In “Friendship of Peoples” (No. 8) you can read Dmitry Stakhov’s moderately adventurous novel “The History of the Sufferings of a Poor Man, or the Seven Travels of Polovinkin.” A certain amount of adventure, an ironic look at both the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present, several quite nice jokes, clear, easy language. Bandits, businessmen, sufferers, Caucasians, stupid young people, decrepit old people. Everyday life slips into phantasmagoria, which in fact turns out to be not so surreal.

Boris Berezovsky called on Vladimir Putin “not to let the genie of unlimited power out of the bottle, which has devastated our country for more than seventy years.” “You can't handle him. He will destroy both the country and you,” said the creator of a new type of constructive opposition in an open letter to the president dedicated to the fate of ORT. Television intrigue is a rather delicate matter.

The anniversary of the explosion in Buinaksk was marked with mourning A monument to the victims of the first of last year's tragic series of September explosions was unveiled yesterday in the Dagestan city of Buynaksk. Exactly one year ago, on September 4 at 21:40, in the seventh military camp of the 156th brigade of the Armed Forces, a truck parked near a residential building exploded. Despite the fact that the town is called military, 90 percent of its residents are civilians.

Russian jeans will not be given to “visiting bigwigs” The Rostov corporation Gloria Jeans, which today controls a significant part of the Russian children's denim market, refused to sell 5.5% of its shares to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The EBRD has been a shareholder in Gloria for several years and this year wanted to increase its stake in the corporation to a blocking stake.

Russian national team forward Vladimir Beschastnykh is already thinking about the game with Yugoslavia The victory in Zurich over the Swiss football players was not easy for the Russians. The outcome of the opening match of the 2002 World Cup was decided by a goal scored by the Spanish legionnaire of our team, Vladimir Beschastnykh.

The Russian Federal Property Fund yesterday held a specialized auction for the sale of 0.25% of shares of RAO Norilsk Nickel. 476,976 ordinary shares were put up for auction at an initial sale price of RUB 230. per share. The auction organizers did not prevent non-residents from participating in it.

Investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office decided to order a new psychiatric examination of Salman Raduev, the main Chechen terrorist captured by the Russian authorities. The main thing that interests them is how sane the former field commander is at the moment and whether he can adequately assess reality to continue his interrogations.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky gained control of the Angarsk Petrochemical Company The YUKOS press service announced that this company had acquired influence over the Angarsk Petrochemical Company (ANHK). An agreement was signed between the leaders of the YUKOS company and the RINKO group, which owns Angarka, to create a management company YUKOS-RINKO on a parity basis within six months.

Product division divided Vladimir Putin and the government The fate of production sharing agreements (PSAs) served as the reason for the first, albeit implicit, conflict between the president and the government. At its meeting on August 31, the government did not support the desire of the head of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, German Gref, to take control of the PSA. The issue was postponed for two months.

On Saturday, the eighth stage of the European Auto Racing Championship in the Grand Touring series took place at the new, state-of-the-art Lausitzring track (Germany). For the first time, Russian pilots from the TNK Racing team, leaders of the national championship in circuit racing in the Tourism 1600 class, Alexey Vasiliev and Nikolay Fomenko, took part in them. They were able to try their hand at the strongest touring car tournament in the Old World, held under the auspices of the FIA.

And Putin listens and eats End. Start on page 1 From the Kremlin’s point of view, no matter how the domestic media interpreted the results of Putin’s visit, this particular battle was won against the Japanese. A senior source from Russian diplomatic circles explained that Moscow had no expectations or plans for this visit. The visit had been prepared for a long time and painstakingly. But there was only one major task.

Ukrainian pressure groups took over government leadership Ukraine’s “European choice,” to which the pro-Western government of Viktor Yushchenko routinely insists, is again in question. And the reason for this is not so much the “intrigues of Russia,” which supposedly does not want to lose control over Kiev, but rather the internal Ukrainian situation.

The situation with northern deliveries in the country, Mikhail Kasyanov said yesterday, “is not yet at the level for us to be satisfied.” The somewhat ambiguous definition of the level of satisfaction of the government is most likely a consequence of the ambiguous situation that has arisen around the problem of delivering fuel and food to hard-to-reach areas of the country.

The Moscow Arts Center hosts the exhibition "Three Fires" It turns out that about a million “persons of Azerbaijani nationality” live in Moscow.

The Nizhny Novgorod region does not want to finance “dead” GAZ projects The administration of the Nizhny Novgorod region officially refused to purchase a 20.5% stake in the Nizhegorod Motors joint venture. According to experts from the regional industry department, the value of the stake offered by GAZ is 1.65 billion rubles. Since mid-summer, the management of the car plant has been feeling the ground for selling to regional authorities half of its stake in the dying Russian-Italian project.