September 29:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said that he wants to develop a civilian nuclear power program with Russia’s help, the BBC reports. Chavez, who recently visited Russia and signed energy co-operation accords with President Dmitry Medvedev, also met with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who said Moscow is “ready to consider the possibility” of helping Venezuela build nuclear power facilities. “Brazil has various nuclear reactors, as does Argentina,” Chavez told a political rally in Caracas. “We will have ours and Vladimir told the media: Russia is ready to help Venezuela develop nuclear energy for peaceful ends.”
Prime Minister Putin has said the Russian government will provide a further $50 billion to increase liquidity in the banking system and fight “contagion” he said has spread from the United States, Bloomberg News reports. The funds supplement a $100 billion crisis package of loans to banks, tax cuts and delayed tax payments. As Bloomberg News notes, Russia’s government was pushed into action by investor flight caused by the war in Georgia, falling commodities prices and the seizure in global capital markets after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.
September 30:
With the world gripped by a financial crisis, an unnamed wealthy Russian has purchased a seven-storey 1,300 square meter townhouse apartment near Moscow’s Kursk railway station for 2.5 billion rubles ($99 million), Reuters reports. A spokesman for the Agent 002 property agency, who said the price paid for the apartment was “an absolute record,” refused to identify the buyer, but said he was an “active businessman” aged around 40 and not among Russia’s best-known tycoons.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has formed a new political party with Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, whose company owns 30 percent of Aeroflot airlines, the Guardian reports. Lebedev said the party would campaign for legal and economic reform and backs a stronger role for parliament, “less state capitalism” and the expansion of Russia’s independent media. Lebedev and Gorbachev between them own 49 percent of Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper that employed Anna Politkovskya, the award-winning Chechnya correspondent and Kremlin critic who was murdered in October 2006.
Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Grin has cited the Internet as one of the reasons for the spread of extremism and racial intolerance in Russia, NEWSru.com reports. Grin told the State Duma there more than 500 websites in Russia are fomenting ethnic hatred and that some post “specific information for preparing and committing crimes on the basis of national and inter-confessional discord,” including instructions on how to make bombs and carry out bombings. Grin called for legislation to prevent the Internet from being used for propagandizing “the ideology of terrorism and racial hatred.”
Meanwhile, 20 percent of the respondents in a survey by the state-owned VTsIOM polling agency said they have used the Internet as a source of information this year, up from 10 percent in 2005. According to NEWSru.com, only 11 percent of the respondents said they use the Internet daily, while 69 percent said they do not use it at all.
[Editor’s Note: Given the effect of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
October 1:
Russia’s Supreme Court has declared that Czar Nicholas II and his family, who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, were victims of political repression. As the Associated Press notes, prosecutors, lower courts and even the Supreme Court’s main body had repeatedly rejected appeals by Nicholas II’s descendants to reclassify the killings from premeditated murder, insisting they were not politically motivated.