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The future of the studio assigned to Mitki, a group of St. Petersburg artists, was left hanging in the air after a hearing in the Kuibyshevsky district court, scheduled for Monday, was postponed until July 18. Mitki face eviction from their spacious studio at 16 Ulitsa Pravdy. They have rented the studio since 1996 when former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak assigned it to them. The court is to decide if the privatization of part of the attic that the Mitki artists use was legal. The studios occupy 193 square meters of the attic, and the art center takes up the remaining 200 square meters. Mitki, like many other artists assigned city-owned property, pay a rental well below market prices. In addition, the group does not have rights to the entire attic, because Sobchak assigned them only part of it. |
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NATASHA DANCHENKOVA / For The St. Petersburg Times
Rosy Donation Baroness Clotilde von Rintelen and Yury Linets, chief doctor at the Nikolayevsky hospital at Peterhof, about to plant some 300 rose bushes donated to the hospital on Monday |
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MOSCOW — Less than two weeks ago, most people in Russia had never heard of Live 8. But as hundreds of thousands watched concerts in eight other cities around the world, up to 60,000 people gathered in the shadow of St. Basil’s Cathedral to see the Pet Shop Boys headline the Moscow concert. Moscow was a late addition to the series of Live 8 concerts after organizers seemingly forgot that Russia was a member of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
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The St. Petersburg branch of the Yabloko party is defending its reputation in a legal battle with Vadim Tyulpanov, the speaker of the city’s Legislative Assembly and head of the Kremlin-loyal United Russia party. The dispute is based on comments by Tyulpanov that Yabloko had paid participants in a protest outside the Legislative Assembly against the replacement of in-kind benefits with cash. |
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Ivannikova Retrial MOSCOW (SPT) — The Moscow City Court on Monday overturned the murder conviction of a woman on the grounds that she acted in self-defense against a man who was trying to rape her, RIA-Novosti reported Monday. |
All photos from issue.
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The St. Petersburg Music Hall says it will appeal against a Moscow Arbitration Court ruling that said it must pay the producers of musical “Nord-Ost” about 10 million rubles ($350,000), the theater’s director, Alexander Platunov, said Monday. The award was made for the Music Hall breaching its contract with the production company to stage the musical, which was at the center of a Moscow hostage crisis in 2002. |
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German Baroness Clotilde von Rintelen, great greatgranddaughter of Russia’s national poet Alexander Pushkin, on Monday brought 300 rose bushes to be planted at Peterhof. |
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The State Russian Museum is facing imminent temporary closure because it is operating without its charter having been ratified. Museum director Vladimir Gusev said last week that because the organization hasn’t registered a charter, its bank accounts could be frozen and federal funding promptly stopped. |
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MOSCOW — The liberal-minded owners of Ren-TV, the last national television channel that offers critical news coverage, have sold a controlling stake to Kremlin-friendly steel giant Severstal, raising the specter of total state control over the country’s television airwaves. |
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Governor’s Rating Up ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburgers’ trust in Governor Valentina Matviyenko grew 6 percentage points in June, Interfax reported Friday, quoting a survey by the Agency of Social Information last month. Forty-six percent of respondents said they trust the governor, while in May the comparable figure was only 40 percent. |
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LONDON — Boris Berezovsky has for the first time disclosed how much he earned from selling his vast Russian holdings, as the self-exiled oligarch prepares a lawsuit against his former protege, Roman Abramovich. |
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MOSCOW — Media International Group, a holding owned by Ukrainian businessman Vadim Rabinovich, said Sunday that it had purchased 100 percent of the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper from Yukos investor Leonid Nevzlin, Interfax-Ukraine reported. Moskovskiye Novosti spokeswoman Tatyana Blinova said Friday that Nevzlin had sold the newspaper to a media company earlier in the week, but declined to identify it. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow region court on Thursday found airport police Captain Mikhail Artamonov guilty of negligence in the deaths of 90 people in the suicide bombings of two planes last August and sentenced him to seven years in prison, Interfax reported. |
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 MOSCOW — Moscow State University rejected the application of a young woman after her brother, masquerading as a woman, was caught trying to take an entrance exam for her Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Some concerts get canceled due to slow ticket sales, bad weather or stars crying off sick, but a planned rock concert in Chechnya was called off a day before it was due to take place because of security concerns. Chechen Prime Minister Sergei Abramov said Monday in Grozny that the “Phoenix: Return to Life” concert planned for Tuesday would be postponed until September, Interfax reported, as organizers said they had been advised by military officials to call off the concert. |
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Q2 Capital Outflow MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian private capital outflow totaled $5.5 billion in the second quarter of the year, Central Bank said. Russians withdrew $200 million from the country in the first quarter of the year, the bank said. The net capital outflow is expected to decrease to between $5 billion and $7 billion in 2005, from $8 billion in 2004, because Russia is dedicated to improving the business climate, including lowering taxes, Andrei Klepach, head of macroeconomic forecasts at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, said in June. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is reportedly in talks to upgrade three Iranian submarines, a $270 million deal that could revive the bilateral arms trade but further irritate the United States. |
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MOSCOW — Would you trust a stranger in a train to look after your bag while you run to the toilet? Probably not if you’re Russian. Seventy percent of people in Russia believe “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people” — while only a quarter agree that “generally most people can be trusted,” according to a poll of 1,500 Russians conducted by Bashkirova & Partners market research firm last month. |
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The impact of St. Petersburg’s small and medium-sized business on the gross domestic product has decreased from 10 percent to 5 percent last year, Oksana Dmitriyeva, State Duma deputy, said last week at a round table. |
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In yet another thought-provoking business venture since quitting his directorship at the city-based Baltika brewery, Timur Bolloyev has initiated a mutual fund that will invest specifically in social infrastructure in the Northwest. To add to the city’s uniform-making factory Trud, of which Bolloyev acquired a controlling share packet earlier this year, the former head of Baltika has gathered over 200 private and company investors and a sum total of 280 million rubles ($10 million) in the country’s first investment fund which targets construction of leisure and social facilities. |
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Breaking Pulkovo airline’s monopoly on the St. Petersburg-Cyprus route, the sunny isle’s air carrier Eurocypria finally launched its Russian operations last Friday. |
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The largest Russian producer of oil-seed and grease substitutes, St. Petersburg-based Soyuz, will invest $20 million into expanding its Kaliningrad plant, the firm’s head said Friday, Interfax reported. A new container sea-line between St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad will be used to transport the products. |
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The new Japanese Consul General in St. Petersburg, Takuo Kidokoro, 59, says the main goal of a diplomat is to understand why people of another nation act or live differently. |
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MOSCOW — Russians bought 225,000 new foreign cars in the first half of this year, compared with 280,000 sold in all of 2004, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The global consultancy firm said that Russia’s automotive production would grow by 45 percent by 2008, making the country the world’s fastest-growing car market after China. |
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MOSCOW — Top Kremlin officials with links to the military and to intelligence agencies are fighting for control over the choicest pieces of the Russian economy, and the battle looks likely to escalate, according to a new report by the Center for Current Politics in Russia. |
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To read the papers, you would think Russia had reverted to communism, renationalized its industries and caused foreign businessmen to panic and run for the borders. |
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Last month, the government announced that it had acquired a controlling stake in Russia’s largest company, the natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Skeptics in some quarters maintain that the deal is far from complete. But let’s assume that on June 23, 2005, the citizens of Russia really did take ownership of a controlling stake in Gazprom. |
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It is already possible to envisage the communique emanating from the Group of Eight summit at Gleneagles on Wednesday to Friday. No doubt there will be congratulatory chest-beating on the progress made in debt relief for Africa and for increased pledges of foreign aid. |
 Today I want to comment on the publication last Monday in Izvestia of the “address of cultural, scientific and community leaders in connection with the sentence received by the former managers of Yukos.” The first thing that comes to mind is this: the publication is just the latest sham of Russian society, concocted in the spirit of the anonymous letters that used to be written against Soviet dissidents. |
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This week, President George W. Bush gave a big speech “explaining” the Iraq war to the American people. It was the usual load of lying blather and false piety — deeply, even murderously cynical. |
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SINGAPORE — Royalty is in residence and world leaders will be wheeling around the polished salons and marble halls of Singapore’s opulent Raffles complex. Welcome to the 2012 Olympic Games host city vote. Lobbying is feverish in this steamy city-state on the tip of the Malaysian peninsula as hyperbole, brinkmanship and paranoia reign. |
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Issues Archive