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A famous British musician has canceled his upcoming concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg due to what he sees as a crackdown on human rights organizations.
"Given the crackdown by Russian authorities on groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, I have regretfully decided to cancel my upcoming concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg in June," a statement on Mark Knopfler's website says.
Knopfler, most famous as one of the founding members of Dire Straits, was due to perform on June 7 and 8 in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The concerts were part of his world tour for his new album "Privateering."
Experts say this marks the first such "walkout" by a Western artist in protest of recent legislation and that other Western performers may follow Knopfler's example. |
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 PERM — Jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina, who is currently serving a two-year sentence at a penal colony in the Perm region town of Berezniki, may be transferred to another correctional facility, two news reports said Wednesday. |
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MIAMI — The U.S. won't grant Russian officials access to one of its citizens held at the Guantanamo Bay prison because the prisoner refuses to meet with them, the U.S. State Department said.
Russian officials have asked to meet with Ravil Mingazov at the U.S. base in Cuba. State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said the 47-year-old prisoner refused through his lawyer to see the delegation. |
All photos from issue.
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 Nine protesters were detained at a Strategy 31 demo for the right of assembly Sunday as a new local law imposing further restrictions on the rallies in St. Petersburg, signed by Governor Poltavchenko on March 19, came into force in the city.
More than three years since Strategy 31 demonstrations, which are named after Article 31 of the Russian Constitution — guaranteeing the freedom of assembly — and held on months containing 31 days, began in St. Petersburg on Jan. 31, 2010, it was apparent that the authorities continue to see it as a major threat.
On Sunday, two dozen police vehicles were parked near the Gostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt and the police’s top brass were present on the scene. Plainclothes officers lurking in the crowd and stationed on the second floor of the store’s gallery recorded the event on their cameras, and dozens of armored OMON special forces officers were waiting in groups on the sides of the site to make arrests. |
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NOT AGAIN!
Chris Gordon / SPT
The heavens played a cosmic April Fools’ Day prank by dumping several inches of wet snow on the city earlier in the week. Despite the snow, however, temperatures are predicted to rise steadily over the next few days. Above, a snow plough clears the paths of Ploshchad Iskusstv on Tuesday morning. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — State-owned gas giant Gazprom will soon move two departments to St. Petersburg.
A senior city official said the departments are “gradually starting to be moved and the rest will move eventually,” Vedomosti reported last week.
The unidentified official attributed the move to the company’s plans to relocate its offices to the new Lakhta Center, an 86-storey skyscraper being built for Gazprom in the city.
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Laugh for Longevity
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — People with a healthy sense of humor usually find an inventive way out of difficult situations, Maria Galimsyanova, an associate professor in psychology at St. Petersburg State University, said April 1, Interfax reported. |
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LGBT activists will send photographs of fascist graffiti in St. Petersburg to Governor Georgy Poltavchenko during the Week Against Homophobia and Transphobia, the annual series of events aimed at drawing attention to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity that is being held in the city this week. |
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Defending champions Dinamo Moscow advanced to this year’s Gagarin Cup Finals after dispatching SKA St. Petersburg 5-1 in Game 6 of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) Western Conference Finals, winning the series 4-2 Monday night.
Marek Kvapil scored a hat-trick and his Czech compatriot Jakub Petruzalek notched three assists as they led Dinamo to victory in what turned out to be the decisive game in front of 7,596 spectators at the Luzhniki Olympic Arena in Moscow.
With just over 11 minutes left in regulation time, Petruzalek fed the puck up to Kvapil, who broke into a one-on-one against SKA netminder Ilya Yezhov. Kvapil slapped the puck past Yezhov to complete his hat-trick, giving Dinamo a 4-1 lead that practically sealed the game and the series. |
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 A group of St. Petersburg politicians, led by Vitaly Milonov, the United Russia lawmaker at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and the godfather of the infamous law against gay propaganda, has launched a crusade against a three-day exhibition by the British artist Adele Morse that is due to open at Geometria Cafe today. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Six adults died while 21 children and three adults were injured in an auto accident last week in the Vologda Oblast.
A group of children from a St. Petersburg orphanage were on a trip in the region when their bus collided head-on with a Scania truck, following which the bus caught fire. |
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 MOSCOW — Opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov, who has been accused of scheming to incite “mass disorder,” will spend the summer at home.
A Moscow court on Monday ruled that his house arrest would continue till Aug. 6, during which time he is unable to speak with fellow activists, use the telephone or Internet, or even go outside without police supervision.
The head of the radical socialist Left Front movement, who has been under house arrest since Feb. 9, told the Basmanny District Court that he had done nothing wrong and his innocence would be proved.
He was initially given the right to leave his apartment under the condition that he would not leave town, but the court ruled that he had violated that agreement on numerous occasions. |
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WAR GAMES
Mikhail Klimentyev / AP
President Vladimir Putin watches a military exercise in the Black Sea resort of Anapa on Friday. The drill involved about 7,000 troops, 30 naval ships, combat aircraft and armored vehicles. |
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MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry said organs from adopted Russian children who died in the U.S. may have been used in transplants, a news report said Monday.
Responding to an inquiry initiated by State Duma Deputy Alexander Starovoitov, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in a letter obtained by Izvestia that Russian agencies in the U.S. “have information based on local media reports about two incidents of the possible use of deceased Russian children’s organs for transplantation,” Izvestia reported.
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ROSTOV-ON-DON, Southern Russia — President Vladimir Putin described the Soviet Union as a land of opportunity and called for two Soviet relics, mandatory school uniforms and the “Hero of Labor” award, to be dusted off in the name of social justice, during an informal meeting with supporters in Rostov-on-Don on Friday. |
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LONDON — The late Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky will be buried in the Gunnersbury Cemetery in London as soon as medical tests are completed, news reports said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Governor Andrei Vorobyov’s preferred candidate was on Monday declared the winner of a small town mayoral election marred by allegations of widespread fraud.
Sunday’s election in the Moscow region town of Zhukovsky, 25 kilometers southeast of the capital, was seen as a litmus test of people’s trust in the ruling party governor ahead of the gubernatorial election in the fall. |
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MOSCOW — The government will not intervene on behalf of Russians hit by a drastic restructuring of Cyprus’ banking system, though it will consider specific cases involving state-linked companies, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said. |
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MOSCOW — Chechnya republic head Ramzan Kadyrov has proposed banning former top officials, including former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, from traveling abroad, where their state secrets could fall into the wrong hands, Kadyrov wrote in a column published in Kremlin-friendly newspaper Izvestia on Monday. |
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MOSCOW — A State Duma deputy has admitted that a bill banning garlic that he submitted to the parliament was an April Fools’ joke.
Sergei Ivanov, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, presented legislation Monday warning that garlic has negative “medical, demographic and socio-economic consequences. |
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 March 25 has already gone down in the Russian blogosphere as the Russian “Kristallnacht” for its nongovernmental organizations. On that day, officials from the Prosecutor General’s Office arrived to inspect several prominent NGOs in Moscow, including the Russian branch of Amnesty International, For Human Rights and Agency for Social Information. |
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In an early March interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, the Kremlin’s spin doctor, Dmitry Badovsky, argued that it is now more important to raise a viable opposition, unquestionably loyal to the Russian state, than to ensure the continued political dominance of the party of power. |
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 It is a little known fact outside St. Petersburg that a whole army of cats has been protecting the unique exhibits at the State Hermitage Museum since the early 18th century. The cats’ chief enemies are the rodents that can do more harm to the museum’s holdings than even the most determined human vandal.
For the past 15 years, workers at the Hermitage have set aside a special day each year to honor the museum’s four-legged sentinels. Three years ago, that private celebration was made public and has attracted attention to the plight of both the museum’s holdings as well as its furry inhabitants.
Known as The Day of the Hermitage Cat, this year’s event will take place Saturday.
“We are holding a competition among students from local schools this year,” said Maria Haltunen, assistant to the museum’s director and the closest thing the cats have to a union spokesperson. “We have asked the children to depict how they imagine a real Hermitage cat.”
The ten best works will then be presented for a week in the Jordan Gallery, one of the ground-floor galleries visitors pass on their way to the main staircase. |
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FOR SPT
The late Alexei German's historical drama faces funding problems. |
 On Thursday, St. Petersburg audiences will have an opportunity to experience Modern Blues Masters, an all-star acoustic blues trio that performs music that brings a new dimension to the style by combining cross-cultural and contemporary influences.
The trio is appearing at the State Jazz Philharmonic as part of the Traditional American Music Festival, which features musicians selected by the American Folklife Center at the U.
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 What happens when an expanding 16th-century European power accidentally comes into contact with a newly forged semi-Asiatic state with imperial and mercantile aspirations of its own?
This is the essential question posed by “Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars,” an exhibition that opened last month at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum that chronicles the relationship between the British monarchy and the Russian tsars, from the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Ivan the Terrible in the early 16th century to the early Romanovs and the re-establishment of the English monarchy after the English Civil War in the mid-17th century. |
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 A joint Kazakh-Russian cultural project — a monumentally scaled historical film that revolves around the figures of Russian Tsar Nicholas I and a Kazakh khan, Jahangir, around the time of the 1825 Decembrists’ revolt — is facing obstacles getting funding from Russian cultural authorities, while filming in Russia is due to begin in late fall of this year. |
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If you feel like getting away from it all — even for only a few hours — you can’t do much better than an afternoon or evening spent at Buddha Bar.
Both literally and figuratively worlds away from the rather bleak and unlovely stretch of embankment that it sits on, Buddha Bar is a destination in more ways than one. |
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 In the past 12 months Russia has seen a number of highly politicized trials – cases based on debatable evidence, conducted with questionable procedures, and invariably resulting in guilty verdicts.
The Pussy Riot trial, arising from the feminist punk collective’s performance of an anti-Putin protest song in a Moscow cathedral, sent two members of the group to a prison colony for two years on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. |
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 It’s lonely at the top. For a business executive, the higher up the corporate ladder you climb and the more critical your decisions become, the less likely you are to receive honest feedback and support. |
 At an employment interview at the Russian branch of one transnational company, candidates were asked what they thought an employee should do in case of fire. The answer that HR managers were looking for was “to follow the instructions.” The most common answer received, however, was “to put out the fire. |
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The question of salary is, as ever, the principal factor on which those looking for work in St. Petersburg base their choice company, according to an article published by HeadHunter, a recruitment agency. |
 A contingent workforce in Russia has become a hot topic and tops the list of the most discussed human resource issues in the country. What are the real benefits of a contingent workforce, and what are the best practices that should be taken into consideration? What value does it bring to the Russian market?
By definition, a contingent workforce is a provisional group of workers who work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, also known as freelancers, independent professionals, independent contractors or consultants. |
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 Finns used to say that the best sight in Stockholm was the 6 p.m. boat leaving for Helsinki. By the same token, it could be said today that the best sight in Finland is the Allegro leaving Helsinki station every morning at 9 a. |
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 Ida-Viru County, or Ida-Virumaa, a northeastern and somewhat overlooked part of this small yet extremely diverse Baltic country, can be an exciting adventure, even if the northern spring is late to arrive. And it is closer to St. Petersburg than the nearest Finnish city of Lappeenranta (163 km vs. 207 km), thus making it an even closer gateway to the European Union. |
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Issues Archive