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A comment by a prominent campaigner has touched off a fevered debate over Russian influence in a former Soviet republic. It's not so often that Romantic poets set social media alight. But that's exactly what happened when the subject of Alexander Pushkin came up on a Russian TV programme. The interviewee, Alexei Navalny, is an anti-corruption campaigner who has long been one of the leading figures opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a conversation on the independent Russian Dozhd TV channel, Navalny and presenter Ksenia Sobchak suggested that Pushkin - one of Russia's great cultural figures - was largely unknown...

Russians are pining for a white December By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow Last Updated: 1:51am GMT 19/12/2006 Russia is experiencing its warmest December since 1870, raising fears of serious economic consequences and prompting warnings about the effect the lack of snow is having on the national psyche. On Friday, the mercury hovered just below nine Celsius — 14 degrees above the average daily temperature for December. The weather has led to predictions of a dearth of grain and psychiatrists are worried about people's fragile emotional states. Companies selling fake frosted window patterns are doing a roaring trade as Russians try...

MOSCOW, Nov. 16 - A Swiss businessman's dogged, 14-year campaign to collect a debt from Russia has ensnared, briefly, 54 paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts of Moscow that had been on display in Switzerland. The paintings - including works by such masters as Poussin, Manet, Renoir and Cézanne and insured for more than $1 billion - were seized by the Swiss police late Tuesday night as the collection was being boxed up after a five-month exhibition at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny. Paintings that have been seized include, clockwise from top left, Paul Gauguin's "Are...

Ukraine apologizes to Russia for vandal destruction of Pushkin monument 23:08 KIEV, June 9 (RIA Novosti) - Advisor to the Ukrainian Culture and Tourism Minister Igor Pristavksky condemned the vandal destruction of the monument to the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in Lvov (Western Ukraine). Unidentified vandals broke the monument made by local sculptor Kassel and unveiled in front of the Russian Cultural Center in Lvov on June 8. "I apologize to the great Russian nation for this vandalism," Pristavsky said adding that Pushkin was highly popular in Ukraine. "I am sorry to say this because I was born in...

Russian literary giant Pushkin labelled as a peddler of porn MURDO MACLEOD HE IS the all-time giant of Russian literature, who shaped the literary heritage of the world’s biggest country. But now Alexander Pushkin’s legacy is in danger of being tainted by an argument over whether some of his early work is pornographic, and whether his ‘adult verses’ even came from the pen of the ‘National Poet’. A collection of his poems has been seized by Russian police as part of a crack-down on "obscene" literature. The move has horrified the nation’s literati in a country where serious literature is...