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MOSCOW - Prosecutors dropped a bombshell on the market Thursday, freezing some $15 billion worth of shares in Yukos and Sibneft as they took the Kremlin's war against jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky into uncharted territory. Prosecutors said they seized 44 percent of Yukos, which now owns 92 percent of Sibneft, to stop Khodorkovsky from selling his controlling stake in the company. |
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A new law on the structure of the St. Petersburg city government was passed by the Legislative Assembly in a third and final reading Thursday, with 44 lawmakers voting in favor and two abstentions. |
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MOSCOW - The Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled as unconstitutional one part of the law that restricts media coverage of election campaigns, and in doing so, gave journalists more room to do their jobs, opponents of the law said. The ruling, read by Chief Justice Valery Zorkin, cancels an umbrella clause in the law on guarantees of voters' rights, which defined campaigning so broadly that reporting information on a candidate could be construed as a violation if it was capable of swaying voters. |
All photos from issue.
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President Vladimir Putin once joined his colleagues to drink to the early death of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko and believed that the Soviet Union was doomed, according to a new book written by one of his former colleagues. A report on the book, due to be printed in Russia soon and called "Sosluzhivets," was printed in German magazine Der Spiegel last week. |
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The election commission for electoral district No. 206 has refused to register prominent St. Petersburg State Duma deputy Yuly Rybakov as a candidate for December's Duma elections. |
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MOSCOW - As President Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of his chief of staff Alexander Voloshinon late Thursday, a new political figure was emergeing from the wings in a reminder that strange intrigues never end in Russian politics. That figure is jailed Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. |
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MOSCOW - Richard Perle, a hawkish policy adviser whose voice is heard in the Pentagon, has called for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight industrialized countries over the arrest of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. |
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FBI Dubrovka Probe MOSCOW (SPT) - The FBI is conducting its own investigation into the October 2002 Dubrovka hostage crisis to determine the cause of death of a U.S. citizen, Sandy Booker of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who was among the hostages. A U.S. Embassy official, who asked not to be named, said the investigation is being conducted by the FBI together with the Prosecutor General's Office, the Federal Security Service and the Interior Ministry. |
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 ST. PETERSBURG - The new five-star exclusive Grand Hotel Emerald opened in the center of St. Petersburg at 18 Suvorovsky Prospect on Oct. 28, becoming the fifth hotel of that class in the city. The Grand Hotel Emerald, which cost $20 million, was designed as a small but exclusive hotel with 93 rooms in classes ranging from Standard to Grand Royal Suite. |
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Vysotsk Terminal ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - LUKoil will open the first stage of its oil terminal in Vysotsk, Leningrad Oblast on Nov. 30, Interfax reported Governor Valery Serdyukov as saying after a meeting with LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - Despite five years of healthy growth, Russia has yet to earn a place among the world's leading economies, the World Economic Forum said in a report issued Thursday. The organization's Global Competitiveness Report puts Russia at No. 70 among 102 countries surveyed in terms of growth competitiveness, down from 65th out of 80 surveyed last year. |
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MOSCOW - Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov issued a warning to some of the nation's largest private companies Wednesday: natural resources have never been privatized. |
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MOSCOW - Russia's vast transport system is in tatters, but annual investment of $20 billion, lifting the government's monopoly and letting investors in should fix it by 2025, according to a new transport strategy endorsed by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG - GM-AvtoVAZ announced plans Tuesday to build 17,000 Opel-Vauxhall Astra sedans per year at their joint facility in Tolyatti. The $100 million deal is the second between the U. |
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MOSCOW - The government wants to streamline the rules for mergers and acquisitions by significantly increasing the size of deals that can be concluded without the approval of the Anti-Monopoly Ministry. Under current legislation, the minimum value of company assets that can be sold without the Anti-Monopoly Ministry's consent is 20 million rubles ($670,000), while no more than 20 percent of a company's shares can be acquired without its stamp of approval. |
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MOSCOW - Emboldened by the attack on one oligarch, the new mayor of Norilsk plans to take on another - and he appears to have the backing of the Kremlin. |
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On the face of it, the Russian president appears to wield far more power than most. When Boris Yeltsin was putting together the current constitution, he reserved all possible powers for himself. And these powers then passed to his hand-picked successor. |
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If President Vladimir Putin allows his chief of staff to leave, it will destroy the balance of power in the Kremlin. Putin will have sided with his trusted buddies from the KGB over the holdovers from the Yeltsin years that he reluctantly inherited. |
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Last weekend I met Professor Bill Bowring, a lawyer heading a European Union-backed project to open a chain of European Human Rights Advocacy Centers in Russia to assist Russian citizens filing complains to the European Court of Human Rights. "Now Russia has finally got itself into a trouble," was my first thought. |
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 The Dirty Three, which broke to international college-rock fame in mid-1990s supporting Pavement, Sonic Youth and John Cale are to play in St. Petersburg next week. The Australian instrumental trio was formed by classically-trained violinist Warren Ellis, who is also a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Apart from Ellis, the Dirty Three includes guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White, whom Ellis recruited from the Blackeyed Susans, the band he had also performed with at one time. |
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 Though imported relatively recently, Halloween is now big in Russia - actually so big that the Moscow authorities, infamous for the ban they put on the ska-punk band Leningrad because they did not like the lyrics - noticed it and recommended that it not be celebrated in schools. |
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Halloween looks like the biggest reason for people to venture out this week, although there are lots of other gigs and parties going on. On Friday night, when everybody will be having fun with pumpkins and freaky costumes, Stary Dom, for instance, will be celebrating Samhain, the Celtic New Year, with a concert of three folk bands playing Irish and Scottish songs. |
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Western ways of doing business may be slow to catch on in Russia, but the concept of "Business Lunch" has really taken root. Like all good ideas, it prospers because it is simple: a set menu for a flat fee which operates in during the slack hours of a restaurant's day. |
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Can art heal society's problems? That's the question a new exhibition which opened on Monday in the "Manezh"Central Exhibition Hall asks, with some works providing more satisfactory answers than others. The exhibition is part of "Rokhto," an ongoing project which grew from a more specific question posed by Finnish artist Markus Renvall. He wanted to know if art can "cure" social "diseases" which often occur among young men between 16 and 24, like suicide, violence, and identity problems. In order to "diagnose" and find a "medicine" for these, a series of art events under the "Rokhto" banner was initiated. |
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 HONG KONG - Last weekend the 100-strong St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra returned to Hong Kong after an absence of nine years for three concerts of different programs as part of their Asian tour. |
 Since its various triumphs - including awards for best film and best debut - at the Venice Film Festival in September, Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return" (Vozvrashcheniye) has hardly left the news in Russia. Coverage has been balanced roughly between the tragic death of one of its lead actors, Vladimir Garin, after completion of shooting, and the question as to whether the film would receive wide national distribution through the major channels (it didn't). |
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In the front of his austere black-and-white book jacket, General Wesley Clark is presented as the former supreme allied commander in Europe and the author of what purports to be an expert analysis of the war in Iraq. |
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A sudi kto?: Who are they to judge? Look who's talking! (said of hypocrites or people incompetent to judge someone or something, from Griboyedov's play "Woe from Wit"). One of the comforting facts of Russian life is how little it has changed over the centuries. As one of Griboyedov's characters says in "Woe from Wit" ("Gorye ot uma"), "Doma novy, no predrassudki stary" (The more things change, the more they stay the same, literally, "the houses may be new, but the attitudes are old"). |
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 BELGOROD, Central Russia - Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez might not chalk up so many strikeouts if he were forced to stand next to the hitter and gently toss the ball straight up, and Giants slugger Barry Bonds might not be threatening baseball's career home run record if he had to start his swing with the bat between his legs. |
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Belarussian Biker Hurt BLOOMINGTON, Illinois (AP) - A Belarussian motorcyclist attempting to be the first deaf, non-speaking biker to cross the globe is recovering after a wreck with a tractor-trailer, officials said. |
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