U.S. crude oil futures ended lower for the fourth day in five on Friday, falling below $90 for the first time in five weeks as traders speculated that OPEC’s meeting next week would decide on an output increase. Worries that the weakening U.S. economy would curb oil demand also fueled pre-weekend selling, analysts said. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, January crude settled down $2.30, or 2.5%, at $88.71 a barrel, the lowest settlement since Oct. 24’s $87.10. It traded...

NEW YORK: On most nights, the Russian Samovar, a dimly lighted restaurant at the edge of the theater district in Midtown Manhattan, is a gloomy blend of new Russian money and faded ?migr? glamour.

But recently its upstairs dining room was haunted by ghosts from the 1920s and 30s, the golden age of the Soviet avant-garde. The grandson of the Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg stood in a corner chatting with the daughter of Alexei Dushkin, who once designed subway stations for Stalin. A few steps away, the daughter of the Soviet planner Nikolai Miliutin sipped cranberry vodka with Barry Bergdoll, the Museum of Modern Arts top architecture curator.

They were all there for a symposium dinner related to “Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32,” a show of recent photographs by Richard Pare at the Modern that conveys the fragile state of so many architectural monuments built in that heady era.

Yet the buzz in the room had less to do with Russias architectural heritage than with a celebrity who had not yet walked through the door: Sergey Gordeev, a 34-year-old billionaire developer and Russian senator who helped finance the show at the Modern.

Two years ago, Gordeev bought a share of the Melnikov House (1927) in Moscow, setting off a panic in the citys small but tightly knit preservation community. With its cylindrical interlocking forms, a hypnotic blend of Modernist purity and Russian mysticism, the house is considered a landmark of Soviet architecture. Yet it stands on valuable land in the city center.

Preservationists feared that Gordeev, who made his money in the rough-and-tumble Russian real estate market, might bulldoze the house to make way for the kind of gaudy new development that has become emblematic of the new Russia.

Today, the Melnikov House not only survives but also seems destined to become a museum. And that is mostly, if not all, due to Gordeev, who has emerged as a white-knight protector of Soviet architecture.

Last year he also bought the Burevestnik Factory Workers Club, another revered building by Melnikov, in suburban Moscow. Gordeev founded the Russian Avant-Garde Foundation, whose mandate includes fostering innovative new architecture and publishing books on Russian architecture as well as protecting and restoring Soviet-era landmarks.

He recently bought the archives of the architects Ivan Leonidov and Alexei Shchusev, and he plans to make the material available to scholars. He has introduced legislation in the Russian parliament that would require the removal of advertising billboards from the citys architectural landmarks. (The bill was recently approved by the upper chamber and is now in the lower chamber.)

“Hes polished up his image,” said Pare, who is negotiating to sell an archive of about 10,000 negatives to Gordeev. “Hes evolved from this shadowy figure to saint overnight.”

With his fingers in so many pies, it can seem as though Gordeevs hands hold the fate of one of the greatest legacies of 20th-century Modernism. And while the preservationists who once feared him now fervently praise him, they privately admit to some disquiet.

Meanwhile, Gordeev seems to have set his sights on a wider playing field: New Yorks cultural institutions. He donated heavily to the Guggenheim Museum last year. And when the Modern was short of financing for the Vanguard show, it was Gordeev who wrote the check.

(That Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, showed up at a Modern dinner only reinforced a perception that New York institutions are in thrall to Gordeev, or at least his easy way with donations.)

When Gordeev finally arrived at the Samovar, he slipped into the crowd as quietly as a cat. A slim, well-built man with windswept hair and piercing blue eyes, he was the picture of casual wealth in his tailored gray suit and open-collared shirt. Although 34, he looks younger, like a skateboarder who had to dress up for a dinner with the grown-ups.

Leaning against a wall near a Russian-style buffet, he chatted enthusiastically about the symposium, where he had spoken that day about his foundations mission. He said that the centerpiece of the foundations efforts would be the Melnikov House, which he plans to transform into a museum, “like Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye or Sir John Soanes house in London.”

“Ive already spent $4 million on the Melnikov House,” he added. “I really think to do preservation in the proper way - government doesnt have the money for that. I like the situation in America, where preservation has the support of private institutions. This is the right model for Russia, where there are a lot of rich people.”

Canada Post is planning to cancel home delivery to nearly half of its customers along some rural routes in Quebec’s Eastern Townships because of road safety concerns. The postal agency is evaluating the safety of mail routes across Canada, after three carriers died and 37 were injured while making deliveries since 2005. Nearly 40 per cent of the routes examined in the Eastern Townships have failed the safety evaluation, because they present a hazard to carriers forced to stop on winding...