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MOSCOW - Sergei Yushenkov, one of Russia's most prominent liberal opposition figures and a State Duma deputy, was shot dead in Moscow on Thursday evening in what fellow deputies condemned as an apparent political assassination. Yushenkov, 52, was gunned down at the entrance to his apartment building in northern Moscow, just hours after the Justice Ministry officially registered his Liberal Russia movement as a party. |
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As the media continues to speculate that Governor Vladimir Yakovlev may leave office before his term is scheduled to end in May 2004, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov on Wednesday added his voice to those of politicians who would like to see the next gubernatorial elections moved ahead to this December to be held at the same time as those for the State Duma. |
All photos from issue.
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 State Hermitage Museum Director Mikhail Piotrovsky announced on Wednesday that the museum will be open round the clock on May 27 this year as a present to St. Petersburg on the day the city celebrates its 300th anniversary. Piotrovsky also said that the Hermitage will be letting in visitors free of charge, with the exception of tour groups, on May 27 through 29. |
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Officials with the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Department of the Ministry of the Interior (GUVD) may be believing the old saying that three is a charm after a visit by Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov on Wednesday. |
 SARATOV, Central Russia - A Saratov court cleared writer and National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov of all terrorism charges Tuesday, sentencing him instead to four years in prison for ordering the purchase of six Kalashnikov assault rifles. In a sharp rebuke to prosecutors and FSB investigators, Judge Alexander Matrosov demanded that the Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor General's Office discipline their investigators for putting on a weak case filled with inconsistencies and fabrications. |
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 MOSCOW - The world's largest financial retailer and the leading domestic commercial bank are taking the battle for primacy in Russia's booming retail-lending market to a new level. On Wednesday, in what company chairperson Mikhail Fridman called the beginning of "a revolution" in Russian banking, Alfa Bank unveiled its ambitious Alfa Express project to open dozens of full-service, modern retail centers in the capital and throughout the country over the next several years. |
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Italian-based company Merloni TermoSanitari put two new assembly lines for Ariston water heaters into operation in Vsevolozhsk, in the Leningrad Oblast, last week, and Francisco Stefanelli, Merloni's director for CIS countries said that the firm also plans to begin construction of a water-heater-production facility at the same site by the end of the year. |
 MOSCOW - The economy surged by 6.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to 3.7 percent in the same period in 2002, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said at the Cabinet meeting on Thursday. "The results of the first quarter are cheering. |
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Cleaning Up ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Henkel-Era plant in Tosno, in the Leningrad Oblast, a subsidiary of German-based Henkel, has invested 1. |
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SOMETIME in the next few weeks, the State Duma is to debate a package of amendments to Russia's laws on the mass media and charitable organizations, as well as to the Criminal and Administrative codes. The amendments, sponsored by President Vladimir Putin, are intended to bring these laws and codes into line with the new law on the basic guarantees of voters' rights. |
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EARLIER this winter (I will start thinking of what we have now as spring when the temperature manages to get above ten degrees for three days in a row), I was introduced to a colleague who told me that she had just started working for a new television station set up to provide coverage of news related directly to the Northwest Region and the Baltic States. |
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 It took a bunch of clowns to salvage the mundane awards ceremony for the ninth annual Golden Mask Festival, honoring productions that premiered during the 2001-2002 season. Moscow artists ran away with the majority of the awards at the 18-day festival, which was held for the first time in St. Petersburg, in honor of the city's 300th anniversary, and luminaries such as directors Kama Ginkas and Lev Dodin, ballerina Ilze Liyepa and actor Alexander Kalyagin were honored for their work. |
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 Over the past few years, the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, more popularly known by its abbreviation, SKIF, has established itself as the city's most varied and most chaotic festival of fringe music and arts. |
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The weekend starts strongly with a show by The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review at Red Club on Friday. The band failed to appear at PAR.spb in early March as planned - both the club and the band claimed that the other side was to blame - so the Friday show will be a really rare opportunity to see the local band live in its own city. |
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Located in the basement of a building behind the scarcely inhabited spit of the Vasilievsky island, the Czech restaurant-bar Bogemius is not the kind of lively beer bar you like to drop into after a hard day's work. |
 Horse trading is a natural feature of competitions like the Golden Mask regardless of where they are held but, usually, there is tacit agreement between the organizers and the jury about how far the spoils can be divided up among friends without taking merit into consideration. Many of the Golden Masks, Russia's most prestigious performing-arts awards, handed out this year made it painfully obvious that the festival had stepped over that line. |
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 The mood of wry disillusion that seeps through the screen adaptation of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" is sounded in the movie's opening moments by the voice of Michael Caine musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 1950's. |
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It is fashionable in some circles to compare Russian democracy to a Potemkin village - a pleasant facade with little substance. "Elections Without Order: Russia's Challenge to Vladimir Putin," by Richard Rose and Neil Munro, follows much in this vein. With freely elected officials and a full range of outspoken political parties, the country looks democratic from a distance, they say, yet society lacks the rule of law, which is key to achieving democracy in substance as well as style. |
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Russia captured its third-straight gold medal at the Bolshoi Priz junior ice-hockey tournament with a 2-0 win over the Czech Republic in the final game of the tournament Wednesday night at the Yubileiny Sports Palace. The Czechs entered the final game of the round-robin competition with a chance of stealing the gold from the Russians. |
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