's economic recovery and a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq pushed the dollar down to $1.0537 per euro in European trading, its weakest level since November 1999, when it stood at $1.0545. When the common currency's notes and bills were launched on Jan. 1, 2002, a euro could be had for just $0.89 cents. Since then, however, the greenback has taken a steady beating, losing 18 percent of its value against its European rival over the course of the year and 10 percent against a trade-weighted basket of major world currencies, making it the worst performing currency in the world. |
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 MOSCOW - Unfortunately for just about everyone who lives in a building older than a decade, which is nearly everyone, Soviet architects were never into insulation. |
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MOSCOW - High world crude prices and the successful sell-off of state stakes in LUKoil and Slavneft in 2002 have left the government with nearly $8 billion of extra cash it can use to pay this year's record debt bill and cushion against external shocks. |
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MOSCOW - BP next month will call a $420-million bond that is convertible into LUKoil shares in what the oil giant hopes is its exit from an inherited investment in Russia's top crude producer, the company said Wednesday. |
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ON North Korea, the conventional wisdom in Washington, which happens to be the same as the conventional wisdom in Pyongyang, goes roughly like this: U.S. President George W. Bush triggered the crisis by excessive hardening-of-line and axis-of-evil-calling; Bush is compounding his hard-lining error by irresponsibly refusing to negotiate with Pyongyang; and, paradoxically, Bush is guilty of foreign-policy incoherence, or worse, in adopting a harder line toward Saddam Hussein than toward Kim Jong Il. |
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LAST week there was another case of mass desertions by Russian conscript soldiers - this time from a unit of the Federal Railroad Troops near St. Petersburg. |
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 Prominent Moscow director Vladimir Mirzoyev is known for his daring, original and, some say, unceremonious approach to classic plays, such as Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," Gogol's "Revizor" ("The Government Inspector"), and Edmund Rostan's "Cyrano de Bergerac." When Mirzoyev's plans to turn his hand to opera in St. Petersburg were unveiled, therefore, the city's artistic circles went into paroxysms of hysteria, and dire warnings abounded of impending disaster. |
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 Cynic, St. Petersburg's favorite underground hangout, reopened in its new location this week after a six-month hiatus with a huge party and a concert by local acts Sveta Kolibaba and Selyodka. |
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St. Petersburg fans of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini have been suffering from culinary depression since the closure last year of the director's namesake restaurant. That deficit, however, has been partially mediated by the opening of Paparazzi, a cafe just off St. Isaac's Square. One of the more obscure corners of Fellini's cultural legacy, the word paparazzo - and the plural form, paparazzi - derives from a character of the same name in the director's most popular film, "La dolce vita." According to the invaluable Web site www.dictionary.com, a paparazzo is "A freelance photographer who doggedly pursues celebrities to take candid pictures for sale to magazines and newspapers. |
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 A few hours after landing in St. Petersburg, Truls Mørk was already feeling the cold. "Well, in Oslo, where I live, it's about - 9 [degrees Celsius]," he smiled. |
 Ewa Podles claims to be the only true contralto in the world. Yet the Polish singer - whose unique, almost masculine voice, with its tremendous chest notes, encompasses a range of almost three octaves - is often called anything else. For example, some of the advertisements for the recent Arts Square Festival, at which she sang in the role of Orfeo in a concert performance of Christoph Gluck's opera "Orfeo ed Eurydice" on Jan. |
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Anyone who has read the stories of Bruno Schulz, the collection called "The Street of Crocodiles," or "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass," will know this writer as one of the strangest literary figures of the century. |
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NEW YORK - It was the middle of a Russian winter, and cinematographer Tilman Buttner had just a narrow window of daylight to do something no one has ever done before - shoot a feature-length film in one continuous take. The film was "Russian Ark," a dreamy tableau of Russian history from Peter the Great to the present, filmed entirely in 33 rooms of the State Hermitage Museum, with 2,000 actors and extras who had never rehearsed all together. |
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Fartsovshchik: black-marketeer (Soviet period). As another anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union passed at the end of December, I was overcome by a fit of nostalgia for all the words, expressions and cliches of the Soviet period that disappeared along with the hammer and sickle. |
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