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The number of visitors to St. Petersburg this summer are 30 percent down on last year and experts are predicting a further decline next year, a Russian Tourism Industry Union poll, or RST, has found. The RST polled 115 city tour operators, which reported an average 30-percent decline in foreign and Russian visitors. “The poll’s participants provided very different statistics, with the figures on the drop in foreign tourists varying from 15 percent to 60 percent, but most respondents said the flow has reduced by a third,” Tatyana Demeneva, spokeswoman for the RST in St. Petersburg, said Thursday. The Peter and Paul Fortress Museum independently counted its visitors in May, June, July and suggested the decline is less severe, only 12.8 percent compared to last year. |
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HEAVENS ABOVE
Viktor Korotayev / Reuters
Sukhoi Su-27 jets of the Russkiye Vityazy stunt team fly in formation above a church during the MAKS-2005 international air show in Zhukovsky near Moscow on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — The Cabinet on Thursday approved a draft of its 2006 budget, giving the go-ahead for the biggest increase in public spending since the August 1998 economic meltdown. Public spending will increase by around 50 percent next year, as the government seeks to target those less well off, including the country’s senior citizens, who will see their pensions more than double.
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The assassins and those who paid them to kill St. Petersburg Vice-Governor Mikhail Manevich in 1997 are known and will soon be brutally punished, Anatoly Chubais, head of national power grid United Energy Systems, said on the eighth anniversary of Manevich’s slaying on Thursday. |
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Activist Arrested ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Alexander Vtulkin, a radical activist with the Russian Republic organization, for whom international and federal search warrants were issued after he threatened to kill St. |
All photos from issue.
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Yury Belyayev, head of the Party of Liberty, has been charged with inciting national, racial and religious hatred after prosecutors handed the results of a criminal investigation to the city court on Monday, local media reported. The City Prosecutor’s Office could not be reached for comment. The charges relate to articles Belyayev wrote for newspaper “Nash Narodny Nablyudatel” in 2004, which is distributed nationwide and on the web. The leader of the Party of Liberty, who until 1993 was a member of the St. Petersburg police department, was convicted in February 1996 of inciting national hatred and organizing mass public disorder. He was sentenced to a year in prison, but was released in the courtroom because of an amnesty marking the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. |
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German Orlov / For The St. Petersburg Times
U.S. Consul General Mary Kruger at AmCham’s July 4 celebration in St. Petersburg. |
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The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957 had a powerful effect on the life of Mary Kruger, the new U.S. Consul General in St. Petersburg. “When Sputnik was launched, people in the United States were both surprised and fearful of the Soviet Union, which made me very interested in this country,” she said Wednesday in an interview.
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The St. Petersburg city court on Wednesday sent the criminal case against two suspects charged over their alleged role in the assassination of State Duma lawmaker Galina Starovoitova in 1998 back to the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office saying that the charge against one defendant was incorrectly laid. |
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42 Bombs Dug Up ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Forty-two World War II bombs were dug up on a building site in the city’s Primorsky district this week and were taken to a military range to be destroyed, Interfax reported Wednesday. |
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Swiss-based oil trader Glencore has bought into Russia's Russneft, the fastest-growing player in the world's No. 2 crude exporter, branching out of its core trading business to invest in a company it helped create. "Glencore through its subsidiaries has entered into the Russian upstream market with its strategic partner Russneft, with ownership in a diversified portfolio of oil producing assets," Glencore's web site said. |
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MOSCOW — One of the authors of a new textbook that encourages budding lawyers to be aggressive in minimizing taxes for corporate clients is none other than the head of the Federal Tax Service, Anatoly Serdyukov, Vedomosti reported Thursday. |
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Locked in a 10-year dispute over rights, dockers at St. Petersburg Sea Port will begin an indefinite strike starting August 30, in the process causing million-dollar losses to a metals firm that represents one of the port’s core shareholders. “We will start by ceasing to handle cargo from Novolipetsk Metal Factory,” Alexander Petrov, deputy head of the Russian Trade Union’s port committee said Wednesday at a press briefing. |
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Swedish construction concern Skanska AB sold its St. Petersburg subsidiary Skanska Stroi for an undisclosed sum, business daily Delovoi Petersburg reported this week. |
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The Leningrad Oblast has turned creative in regard to income tax payments. The region plans to collect the tax not through the workplace, but through a person’s place of residence, the Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov said Tuesday in a statement. Currently, areas of the Oblast where there is a high concentration of large companies earn higher budget revenues to spend on utilities and general improvements, putting mainly residential parts at a disadvantage. |
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Consolidation of Russia’s beer market has entered its final phase of acquisitions. This week, Heineken snapped up Cyprus-registered Ivan Taranov Brewery (PIT) for an undisclosed sum, while Vedomosti reported that beer giants Efes and SABMiller launched rival bids for one of Russia’s last independents, the Krasny Vostok brewery. |
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Yevroset Rings Short MOSCOW (SPT) — Yevroset, Russia's largest retailer of cell phones, is buying phones at retail outlets of its competitors, amid concerns over a possible cell phone shortage, Gazeta.ru newspaper reported Thursday. Yevroset declined to comment, but the retailer's competitor Svyaznoi and other retailers confirmed Yevroset has been buying phones from them this week, Gazeta. |
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Politicians and the media have suddenly realized that there are young people in Russia. Not a week goes by without some announcement of a new endeavor that has been cooked up by the opposition or supporters of the current regime to attract and educate Russia’s youth. |
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Military casualties in wars are regrettable, but deaths must be expected. For instance, in Iraq almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died since the war started in March 2003. |
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MOSCOW — It’s a typical Moscow night. Our hero, Anton, has just drunk a glassful of warm, thick pig’s blood (an unpleasant but necessary preparation for hunting vampires). Then he gets stopped by one of the beefy policemen who are the scourge of every Muscovite who has ever ventured into the streets fueled by a shot of something strong – and that would be quite a few. |
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Sceptic Jazz, a German band that describes its style as “garage-trashpunk,” promises to be a good option this weekend, judging by the five-song EP it released available from its website. |
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A new exhibition running in the Benois Wing of the State Russian Museum until Sept. 12, “ARCHIVazhny Avant-garde,” unveils hidden treasures of Russian art, which had spent decades locked in well-guarded Soviet archives. The show, assembled from the collection of the federal State Archive of Art and Literature, displays an array of original masterpieces, which until now have been inaccessible — not only to the general public but even to many art historians and experts. |
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The Russian North was not only a bustling trading zone in pre-industrial times, but also developed its own architectural forms based on wood. Its decline thereafter helped preserve them. |
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This week St. Petersburg is celebrating an art form not readily associated with Russia — barbershop singing. Concert halls and streets will for six days resound to the jovial harmonies of this distinctly American style of singing at the Sixth International Barbershop Harmony Festival. |
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There are two explanations for the word “Nagual.” In books by Carlos Castaneda about Native American Shamanism we find it interpreted as “sorcerer.” In Aztec mythology it means “the god of sun and happiness. |
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Greek Crash ‘Peculiar’ ATHENS (Reuters) — Cyprus’ president said Wednesday the weekend crash of a Cypriot airliner was “peculiar” with only one precedent, indirectly suggesting a link to U.S. golfer Payne Stewart’s similar plane death six years ago. President Tassos Papadopoulos did not name the 1999 Learjet crash that killed Stewart and five others as the precedent in question, but Greek authorities have consistently highlighted it as their only known close comparison to Sunday’s crash. |
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RIGA, Latvia — Russia huffed and puffed to an unimpressive 1-1 draw against Latvia in Riga on Wednesday, drastically reducing its already slim chances of qualifying for next year’s World Cup in Germany as it failed to impress against a motivated Baltic side. The game, partly overshadowed by tense political relations between the two former Soviet nations, sparked more passion off the field than on. |
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Issues Archive