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St. Petersburg environmentalists Thursday denied President Vladimir Putin’s allegation that foreign businesses pay environmental groups to lobby against certain projects, causing financial losses to Russia. Putin made the remarks at a meeting with human rights activists at the Kremlin on Wednesday and apparently referred to this happening in relation to a port in the Leningrad Oblast. Putin, who was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, could have been involved in such an undertaking. “We started building a port near Finland,” he said Wednesday in remarks quoted on the presidential web site. “Our partners, I know for sure, invested in the activity of environmental organizations, just to prevent the development of the project because it created competition to them in the Baltic. |
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EPHEMERAL IMAGE
ALEXANDER BELENKY / The St. Petersburg Times
The winning entry at the international sand sculpture festival at the Peter and Paul Fortress on Wednesday. The Czech sculptors called their creation "Pray for Humanity". |
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A vitamin-packed vegetable from the New World that has become a Russian national icon will get its own festival for the first time this weekend. The Old World’s first contact with potatoes came in 1537 when the Conquistadors found them in Peru. They did not arrive in Europe until about 1570, but people were not at first attracted to them and it was not until 1780 that they gained widespread popularity.
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If it’s a nice sunny day and you think it might be fun to go out and play on the grass, don’t — at least not if you are not white. That’s the advice Korean student Jae Myong Shin and four friends, both foreign and Russian, have after being detained for three hours by police on July 7 for playing frisbee on the grass of the Field of Mars. |
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British Ambassador Tony Brenton was robbed of his wallet and his wife was slightly injured in an attack in central St. Petersburg, Interfax and Itar-Tass reported Thursday. |
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No Invite to Estonia ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Five-day Estonian visas could be available without having to obtain an invitation starting next year, Fontanka.ru reported Tuesday, quoting the Russian Union of Tour Operators. According to amendments to a law under discussion in the Estonian parliament, visitors would be required only to have enough money to pay for their stay in the country and their return. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Bribery is on the rise, with businesses and individuals forking out $319 billion per year to bureaucrats, police, educators and doctors, according to a study released Wednesday. However, people are gradually growing more reluctant to pay bribes, it said. Bureaucrats and other state-paid employees are putting growing pressure on people to pay bribes, despite well-publicized efforts by the Kremlin to crack down on corruption, according to the two-year study by Indem, an anti-corruption think tank, and Romir Monitoring. “The stable growth of corruption is provided by the extra pressure that the authorities are putting on ordinary people to make them pay bribes,” Indem president Georgy Satarov said at a news conference. |
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ALEXANDER BELENKY / The St. Petersburg Times
A group of enthusiasts on Tuesday dig around the old cannon barrel that bears the point once in a network used to make maps. |
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A rare geodesic point near St. Petersburg that played a key role in the mapping of Russia as railways and roads were laid in the 19th century was rescued by a group of enthusiasts this week. The keeper of exact geodesy coordinates — marked on a buried cannon — was put in a 40-ton shell of concrete and iron, which like an Egyptian pyramid hides the geodesic mystery from the uninitiated.
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Peter Statue at Pulkovo? ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The council of the St. Petersburg League of Nationalities has suggested the Peter the Great statue given to the city by sculptor Zurab Tseriteli should be mounted outside Pulkovo 1 airport, Rosbalt reported Monday. “All travelers who come to our city by train through Moskovsky railway station are met by a splendid statue of Peter the Great,” the league was quoted as saying in a letter to Governor Valentina Matviyenko. |
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MOSCOW — Business leaders gathered Wednesday for an unprecedented public discussion on how to harness their libidos to maximize profits. Between jokes and rounds of giggles, some 30 dapper entrepreneurs also raised the possibility that President Vladimir Putin’s power vertical is a sign of repressed sexuality. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court removed the final roadblock to a possible Gazprom buyout of Sibneft on Wednesday when it handed full control of Sibneft back to a group of shareholders led by Roman Abramovich. |
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Geoilbent Split Agreed MOSCOW(Bloomberg) — LUKoil and Russneft agreed to split the ownership of Geoilbent, a Siberian oil venture LUKoil has sought control of since June, Kommersant reported, without saying where it got the information. LUKoil’s purchase of 66 percent of the oil company was challenged in three Russian courts by a Russneft unit that claimed priority rights to the stake, and by individual investors, Kommersant reported. |
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Hoping to increase their competitiveness on the global market, four European business schools have joined forces to offer a unified program through St. |
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The world’s fourth-largest truck and bus manufacturer Scania AB plans to seize initiative on the Russian auto market. Scania will build its second Russian bus plant in the Leningrad Oblast and may follow that with a truck factory, the Oblast’s economy and investment committee press-service said Tuesday in a statement. |
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CIT Changes Name ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City-based fund manager Creative Investment Technologies has changed its official name to CIT Finance, the company said this week in a statement. |
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Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov is a remarkably open and sincere person. It makes you wonder how he ever served as an intelligence agent. He was ordered to strengthen relations with NATO, and he has done all he could to accomplish this task. Once every six months, smiling till it hurts, he meets with NATO defense ministers, signs cooperation agreements and observes joint military exercises intended to develop operational interoperability between Russian and NATO troops. |
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Arriving in Moscow by train early Tuesday morning I overheard quite a common, but very up-to-date question that my neighbor had asked of a women sitting in front of him. |
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 Finalnd’s Savonlinna Opera Festival, one of the oldest in Europe, running until Aug. 7, opened earlier this month with an opera set in the ancient Russian capital Veliky Novgorod, 300 kilometers south of St. Petersburg. “Set in a land of forests, the opera tells about complicated human relationships and confrontations between people and regimes, from slavery right up to the league of free nations dwelling in the forest,” said librettist Paavo Haavikko of the opera, “The Horseman,” which he created with composer Aulis Sallinen. |
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The New York Times Like some mighty machine, clanking and groaning, the Bolshoi Ballet lumbered into the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday night, its first visit in 18 years to the home it used to haunt, at the old Met and the new, from 1959 through the 1970’s. |
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American guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, will return to the city to perform one of his most famous works, the soundtrack to the 1920 German silent film, “The Golem” (“Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam”). Recently released on DVD, the work premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 1989. Set in the 16th-century Prague, the expressionist film was directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener and is considered an early horror classic. Lucas performed in St. Petersburg at the SKIF festival last year as a solo guitarist. “I have been called a ‘guitarist of 1000 ideas’ by The New York Times and in truth resemble a one-man space orchestra navigating the cosmos,” wrote Lucas in an email exchange with The St. |
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 In a disappointing setback for the St. Petersburg band La Minor, its Western European tour with concerts planned for Germany and the Netherlands in July and August, scheduled to start this Wednesday, has been postponed. |
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The autobiography of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, “My Life,” has come out in Russian translation under the title “Moya Zhizn.” The book describes exactly what’s lacking in Russian politics, such as the recognition that election campaigns aren’t a waste of time and money, but a way for the voters to express their will. |
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It said to be the worst habit of the self-aggrandizing pseud: picking up the memoirs of a famous figure and flicking to the index to see if he or she get a mention. |
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Malibu Taco 36 1-aya Liniya, Vasilyevsky Island. Tel. 328 0171 Open 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Menu in Russian and with explanatory photographs Cash only. Lunch for two with beer 729 rubles ($25) Whether it is nostalgia or novelty, Malibu Taco is honest about what it serves: the Californian version of Mexican cuisine. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian Premier League has suggested canceling its traditional summer season in order to bring its schedule in line with that of European soccer, which starts in the fall and ends in spring, Sport-Express reported Wednesday. The new format, which the premier league has been mulling over for years, will start in fall 2006 if approved. |
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Issues Archive