The mysterious killing of Stalin’s rival Sergei Kirov on Dec. 1, 1934, has remained one of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded riddles for decades because many of the key documents were immediately classified by the secret police.

Under the proposed changes to the Law on Religious Activity, only leaders of registered religious groups and their officially authorized missionaries would be allowed to pass out religious literature, preach and talk about their faith in public.

In the wake of interviews critical of the Kremlin's pressure on the judicial system on judge will resign from the Constitutional Court at the end of this month, while another has already handed in his resignation as a member of the country’s Council of Judges.

The first step toward a better way of handling the South Caucasus should be for Russia, the United States, the European Union, Turkey and Iran to agree to stop trying to push each other out of the region and to stop carving it up into pieces.

Shmatko is heading to Sofia next week for talks on the $1 billion pipeline and Russia’s two other energy projects in the country.

RusAl ended almost a year of tortuous negotiations on its $7.4 billion foreign debt when a British fund agreed this week to join more than 70 international lenders in the restructuring.

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church are making progress toward healing their 1,000-year-old rift, a senior Russian official said ahead of President Dmitry Medvedev’s first visit to the Vatican.

The country produced 10.07 million bpd in November, the third straight month that output has topped 10 million bpd, as more crude emerged from the new Arctic field run by state-controlled sector leader Rosneft.

As part of a self-employment program that has created 120,000 jobs this year, Moscow’s Labor and Employment Department held a contest last month awarding grants to prospective entrepreneurs to use as seed capital to start their own business.

A law ordering more transparency in the courts has been signed by President Dmitry Medvedev and will come into force next July, aiming to overcome what Medvedev has dubbed as legal nihilism.