A Japanese diplomat will travel to Chita on Thursday from the Khabarovsk consulate in response to the murder of a Japanese tourist who was traveling across Russia on a motorcycle. A Japanese diplomat will travel to Chita on Thursday from the Khabarovsk consulate in response to the murder of a Japanese tourist who was traveling across Russia on a motorcycle...

The estranged husband of a Sberbànk employee in Primorye fatally stabbed his wife in the bank Tuesday — scrawling the chilling message, "Yulia, I love you," in blood on a window before being arrested. The estranged husband of a Sberbànk employee in Primorye fatally stabbed his wife in the bank Tuesday — scrawling the chilling message, "Yulia, I love you," in blood on a window before being arrested. The brutal stabbing took place in...

An alleged organizer of a murder of Russian furniture magnate Mikhail Kravchenko has been detained in the Moscow region. An alleged organizer of a murder of Russian furniture magnate Mikhail Kravchenko has been detained in the Moscow region, Itar-Tass reported Tuesday...

Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. NEW YORK — Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where the...

Police in the Sverdlovsk region have detained three men on suspicion of murdering and robbing a tourist from Moscow. Police in the Sverdlovsk region have detained three men on suspicion of murder and robbery. According to a statement on the website of the region's Investigative Committee, the victim was...

A tourist from Japan has been found murdered in the Zabaikalsky region in Siberia, investigators said Wednesday. The 31-year-old tourist, whose identity was not immediately revealed, was traveling around Russia on his Suzuki motorbike. He set up a tent on the side of a road near the village...

... work properly. In addition, the members said, workers are not allowed to form trade unions and go on strike, harsh anti-extremism laws are applied to trifling comments on the Internet, most mass media are controlled by authorities, and abductions and murders in the North Caucasus continue. Addressing the complaints, Medvedev said he would consider a hotline for reports about police corruption, but said he saw “no threat” to freedom of speech and called the obstruction of nongovernmental...

... were stashed in Gudauta by Rustan Gitsba, the leader of a local radical Islamist group, Abkhaz Jamaat, which nobody in Abkhazia had apparently ever heard of before. His brother Khamzat, imam of the Gudauta mosque, however, made headlines when he was murdered in 2007. Abkhazia was quick to presage the complicity of "foreign players." Abkhazia's leader, Alexander Ankvab, can't be too pleased. The cache was discovered during the investigation of the latest attempt on his life in February,...

... violence but by offering a better alternative. The Russian government cannot sanction the practice of stoning, chopping off a hand for theft and other Sharia practices. In 1997, when Chechnya had Sharia courts, it was impossible to convict a single murderer or traitor. This is because any Muslim accused of a crime could tell the court, "I swear on the Koran that I was not the one who committed the crime." And even if his accusers were to produce a document with his signature that proved...

... Everything is squandered or lost. Efficiency is achieved by establishing and following rules, but criminals are lawless by nature. The notion that mafia thugs live by a special "thieves' law" is a legend. For example, Godfather Vyacheslav Ivankov, murdered in Moscow in 2009, was himself the worst offender against the law's most-sacred precepts. Over the past 12 years, Russia has become a full-fledged mafia state. One day, historians will chart its exact structure, but it seems clear that it consists...

... gubernatorial elections — which the authorities have rejected — or the liberalization of political parties — which has no meaning in the absence of real elections. It is as if 21st-century Russia is still locked in the Middle Ages. The murder rate in today's Russia is the same as it was in 16th-century England. Moscow officials are just as servile and obsequious as they were in the Korean kingdom of Silla over 1,000 years ago. Russia's bigwigs wave their iPhones and iPads about while...

... from hell will be sure to arrive. Boris's last moments are engulfed in anger — his governed failed to appreciate any of his efforts — and remorseful hallucinations, in which the tormented tsar mistakes his own horrified son for the murdered Prince Dmitry. No less bitter are the scenes of mass protests, the demonstrators numerous but disorganized, that are violently dispersed by the riot police. The finale sees Godunov making a speech in a hall closely resembling the State Duma...

... corruption and an albatross around the neck of the state. Criminality reached an apogee in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, with cars being stolen the moment they left the factory. Mafia distribution networks sold them on for huge profits. Murders connected to the nexus of corrupt managers, city officials and mafia bosses at AvtoVAZ continued until after Renault first bought into the company in 2008. Vyacheslav Shirshov, a purchasing manager for the firm, was killed in February of that...

... United Russia-connected analyst, painted an even darker picture, saying the protests will carry on until someone from the opposition "resorts to terror." He drew a parallel between the current radical elements within the opposition and the murder plotters of Tsars Alexander II and Alexander III in 19th-century Russia. 418973 171293 179742

... media and investors tend to exaggerate Russia's problems. Russia's reputation in Britain is particularly bad. Dramatic incidents in Britain such as the polonium-poisoning death in London of former Federal Security Services agent Alexander Litvinenko or murder attempts against Russian businessmen certainly haven't helped. A journalist friend from London recently tried to prepare me for a meeting with the British media. "Don't dare to be late by even five minutes when meeting with a reporter,"...