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Governor Valentina Matviyenko painted a rosy picture of St. Petersburg in her annual address, saying she would like to see it as a prosperous European city in which the incomes of its citizens grow steadily. In her second address delivered to the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, Matviyenko ignored the fact that official statistics show that the strengthening ruble and rising inflation slowed income growth in 2004. |
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As the world mourned the death of Pope John Paul II, hundreds of people came to Catholic churches in Russia - a place he could never visit - to pay their respects. |
 A concert called "Pitersky Maidan" (St. Petersburg's Maidan) featuring top Russian and Ukrainian bands, which had been scheduled to take place Sunday has been canceled for political reasons, claims its promoter. But there may be more to the story than meets the eye. |
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MOSCOW - A rift among national power brokers threatens the country with disintegration that could have even more violent consequences than the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kremlin chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev warned in a wide-ranging interview published Monday. |
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Nonconformist artistic group Mitki, famous for their blue-and-white striped sailor shirts, faces losing its studio this month. The group has about 15 members who use the studios, and has been running since the early 1980s. The striped shirts are not only worn by members, but are also a central feature of their art works. |
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Young and exciting Mariinsky contralto Yekaterina Semenchuk is to sing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. The singer will perform Gretchaninov's "The Symbol of Faith" at a church blessing, following the civil wedding next Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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On the orders of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, the City Prosecutor's Office has launched a campaign to stop the police from reporting misleading crime statistics. Ustinov last month confirmed that law enforcement bodies' official records are extremely far from reality. |
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City Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev on Wednesday announced that the murders of two foreigners last year have been solved, and has stated unequivocally that the motive was racial hatred. |
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MOSCOW - Moskovskiye Novosti's supervisory board has urged that Yevgeny Kiselyov hand over his post as editor to fired deputy editor Lyudmila Telen but retain his position as the newspaper's general director to resolve a bitter labor dispute, a board member said Monday. |
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International students of diplomacy took part in a simulated United Nations in St. Petersburg this week, and although the sessions were staged, the subjects were pressing and participants hope the resolutions will help the UN. |
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Starovoitova Sentences ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Deputy city prosecutor Alexander Korsunov on Monday called for sentences of betwen 4 1/2 years and life for those on trial for their roles in the murder of State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, Interfax reported. |
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All foreign businesses operating in Russia may soon be forced to translate their names into Russian or pick a more Russian-sounding word equivalent, according to a leaked report to be put before the Duma on Friday. |
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MOSCOW - After spending a day in court watching cartoons, a Moscow judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit brought against RenTV for broadcasting two American programs that the plaintiff said had piqued his young son's interest in cocaine and prompted the child to insult his mother. |
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MOSCOW - Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was shot by an aide at his request to avoid being captured alive, Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said Friday, in a remarkable departure from the previous official version of Maskhadov's death. |
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Prince Andrew to Visit ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Britain's Prince Andrew will visit Murmansk for 60th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany in early May, Interfax reported last week citing the regional administration. The prince is to spend three days in the region together with British veterans of the World War II arctic convoys. |
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MOSCOW - A Moscow City Court judge on Wednesday sentenced former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin to 20 years in prison on charges of double murder and conspiracy to commit murder, rejecting a prosecution demand for life imprisonment. |
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MOSCOW - A group of some of Russia's biggest media organizations plans to donate $200 million worth of cash, airtime and column inches to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in a three-year campaign to halt the spread of infection in the country, Gazprom Media said last Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - About 5,000 people, including former world chess champion Boris Spassky, have signed a letter asking prosecutors to ban Jewish organizations because they believe one of the basic Judaic books professes religious hatred, according to a center that monitors religious freedom. |
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Surkov: No Amendments MOSCOW (SPT) - The deputy head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov told journalists Tuesday that he is against any changes to the Constitution and Russia becoming a parliamentary republic. Rumors about amending the Constitution to allow President Vladimir Putin to stay in power after his second term expires have been strong in recent months. |
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Four years ago, when Zhenya Anisimova, then aged five, arrived at the SOS Children's Village for abandoned children near the town of Pushkin, she talked only to herself and a TV set. |
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 The vexing question of the continued development of St. Petersburg's tourism sector was raised once more at this year's ITB international tourism fair in Berlin last month. Nikita Savoyarov was there. BERLIN - St. Petersburg's top tourist official warned that there could be a 25 percent decrease in the number of foreign tourists visiting the city if its hotels keep putting up their rates. |
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Gazprom will invest over 560 million rubles ($20 million) in repairing and renovating St. Petersburg's heating energy networks in 2005, according to an agreement signed Tuesday by Alexei Miller, head of the gas giant, and St. |
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MOSCOW - More than half the country's insurers may have to change their names within three months or face the possibility of losing their licenses. In an effort to crack down on fraud, a provision in the recent insurance law will make it illegal for insurance companies to repeat "full or partial" components of competitors' names starting on July 17. |
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Russian business owners have a different view to their foreign counterparts of what a financially transparent company is, experts said Thursday at a seminar. |
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City Hall on Tuesday sold its 60-percent stake in the three-star Oktyabrskaya Hotel at auction for $49.6 million, about four times the starting price. The winning bid came from Severnaya Stolitsa, which is reported to be related to the Alfa-Eko investment company, part of Alfa Group. |
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Japan Tobacco Inc.'s St. Petersburg plant Petro may have to halt production as early as this week after tax authorities froze some of its bank accounts, business daily Kommersant said Monday, citing company spokesman Vadim Botsan-Kharchenko. |
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The safety and quality of housing in St. Petersburg is being put at risk because a quarter of the city's construction companies break the law, a city official said Monday. "One in four construction companies in St. Petersburg builds houses in breach of the law, thus jeopardizing their quality and safety," web site Nevastroika quoted Alexander Ort, head of the city's construction permit and inspection agency, as saying in an interview. |
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New EBRD Office Head ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Tetsuya Uchida has been appointed head of the St. Petersburg office of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. |
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A trade mission organized by the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce to the Arkhangelsk region late last month was a success, said Dan Kearvell, director of St. Petersburg and Northwest Russia branch of the chamber. One deal was signed and more are expected to follow, he said, but declined to release details on the basis of commercial confidentiality. |
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Oil Output Rises Moscow (Bloomberg) - Russia pumped 3.5 percent more oil in the first three months of this year than it did in the same period last year, the Industry and Energy Ministry's Central Dispatch Administration reported on its web site Monday. |
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Hyundai Made in Russia MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest carmaker, will start making trucks in Russia in May, Interfax reported, citing the chairman of the company that will assemble the vehicles. "The production area for this project has already been prepared and the first 3,000 assembly kits of various models have already been purchased from the South Korean producer,'' ZAO Avtotor Chairman Vladimir Shcherbakov said, the news service reported. |
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When he was 11 years old Jari Angesleva, a businessman from Finland who today works in St. Petersburg, was at a youth camp where he burned the shoes of a famous Finnish communist who has since been buried in the Kremlin Wall. |
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Expectations have been running high for years that Russia will be flooded by foreign architects looking for work beyond the stagnant European construction market. However, despite the many ambitious plans by foreign architects around the country, local architects have maintained a monopoly and few projects have been realized. |
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Business centers have become one of the fastest growing sectors of the local real estate market. More than 200 complexes are functioning in the city with around 100,000 square meters of office space added in 2004. |
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Late last month, at the start of a meeting in the Kremlin with business leaders, President Vladimir Putin came out with an important initiative on property rights: to reduce the Civil Code's statute of limitations on privatizations - that is, the period after a privatization deal in which it can be legally challenged - from the existing 10 years to three years. |
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The story of one Helmut Trienekens, a man who made millions from garbage, is astonishingly similar to many other stories of corruption in the sphere of community services all over the world. |
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Unlike Poland and the Baltic states, Russia lacks a key source of soft power: a united body of ethnic expatriates who can be relied on to support the mother country's policies in places like Washington. But this could change in the very near future. Moscow may bring into its sphere of influence what used to be a key ideological base for the Kremlin's emigre foes, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, or ROCOR. |
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The Prosecutor General's Office acts like a lazy worker who, after his employers tell him to do something, does everything possible to avoid it. At least this is how prosecutors behaved in response to calls to act against newspapers that regularly publish articles insulting certain nationalities. |
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The Sakharov Museum director and his assistant were convicted not only of violating the rights of radical Orthodox believers not to have anyone anywhere challenge their views, but also of "insulting the dignity of the Russian people," as the judge put it at Monday's sentencing. |
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A priest who was at the Vatican II council 40 years ago recalls, "I remember raising my head and thinking, 'Who is that prophet?' "The speaker who had caught his attention was a Polish prelate named Karol Wojtyla, and his subject was a proposed declaration renouncing the ancient accusation of enduring Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. |
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The City Charter Court recently declared illegal the way that the administration of the city was made the administration of the governor. Behind this game with words, however, is hidden a very important event - a revolution in administration created by the first point of an order issued by the city government on Nov. |
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Today we take up the case of Murat Kurnaz, one of the thousands of innocent captives held illegally in the belly of the new American beast: U.S. President George W. |
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 Nikolai Makarov is trying to save the world - one film at a time. The St. Petersburg-based documentary filmmaker creates films that give voice to little-known and often misunderstood communities in Russia, such as the blind and the deaf. His latest movie "Ya Glukhoi" ("I am Deaf") premiered recently at Dom Kino to critical accolades and a rousing and emotional response from the audience. |
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The Prodigy returns to St. Petersburg this week. The British dance veterans were first seen in St. Petersburg in the form of the Jilted Generation, which was actually a tribute band that cunning local promoters tried to sell as the real thing in 1998. |
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Childhood days when we had fondue were always something special. The whole family gathered around the shining silver pot, waiting for the oil to heat up. Each of us was armed with two skewers with which to fry pieces of pork or lamb to eat with various sauces, salad, and toasted bread. Having fondue was a real feast for all the senses. When two of my friends and I visited La Fondue on Dvortsovaya Neberezhnaya not far from the Winter Palace over looking the River Neva, it was also supposed to be a special evening. The restaurant's interior is absolutely stunning. High walls are painted in a fresh rose color, with white net curtains elegantly draped around the windows. |
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 Action pictures are probably one of the hardest movies to nail at this point in history. All right, the requirements are few - a hero plus plenty of action - but so much has already been done in the genre and cliches lurk around every corner, wearing sunglasses and touting berettas in each hand. |
 When U.S. President George W. Bush read Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy" last fall, he liked it so much that he circulated it among his colleagues and invited the author to the Oval Office for a chat. Public attention quickly zeroed in on the diminutive Ukrainian-born mathematician who had devoted himself to the Jewish refusenik struggle in the Soviet Union after being denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973. |
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You may never see these videos on MTV, but this weekend Petersburgers have the chance to view rarely-seen clips by local and national artists at the second annual Kinorock festival at Stary Dom. |
 At the Fifth International Ballet Festival, currently in full swing at the Mariinsky Theater, modern choreography takes the center stage. The event, showcasing performances of works by William Forsythe, Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine, opened on March 24 with a world premiere of a ballet by prominent British choreographer David Dawson. |
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A new ballet based loosely on Leo Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina" premieres at the St. Petersburg Conservatory on April 1 and 2. Well-known St. |
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COPENHAGEN - Social issues remain the major human rights problems in Russia, Vladimir Lukin, the federal ombudsman for human rights, said Thursday. "The problems of pensioners, delayed payments, breaches by private entrepreneurs of labor laws against their employees, the problems of working migrants, army conscripts' lack of rights - such complaints make up 50 percent of all complaints that the Ombudsman's Office receives," Lukin said in an interview. |
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A decade ago professional basketball players in Russia were about as confident as striking miners that they would receive their salaries. But thanks to backing from big business, regional politicians and the Federal Security Service, top Russian clubs this season are awash in cash and readily paying top dollar to some of the best players in Europe. |
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Mets' Galarraga Retires NEW YORK (AP) - Andres Galarraga overcame non-Hodgkin's lymphoma twice in five years to prolong his stellar career. When he thought he wasn't reaching his usual standards, he retired - even though he was only one home run shy of 400. |
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Syria to Withdraw BEIRUT (Reuters) - The second and final phase of Syria's troop withdrawal from Lebanon will start Thursday and conclude as announced by April 30, a Lebanese military source said Monday. |
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The newly-elected president of the Russian Football Union, Vitaly Mutko, received the resignation of long-serving Russian national coach Georgy Yartsev on Monday, the Interfax news agency reported. Mutko previously expressed his intention to replace Yartsev and didn't rule out the idea of hiring a coach from outside Russia. |
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