WorldcrunchKommersant (“The Businessman”) was founded in 1989 as the first business newspaper in the Russia. Originally a weekly, Kommersant is now a daily newspaper with strong political and business coverage. It has been owned since 2006 by Alisher Usmanov, the director of a subsidiary of Gazprom.
KAMCHATKA PENINSULA – “The Kamchatka? Why?” was the response I got from everyone who heard I was going there, even though I think they all knew how beautiful the region is. It’s true; the Kamchatka is far away and expensive (although no further than Japan or Cuba). And for some reason, it’s a little scary. […]
MOSCOW – It has only recently emerged that Russia and Iraq have been secretly working on major arms deals. During Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s visit to Moscow in October, it was revealed that Iraq had already signed a contract to purchase 30 Russian-built military helicopters and 42 rocket launchers for $4.2 billion, with plans […]
MOSCOW – This summer there was an unpleasant surprise for many Russian Internet users – the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia was shut down. Of course, it was only for one day. “Imagine a world without free knowledge,” the home page said, instead of the usual search functions. “The Wikipedia community is protesting censorship that is […]
MOSCOW – Barack Obama’s re-election has allowed many people in Moscow to sigh with relief: The Cold War really is over. And that is the most important take-away from the Russian capital after the 2012 presidential election in the United States. The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, had surprised everyone during the campaign by citing Russia […]
MOSCOW – The Russian patent office has announced on its official website that it has denied Pussy Riot’s application for a trademark. The application has been at the center of a major conflict about the use of Pussy Riot’s “brand.” Band member Yekaterina Samutsevich had requested that one of the group’s lawyers, Mark Feigin, not […]
MOSCOW – It’s hard to shake the feeling that the idea of reinstating mandatory school uniforms has been discussed on and off ever since school uniforms were abandoned two decades ago. To recall the discussion last spring: The Duma came to the conclusion that uniforms could ease tensions between social classes at school, and even […]
MOSCOW – Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is calling on all members of the clergy to carefully watch what they say and how they live their lives, especially in light of the way modern information travels fast. Without naming names, he referred to some recent cases where the actions of clergy members […]
MOSCOW – On the evening of October 10th, Turkish Air Force jets forced Syrian Air flight 442, a civilian passenger plane, to land at the airport in Ankara, Turkey. They suspected that the plane, which was carrying 35 passengers from Moscow to Damascus, contained cargo not allowed under the rules of civilian aviation. After searching […]
MOSCOW – “At the time of transition, there were hopes that Russia would transform itself into a high-skilled, high-income economy with strong social protection programs inherited from the Soviet Union era…” So starts the Credit Suisse report on Russia as part of its 2012 Global Wealth Report. According to the bank’s experts, since 2000 the […]
KIEV – “If we don’t stop Yanukovych, we will lose Ukraine…” Speaking in perfect Russian, one of Yulia Tymoshenko’s young supporters is talking about the upcoming election while working a shift at one of the protest tents set up along Kiev’s main street, Khreshchatyk. The stakes she sees in Sunday’s election are high indeed. “We […]
MOSCOW – With winter coming, and the end of this year’s bicycling season, it is worth looking at Russian cities’ relationship with two-wheel transportation. First of all, the number of people choosing to get around by bike has actually become noticeable. In response, Moscow’s city government has started to think seriously for the first time […]
DOMODEDOVO – I first met with the leaders of this town’s independence movement in a small Azeri cafe. Domodedovo is barely a town, really, more like just a street; and when I arrived, there was a Muscovite photographer obviously on the same story. We were waiting for the members of the independence movement led by […]
MOSCOW – The first third of Srdzhan Dragoevich’s new film, The Parade, will bring a smile to even the gloomiest of faces. It’s a silly, rude comedy that is meant to be fun for the viewers. It is also very much a film with a message about tolerance for homosexuals, as well as for those […]
MOSCOW – The traffic jams in Russia’s capital have become world-famous in the last several years, so bad that in 2010 the Federal Government decided to address the problem directly. At the time, then-President Dimitri Medvedev commissioned a plan for the development of Moscow’s transportation system through the year 2020 that aims to get Muscovites […]
MOSCOW – Russia is going through a home-grown adoption boom. In the changing landscape of adoption, 6,700 children were adopted or placed with foster parents inside of Russia last year. It is a marked change since the mid-2000s, when most adoptive parents were foreigners. Now the majority of Russian adoptees are adopted by Russian parents. […]
MOSCOW – While much has been made of a “reset” in the relationship between the United States and Russia, Pakistan is also trying to find a new starting point in its relationship with Russia, which has yet to recover from Pakistan’s cold-war alliance with the United States. This would-be reset has had both setbacks and […]
MOSCOW – In a new twist in the case of Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Russian investigative journalist murdered in 2006, her children are filing a petition to rescind a plea bargain reached with one of the men involved in their mother’s assassination. Politkovskaya was a well-known investigative journalist who reported extensively for the Russian paper […]
-Op-Ed- MOSCOW – The reality of our lives in Russia is that the beginning of the 21st century is being dominated by the political leadership of Vladimir Putin. But it is perfectly obvious that the next couple of years will be the most difficult, and for Russian society these years will be the most important. […]
MOSCOW – Rattled by a horrific traffic accident in Moscow, Russian authorities have finally turned their attention to strengthening the country’s laws against drunk driving. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Russia needed to implement a stricter penalty for drunk driving and called it the biggest issue in Russia. On September 22, a man was driving […]
MOSCOW – The question of whether or not citizens in Russia have the right to defend themselves if they are being beaten by police was taken up by the Supreme Court in June. The case came just after a large protest on May 6 that was marred by several police beatings. In regulations released soon […]
MOSCOW – The Russian government has made quite clear its desire to protect the national light manufacturing and textile industry. A thick packet of documents from the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) lays out how the government intends to change the law regarding procurement of materials for federal agencies, including the military. MED essentially wants […]
ASTANA – Earlier this month, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev rolled out his new project for cooperation between the East and West — and it lacked neither ambition nor a healthy supply of alphabet-soup acronyms . A person close to President Nazarbayev’s administration said this was the most audacious of Kazakhstan’s recent foreign policy projects, unveiled […]
MOSCOW – U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has announced that Washington would close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Russia. Nuland said that it was the Russian government forcing the closure, a charge the Kremlin denies. “Like all foreign agencies that provide financing to Russian NGOs, USAID needs to follow […]
MOSCOW – Just this past August, there have been three attacks on Muslims in a small region of Dagestan – two attacks on Imams and one attack on a Shiite mosque. The attack on the mosque was the first attack on Shiites in the Northern Caucasus. It appears that the fight between Sunnis and Shiites, […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW – The Russia Arctic Coast is one of the dirtiest places on earth. According to the most conservative estimates, the shores of the Arctic Ocean are littered with 4 million tons of industrial and construction waste, part of which is toxic. More than 20,000 pieces of electronics are strewn across the Russian Arctic […]
MOSCOW – Russia’s federal government, which has instituted its own new public order decrees, is starting to be concerned that the outer regions of the country are cracking down on civil society protests a little too enthusiastically. Regional leaders took part in a meeting last month of vice-governors with the presidential administration to discuss laws […]
MOSCOW – Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has been monitoring the state of health in various countries for the past 60 years, it has never explicitly compared countries with one another. So Bloomberg news, using WHO data as well as other data from the World Bank and the United Nations, put together a rating […]
TASHKENT – Fundamental changes are afoot in the relations between the United States and Uzbekistan — and Russia isn’t happy. Until recently, the central Asian country was on the U.S.’s black list of human rights offenders to whom it was forbidden to provide any sort of military technology. But with a special decree, Secretary of […]
SAINT PETERSBURG – A well-known art collector buys a painting from a long-time acquaintance, who is also a publisher of books about Russian art. He displays it in an art exhibition, and an art expert happens to see it and recognize it as a fake that she had see before and identified as a forgery […]
MOSCOW – They say that the most expensive lunch enjoyed by anyone in the world was when the head of Greenlight Capital, David Einhorn, spent ‘only’ $250,100 for the right to dine with Warren Buffet, who he had always admired. Nikolai Taishikhin, who lives in a small town on Russia’ border with Mongolia, didn’t quite […]
MOSCOW – The three members of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band accused of hooliganism for anunauthorized performance in a Moscow cathedral, had their last words in court on Wednesday after a weeklong trial. The verdict will be announced on August 17. For those outside Russia, this whole affair has been a litmus test for […]
MOSCOW – Proposed legislation in the Russian Duma (Lower House of Parliament) would forbid all public employees, including government ministers, the President and the Duma MPs themselves, from owning any real estate, stocks or bank accounts outside of Russia. In its current form, public employees found to have property or accounts abroad would be removed […]