In answer to Estonia's decision to remove the Bronze Soldier monument, some Russian politicians want to rename the Moscow street where the Estonian embassy is located after the man killed during the ensuing riots. Sergei Mironov, speaker of the upper house of Russia's parliament, said Malyi Kislovsky Street should be named after Dmitri Ganin, who he said was "brutally beaten, chained with handcuffs to a blood-stained lamppost." The politician's account of Ganin's death is dramatically different from the Estonian record of events. Estonian police said Ganin, 20, was found with a stab wound to the chest in Tatari Street, the center of the riots. He was taken to hospital but could not be saved. Police said his pockets were stuffed with items believed to have been looted from a nearby kiosk.
On the night of May 13 the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa were hit by their largest power cut in the last eight years, affecting 78 percent of electricity consumers. The outage that left 20,000 households without electricity for two hours, caused losses to enterprises and disrupted work at the Kuressaare hospital, the regional newspaper Meie Maa reports. The hospital had to manage without electricity for about 40 minutes until its own generator went into operation. The cause of the trouble was a fault in a piece of equipment at a substation which caused a high-voltage line supplying power to Saaremaa and Hiiumaa to switch off. The power supply was restored at 1:30 a.m.
Authorities in the Russian Tver region have said they have found relatives of Lt. Vasily Volkov, whose remains had reportedly been buried at the Bronze Soldier monument in Tallinn and have now been unearthed. According to Interfax, the Tver Region authorities have found Volkov's sister and a more distant relative who have expressed the wish of reburial of his remains in Russia. The government has already prepared a letter to be sent to the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Estonian authorities, asking for assistance in Volkov's reburial. Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said May 10 that Estonia would respond to the wishes of relatives, not legal entities, concerning reburial of the remains excavated from Tonismagi due to concerns that other applications could be made with political aims.
