The St. Petersburg Times, a weekly English language newspaper founded in Russia’s second city in 1993, has stopped producing its print edition. To staunch the flow of red ink, the owner of the paper (Independent Media) decided to cut back to an online version only. The publication’s sister paper, The Moscow Times, founded in 1992, continues to come out in print.
Meanwhile Meduza, a news website staffed by the exiled team of Lenta.Ru (a popular publication that was ordered to change its editorial policy in March 2014 because of its coverage of the Ukraine crisis), has launched an English version. “You’ll find the stories most vital to understanding what’s really going on in Russia,” Meduza claimed in its announcement of the launch.
meduza.io/en
The Qolsharif mosque in Kazan, capital of Russia’s Muslim Tatarstan Republic, has launched a round-the-clock reading of the Koran. Muslim clerics will read the Koran in a special glass-walled room day and night, interrupted only for prayer - a first in Russia.
In February, Russia’s broadcasting network ordered the closure of Tomsk’s TV-2 channel.
A recipient of multiple awards over its 23 years of operation, the channel was one of the last independent media voices in the provinces.
After TV-2 was cut from federal over-the-air broadcasts in January, the channel survived for another month on cable. A rally by thousands of citizens to keep the channel on the air did not sway the authorities, and when the station’s license expired in February, its fate was sealed.
TV-2 broadcast to some 600,000 Siberian viewers and employed over 200 souls. The closure followed months of pressure after the channel’s criticism of local authorities, as well as reporting on the Ukraine conflict and mobilization of volunteers from Tomsk to fight in eastern Ukraine.
As prices rise in Russia, vodka is getting cheaper. The government has lowered the minimum price on a 0.5L bottle of vodka from R220 rubles to R185. Officials explained that the price was lowered to avoid the risks of counterfeit vodka. By some estimates, as much as 65 percent of alcohol consumed in Russia is counterfeit. By law, the government can regulate prices on beverages that have an alcohol content over 28 percent.
A new film by British director Peter Greenaway is a biopic of the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in particularly his journey to Mexico where he, the established and venerated creator of The Battleship Potemkin, has perspective-altering experiences and rethinks his career.
Greenaway’s film, titled Eisenstein in Guanajuato, was scheduled to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Greenaway is on track to complete a second film about Eisenstein as well. Called The Eisenstein Handshake, the film was initially welcomed by Russia, which owns much of the archival footage needed to complete the project. Yet after reviewing the screenplay, the Russian film agency objected to some aspects of the story – such as those touching on Eisenstein’s homosexuality. Let Greenaway rework the screenplay, the agency suggested, then we can talk about sharing archival footage.
Though he was married, Eisen-stein reputedly included homoerotic imagery in his films, and some biographers have said he was uncomfortable about his sexual orientation and studied homosexuality before concluding it was “regressive.”
Russia’s seemingly endless doping scandals have caught up with athletics boss Valentin Balakhnichev, who at press time was promising to resign his post in mid-February.
The announcement came after Russia’s top Olympians – steeplechase champion Yulia Zaripova and race walkers Sergei Kirdyapkin, Olga Kaniskina and Valery Borchin – were banned by the country’s anti-doping agency after failing blood tests.
Balakhnichev was one of the sports officials exposed in a German film alleging Russia has a systemic doping program for its top athletes. Sports Minister Valery Mutko, who has proclaimed a war on doping, said the problem could go as far as the children’s sports academies, where coaches are a bit too eager to see their trainees perform well and make the national team.
While the government seeks to trim its budget in order to weather the economic crisis, it is still confident that it can host the 2018 World Cup, which may require even more investment than the 2104 Olympic Games in Sochi.
FIFA head Joseph Blatter said he has received assurances from Vladimir Putin that Russia is on track to build the promised stadiums and provide the rest of the Cup’s needed infrastructure. Yet the government has decided that those stadiums not yet built will be redesigned in a way to cut costs by 10 percent. A total of 12 stadiums must be either rebuilt or built from scratch at a price of R300 billion.
A spate of espionage and treason cases were launched in the first two months of this year.
Svetlana Davydova, a housewife and mother of seven from Smolensk, allegedly called the Ukrainian embassy after overhearing Russian soldiers say they were going to Eastern Ukraine to fight. After a public outcry, Davydova was to be released from prison to house arrest.
Meanwhile, priest Yevgeny Petrin has been arrested for high treason, accused of having passed secrets about the Russian Orthodox Church to Americans.
Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed last year, celebrates its one-year “anniversary” as a Russian region in March.
According to a poll by GFK Ukraine, 82 percent of Crimeans fully support the annexation, and only 3-4 percent oppose it. Pensioners are happy to have their pensions brought up to Russian levels: half of respondents to the poll said they are better off than before (35 percent said their standard of living is the same). But these positive changes are accompanied of late by 40 percent inflation, and the impact of Western sanctions are being felt (Visa, MasterCard, eBay, PayPal, Apple and Google are just some of the companies that have reduced or stopped operations in Crimea).
Furthermore, minorities like Crimean Tatars are under increasing pressure. Authorities are regularly arresting Crimean Tatar activists and lawmakers and have raided the only channel that caters to that community. Meanwhile, many ethnic Ukrainians are moving off the peninsula, even though they were automatically granted Russian citizenship.
The one-year anniversary comes as Russian senators are working on a bill that would proclaim illegitimate the 1954 transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. The decision made by the Supreme Soviet at the time stated that “considering the unity of economy, territorial closeness and tight economic and cultural ties of Crimea and Ukraine, the Presidium… decrees the transfer of Crimea” from Russia. In the 1950s, the peninsula was a devastated region, little used and sparsely populated after the devastation of World War II and the deadly 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Its development required water and electricity from Ukraine, on which Crimea still depends today, 70 years later.
Установите доллар как при Советской власти — 65 копеек давайте платить, и всё будет нормально
“Set the dollar as it was in Soviet times, at 65 kopeks, and everything will be back to normal.”
Lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky, arguing that the dollar is “overvalued” at nearly 70 rubles, having doubled in value versus the Russian ruble since early 2014. (Interfax)
Нельзя с позиции сегодняшнего дня давать оценки тому, что было в другой эпохе, в другое время <...> Это предложение просто чушь какая-то.
“You can’t look at what happened during another era from today’s standpoint … That proposal is simply nonsense.”
Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev dismissing a proposal by top lawmakers to draft a statement criticizing the “annexation” of East Germany by West Germany after the fall of Berlin Wall. (Interfax)
смирение людей, принимающих решения, касающихся других, есть непременное условие достойного служения»
“Today, those making decisions affecting the fate of humanity and a great number of people must look at themselves self-critically... Humility in those making decisions affecting others is an absolute precondition for worthy service.”
The Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill, on the need for Russian leaders – both religious and political – to be humble. (RIA Novosti)
создает виртулальную реальность а потом реагирует на реальность ею же созданную
“What is the government doing? It has destroyed all healthy channels of communication and has wound up with a blood pressure monitor that always reads 120/80, a thermometer that always reads 98.6, and a glucometer that always reads 6… The presidential administration creates virtual reality and then reacts to the reality of its own making.”
Yulia Muchnik, news host for TV-2, the Tomsk-based channel that was ordered closed on January 1, 2015 (see page 9), saying that the government has lost touch with what is happening in the country after imposing almost total media control.
YELENA OBRAZTSOVA, a star mezzo-soprano at the Bolshoi Theater and one of the greatest primas of the Soviet era, passed away at 75. Born not long before World War II in what was then Leningrad, she was evacuated from the city in 1943 during the Nazi siege. After the war, the diminutive Obraztsova joined a children’s choir, where her singing career started. Graduating from the Rimsky-Korsakov conservatory, she soon took the music world by storm, winning prizes and debuting at the Bolshoi at the tender age of 24, while still a student.
Obraztsova toured Western countries with the Bolshoi, winning rave reviews at the Met and La Scala. She took center stage in two Franco Zeffirelli filmed operas, one of them opposite Placido Domingo.
In recent years she headed the opera troupe of St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theater and taught, while overseeing several projects. Obraztsova suffered from leukemia and passed away while undergoing treatment in Germany.
GLEB YAKUNIN, a dissident priest who first opposed the atheism of the Soviet state and then its control of the church – for which he was defrocked – passed away on December 25 at the age of 80, succumbing to a long illness.
Yakunin was serving as a priest in the provinces when, in 1965, he co-authored a biting letter to then Patriarch Alexei I. In it, he decried repression of Christians by the state and said people yearned for a different approach, for a church that was not weak, fragmented and permeated with fear (at the time, the Church was heavily infiltrated by the KGB and tightly controlled by the Soviet state). The Patriarch prohibited Yakunin and his co-author Nikolai Eshchliman from continuing to serve as priests.
Yakunin later spent nearly a decade in Soviet camps and exile for his activities chronicling the persecution of believers through his Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers in the USSR. After being amnestied by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, he served a few years more in a parish outside Moscow and in 1990 was elected to the Supreme Soviet.
After his involvement in the investigation of the 1991 coup attempt, in 1992 Yakunin released information from KGB files that showed the Moscow Patriarchate had been cooperating with the KGB, implicating top leaders of the Church, including Patriarch Alexei. As a result, in 1993 he was excommunicated. He nonetheless continued his work for human rights over the next two decades and, in 2004, founded a breakaway Apostolic Orthodox Church.
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