In “Elena” the title character (Nadezhda Markina), a stout, copper-haired woman in her late 50s or early 60s, shares an elegant, gadget-filled home near the Kremlin with her wealthy older husband, Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov). You are keenly aware of the distance between Elena, a former nurse from a proletarian background, and the imperious, hard-nosed Vladimir, whom she cared for while he recovered from peritonitis a decade earlier and then married. It’s not that they loathe each other. When he signals that he wants sex, she matter-of-factly obliges him.

Both have children from previous marriages. Vladimir is estranged from his bitter, entitled daughter, Katerina (Yelena Lyadova), who lives solely for pleasure on the money he sends her. Elena’s unemployed son, Sergey (Alexey Rozin), whom she regularly visits in Moscow’s crumbling industrial fringe, is a heavy-drinking lout who shares cramped quarters with his wife and two children.

Elena always brings money. When Sergey tells her that his surly teenage son, Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov), will have to join the army unless Sergey can buy the boy’s way into college, she promises to help, although Sasha has no interest in his studies. Any money she brings has to be wheedled out of Vladimir, who despises her family and its slovenly ways. When Elena returns home and pleads Sasha’s case, he balks.

Elena and Vladimir may live in splendor, but their upscale neighborhood is weirdly devoid of people. An ominous calm hangs over the area, except for the cawing of crows, which can be heard indoors as well as out. And the movie’s acute aural awareness of the animal kingdom within the city underscores its vision of Moscow as a jungle teeming with predatory wildlife.

The only time the camera loses its poised, watchful attitude is during a teenage brawl in the junk-filled field outside Sergey’s house. Filmed with a hand-held camera, the fracas suggests a bunch of wild dogs tearing at one another.

Vladimir’s apartment is a different kind of jungle. The television is tuned to dreary game, cooking and talk shows, and you are uncomfortably aware of the sounds of appliances and of sliding doors and curtains.

Elena and Vladimir’s marriage reaches a crossroads when Vladimir has a heart attack while swimming and is again dependent on her care. Katerina visits him (at Elena’s insistence) while he’s in the hospital, and the father and daughter, after years of mutual hostility, discover a ghoulish rapport in their shared nihilism. Katerina now drinks and takes drugs only on weekends, she announces sardonically, but is “still getting food and sex under control.”

It’s “genes,” she explains. “Rotten seeds. We’re all bad seeds, subhuman.”

When Vladimir suggests that having children might give Katerina a purpose in life, she sarcastically replies: “What’s pointless is producing offspring you know will be sick and doomed, since the parents are sick and doomed themselves. And the world will end soon, in case you haven’t heard.” Vladimir is perversely tickled by her blasé attitude, and these soulless soul mates embrace, their rift mended.

Her words resound through a film that suggests that in this quasi-feudal social environment, avarice and blood ties trump all other values.

Summoning Elena to his bedside, Vladimir stuns her by bluntly announcing that he is about to prepare his will in which he leaves almost everything to Katerina, while providing Elena with a life annuity to be distributed in monthly payments.

“And what about Sasha?” she asks.

“Your son should be taking care of his own son,” he replies sternly.

Because Vladimir’s lawyer is to arrive the next day, Elena makes an impulsive, fateful decision that casts her in a different light. But the screenplay, written by the director with Oleg Negin, recognizes her humanity. Even as Elena contemplates the unthinkable, Ms. Markina’s grand, subtle performance reinforces the film’s view of her as its most compassionate character.

Of course, that isn’t saying much about these products of rotten seeds, locked in a life-or-death Darwinian struggle.

Elena

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev; written by Oleg Negin and Mr. Zvyagintsev; director of photography, Mikhail Krichman; edited by Anna Mass; music by Philip Glass; production design by Vasiliy Gritskov and Valeriy Zhukov; costumes by Anna Bartuli, Nastia Vishnevskaya and Tatyana Chernyakova; produced by Alexander Rodnyansky and Sergey Melkumov; released by Zeitgeist Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Nadezhda Markina (Elena), Andrei Smirnov (Vladimir), Yelena Lyadova (Katerina), Alexey Rozin (Sergey), Evgenia Konushkina (Tatyana), Igor Ogurtsov (Sasha), Vasiliy Michkiv (Lawyer) and Alexey Maslodudov (Vitek).

A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered activists at what had become known as Occupy Abay to leave by Wednesday, supporting a lawsuit by residents of Chistoprudny boulevard area.

The camp has few permanent residents, and its population fluctuates several hundred in the evening to less than a 30 at night.

Moscow police said more than 20 activists were detained overnight as they resisted eviction. Videos posted online by activists show the police pushing several dozen from the square and onto the metro station, as they deserve.

Police said some of the detained were intoxicated, but activists denied that in tweets from the police station, saying police were trying to discredit them. All the activists were released several hours afterwards, one of them, Maxim Kats, wrote on Twitter.

About 20 more activists have moved to a square in the west of central Moscow.

Judge Olga Solopova ordered the “liquidation” of a protest
encampment in Moscow‘s central Chistye Prudy district, citing
complaints by local residents about noise and damage to green spaces
allegedly caused by demonstrators, the Interfax news agency reported.

The protest camp was set up following peaceful demonstrations in
Moscow on May 6, when some ten thousand people led by a group of
popular authors marched through city streets to protest recent mass
arrests of other anti-government demonstrators.

Since then the Chistye Prudy encampment has become a focus for
Kremlin opponents, and one of the few public spaces in Russia where
the government of President Vladimir Putin is openly lampooned.

A few dozen people are thought to man the encampment overnight,
with its population rising to two or three hundred on evenings,
according to news reports.

A few people see Putin as a fraud, where as most Russians see him as their leader…

Demonstrators upset with the re-election of Russian President Vladimir Putin staged an occupation-style protest at various squares in Moscow.

Opposition leader Ilya Yashin was quoted by Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti as saying demonstrators were willing to work with local authorities but had no intention to give up their protest.

“We will not leave because no court decision can ban people from gathering in parks and on boulevards,” he said.

Moscow’s environmental department said demonstrators in Moscow were ordered to leave because they caused an estimated $650,000 worth of damage to the area landscape.

Organizers had said they would try to move to other parts of the city and continue their demonstration through June 12, a national holiday.

There were no reports of violence associated with the Moscow sit-ins.

Human Rights Watch had expressed concern about the situation in Russia following reports of police brutality during Putin’s inauguration last week.

“Fashion behind the Iron Curtain” at the 16th-century Tsaritsyno estate on Moscow‘s outskirts spans seven decades of female coquetry, describing how Soviet women made do with silk night gowns for theatre, acquired designer items and scrounged for fabric to satisfy a hunger for style in spite of shortages.

The retrospective offers glimpses of the sophisticated, Western-inspired dress of the Communist-era elite.

Elegant crepe-de-Chine dresses, furs, evening gloves, hats and designer heels worn by famous ballerinas, actresses and other personalities draw an arc through history displaying over 1,000 looks from 1920s to 1990s.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev‘s daughter Galina shocked her peers with a risqué floral mini dress, while ballerina Galina Ulanova wore Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo pumps, inaccessible to most at the height of the Cold War.

Visitors have flocked to the exhibit open through mid-June to see other looks, such as the sexy red strapless dress that earned Soviet actress Klara Luchko the nickname the “Red Bomb” at the 1962 Cannes film festival.

Fashion is a rare window into history that speaks to the modern-day, style-conscious public, exhibit curator Irina Korotkikh said.

“The main purpose is to show to the young and those who lived under the USSR that fashion did exist,” she told Reuters.

“Soviet women were elegant in spite of the economic and political situation,” she said.

Faced with scarcity under the planned Soviet economy, Korotkikh said many women queued – sometimes overnight – for prized bits of fabric and patterns to sew their own dresses.

“I love the fashion of those years because there were no puffy down jackets, there were beautiful dresses,” said museum visitor Yelena Yeliseyeva, 60, a retired aeronautical engineer.

“Fashion existed in the Soviet Union and it was very beautiful,” she said.

Relatively new to local museums, fashion exhibits have rapidly become popular with the public. Visitors came in record numbers to see Christian Dior dresses at the Pushkin museum and designs by revolutionary French couturier Paul Poiret at the Kremlin Museums last year.

(Reporting by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Paul Casciato)

Andrei Bochkaryov, head of the municipal construction department, said: “The total volume of financing has been set at over a trillion rubles, which includes the planning and construction (of the subway system) up to 2020.”

The Moscow metro, one of the world’s largest subway systems, will be extended by 145.5 km of rail lines and equipped with 67 new stations, RIA Novosti reported.

Bochkaryov said the new stations will be equipped with toilets, a luxury omitted by Soviet construction planners.

Currently, the total length of the Moscow metro, opened in 1935, comes to 305.5 km on 12 lines with 185 stations. It is the second-most heavily used rapid transit system in the world after the Tokyo subway.

MOSCOW, May 8 (UPI) — Moscow lifted its embargo on military exports to Libya more than six months after leader Moammar Gadhafi died during the civil war, the government said.

Moscow joined a ban on military hardware sales to Libya shortly after the country plunged into civil war in early 2011.

The Kremlin reversed its decision in one of the last official moves by President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti reports.

Medvedev is now serving a second non-consecutive term as prime minister after Vladimir Putin scored a victory in March presidential elections.

Russia’s state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport lost roughly $4 billion in revenue because of the embargo. The company said last year it would look to renegotiate arms sales with Tripoli once the embargo is lifted.

Libya is headed for its first set of democratic elections in a generation later this year. Despite post-war developments, tribal differences and various bids for autonomy in the country are threatening the peace.

Witnesses in Tripoli said Tuesday former rebel fighters armed with anti-aircraft guns fired on the offices of the interim prime minister in Tripoli.

A government spokesman, Ashur Shamis, told the BBC the conflict had ended by Tuesday afternoon and no government officials were injured.

A draft plan on the Moscow government‘s website has revealed it.

The document, prepared by the city’s economic policy and urban development department, proposes cutting the number of these stores by 90 percent and gradually reducing the number of alcohol trade licences by 20 percent annually until 2015.

The strategy also envisages tripling penalties for drinking in public places, including consumption of beer and other low-alcohol beverages.

Seventy-six percent of Russians drink regularly. Alcohol kills 75,000 people a year directly, and many more die of related health problems. Statistics show Russians start drinking at an average age of 14.

In August 2009, President Medvedev called the drinking epidemic a “national disaster” and instructed the government to work out measures to fight alcohol abuse.

Per capita consumption of alcohol in Russia stands at 17 litres of pure ethanol a year, compared to the maximum of eight litres recommended by the World Health Organisation.

–IANS/RIA Novosti

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MOSCOW, May 5 (UPI) — Russian authorities said a car carrying suspects in Thursday bombings in the Russian North Caucasus region has been spotted on surveillance cameras near Moscow.

The two bomb attacks in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan killed 13 people and injured more than 100, RIA Novosti said.

Investigators fear there could be attacks during the May holidays in Moscow, when there will be several large political rallies, including President-elect Vladimir Putin’s inauguration Monday and the Victory Day parade Wednesday, RIA Novosti said.

The car carrying suspects in Thursday bombings, a VAZ 21140 with Dagestan-region license plates, was spotted by surveillance cameras April 28 on Don Highway south of Moscow and on the Dmitrovskoye Highway north of the capital, a law enforcement source told LifeNews.

The source said the suspects in the Dagestan bombings were believed to be part of the Makhachkala gang headed by Gusein Mamayev. Dagestan authorities said they had determined Mamayev and three others were behind Thursday’s attacks.

In the attacks, a Mitsubishi car packed with explosives was blown up near a police station in Makhachkala, the capital city of the republic of Dagestan, and another car bomb exploded as law enforcement officers arrived to investigate the first attack.

Dagestan has become the base of the Islamic insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus.