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“He is either demonized or deified and my mission is to try and make his image look more human, more normal, if you like,” says Laurence Huot-Solovieff, 62, one of the four great-grandchildren of Grigory Rasputin to come from his legal marriage, and the only of his surviving descendants to have traveled to Russia. Interviewed in St. Petersburg’s Astoria hotel on Monday, Huot-Solovieff, who grew up in France, put the wild-eyed mystic who some felt ruled the country during World War I in a positive light. Rasputin had gained the confidence of Tsarina Alexandra because he could soothe the ailing Tsarevich Alexis. This ability gained him access to and influence with the family of the last tsar, Nicholas II. It also generated hatred among courtiers, who plotted his demise and eventually murdered him. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Laurence Huot-Solovieff, Rasputin’s great-granddaughter, in St. Petersburg on Monday. Inset is a photograph of her ancestor. |
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BESLAN, North Ossetia — The boys were wearing formal black suits, the girls their best blue uniforms, snow-white aprons and hair ribbons. Many brought flowers for their teachers. It could have been the first day of school in any provincial Russian town — but for the metal detectors, and the hordes of policemen and television journalists. Those guarding Beslan’s schools and recording the day almost outnumbered the few former students of School No.
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Matviyenko Oversees ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko has taken personal control over the investigation of the murder of a pedestrian who was beaten to death with a baseball bat, Interfax said Monday. “This terrible crime received public resonance and it should not go unpunished,” Matviyenko said. |
All photos from issue.
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The Commission on Safety Traffic supervised by the city’s governor will this month begin large-scale inspections of the city’s tourist buses. The city administration decided to start the inspections after a collision a month ago in which a 69-year-old German woman died and 19 other German and Dutch tourists, who were with her in a tourist bus touring St. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s new naval chief vowed on Monday to boost discipline and provide better leadership in the accident-prone navy, a day after his appointment by President Vladimir Putin. |
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An initiative to mobilize the enthusiasm of young people to clean up litter-strewn beaches in the Leningrad Oblast was marred by official stubbornness and bad weather but was still a success to make some beaches cleaner. Two activists Rostislav Popov and Nikolai Yevdokimov developed the idea of getting young people to clean up the beaches hoping to attract a large crowd of young people to clean up the beaches accompanied by music and sunshine. |
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MOSCOW — At a meeting on Friday with mothers of children killed in the Beslan school a year ago, President Vladimir Putin promised a thorough investigation into how the crisis was handled, but told them Russia was unable to protect its citizens against terrorism. |
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BESLAN, North Ossetia — Inside the gym, next to a carpet of fresh carnations, roses and lilies, the black-clad women wept, their faces showing exhaustion from three tearful days of keeping vigil at the place where their children died. Their anguished sobs were the only sounds to pierce the silence that engulfed Beslan and all of North Ossetia at 1:05 p. |
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BESLAN — Borik Rubayev had lived with his aunt, whom he calls mama, for five years before his parents died in the Beslan school tragedy. On Friday, court marshals, acting on behalf of his grandparents, came to take him away. |
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UNICEF A UNICEF photography workshop for the children of Beslan turned into an extraordinary period of rehabilitation and rejuvenation. The children’s photographs were of such high quality that the Beslan authorities opened an exhibition of their work as part of the commemoration of the first anniversary of the siege of School No. |
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Geos corporation, one of Japan’s largest private language schools with 510 branches in Japan alone, plans to enter the St. Petersburg market as part of a general expansion into Russia, the company said Friday. The corporation opened a marketing office, Geos International Russia, in Moscow last month and plan to launch another office “soon,” Kaoru Yamashita, spokeswoman for Geos in Tokyo, said in an e-mail. |
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FRANKFURT — Gas firm Gazprom, German utility E.On and Wintershall, a unit of German chemical maker BASF, will sign a deal on Thursday to build a Baltic Sea pipeline, sources said. |
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By the end of the year the communal services of a quarter of St. Petersburg housing stock will pass into the hands of private companies, City Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Saturday, Interfax reported. “Our goal is to create Property Owners Associations. |
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Russian Railways Co. is postponing the signing of a 1.5 billion-euro contract with Siemens on a joint high-speed rail project, presenting the German engineering giant with its second major setback in Russia this year. |
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Reforms to create a competitive marketplace for Russian electricity are on track but key decisions still have to be taken on allocating shares in new power companies, a top executive said Monday. Sergei Dubinin, chief financial officer at state-controlled power monopoly Unified Energy Systems, said the process of creating the regional power companies that should replace UES by 2007 was going according to plan. |
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MOSCOW — The government is close to completing the legal framework for the state investment fund, designed to finance infrastructure projects, a senior government official said Thursday. |
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Gazprom-Media has bought St. Petersburg weekly newspaper Chas Pik through its subsidiary firm Aura, Alexei Turchenko, the new head of Gazprom-Media said last week. Without revealing the purchasing price, Turchenko vowed the move was aimed at making the newspaper profitable, but market players warned that the deal may have been politically motivated. |
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Just a few years ago the very idea of Russia-based software engineers developing integrated systems for international investment funds seemed unbelievable. |
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St. Petersburg is proving to be an increasingly interesting center of investment activity. Investments in commercial and industrial real estate in 2004 totaled $1.54 billion. It is important to emphasize that the city’s real estate market is not as overheated as in Moscow. |
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The title of a 1904 publication by the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, “One step forward, two steps back,” very well reflects the situation in today’s Russian tax system. |
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At the end of July, the Supreme Arbitration Court adopted a resolution that sought to clarify disputes connected with the determination of the customs value of goods. The resolution gave the arbitration courts some clarification on how to handle disputed decisions from the customs authorities. Specifically, in such disputes the customs officials do not agree with the declarer’s determination of the customs value of imported goods using the transaction price of the goods. |
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President Vladimir Putin said on Monday Russia must pursue a prudent fiscal policy, amid calls from some quarters for the government to spend yet more of its record oil windfall. Russia’s rulers are walking a tight rope between the need to save money against any future drop in crude prices and the desire to be seen to be redistributing wealth around a country where the average wage is still only $300 a month. |
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5,000 Phones Seized ST. PETERSBURG (AP) — Customs and security agents seized a seaborne consignment of smuggled Nokia cell phones from Finland over the weekend in the latest sting operation targeting illegal mobile phone imports, customs officials said Monday. |
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The first time it seemed like a neat joke or perhaps a cordial welcome. As more foreign investors sign up for factories and offices in St. Petersburg, however, Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s unsubtle endorsement of the arriving companies’ products has turned absurd. |
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From now on, every Sept. 1 our thoughts will turn to Beslan and those children all dressed up for the first day of school. The ominous thought occurs that not just the children but Sept. |
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Under the administration of St. Petersburg former governor Vladimir Yakovlev, the city was run not so much according to laws, but according to a series of “understandings.” The results of such a management style are well known. For understandable reasons, when Valentina Matviyenko’s team took over at City Hall, they immediately began to deal with this evil and declared themselves to favor a modern, meaning liberal, open management style. |
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It was the one great fear that trumped all the others, the nightmare scenario that overrode reason, skepticism, and all political debate, stampeding the nation into war: the thought of terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction — “dirty bombs” packed with cancerous nukestuff and gene-warping chemical poisons that would kill, maim and deform the innocent. |
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BEIJING — British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the European Union’s economic and political ties with Beijing were vital on Monday at the start of an EU-China summit marred by wrangling over textiles exports. The annual summit will produce deals on climate change, trade and investment, including the signing of a contract by European plane maker Airbus to sell aircraft to China. |
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PARIS — A fire killed 14 people in a suspected arson attack in a high-rise apartment block in Paris on Sunday, the third major blaze in the French capital in just over a week, police said. |
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TOKYO — A powerful Category 4 typhoon bore down on southwestern Japan on Monday, threatening the country’s heavily populated main islands with torrential rain and strong winds and disrupting transport and oil refineries. Weather officials in South Korea also warned of flooding, while eastern China braced for possible effects from Typhoon Nabi after the region’s previous storm killed at least 84 people in the east of the country, newspapers said. |
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NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans police killed four looters who had opened fire on them Sunday as rescue teams scoured homes and toxic waters flooding streets to find survivors and recover thousands of bloated corpses. |
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Hockey Loss to Sweden ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Mika Hannula scored the game-winner with 32 seconds remaining in regulation time as Sweden edged Russia 2-1 in the Ceksa Pojistovna Cup ice hockey event held in St. Petersburg on Thursday night at the Yubileiny Sports Palace. “Unfortunately one of our new young players, Andrei Kuteikin, who made it debut with the [Russian National] team, made a critical mistake in the third period which cost us the game,” said Team Russia Head Coach Vladimir Kirkunov. |
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Issues Archive