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Watching members of a non-conformist, underground arts group cosying up with a state official — in this case Governor Valentina Matviyenko — is an unorthodox sight. The occasion? A housewarming party for the Mitki arts group, at their new studio, personally presented to the artists by Matviyenko on Thursday. Matviyenko was dressed in a stripy sailors’ shirt — a garment that features prominently in the group’s works and culture — and drank tea and ate pies with the artists at their new home at 36/38 Ulitsa Marata. Sitting in a newly renovated, brightly lit exhibition hall-turned-dining room, Matviyenko admired the art around her. |
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THE ICE PALACE COMETH
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
At a cost of around $150,000, a replica of an ice palace originally built on Palace Square in 1740 by Empress Anna Ioannovna was opened on the same spot Thursday. Weather permitting, the palace will remain in place into March. |
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MADRID —President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he would invite Hamas leaders to Moscow, opening a crack in a wall of U.S.-led opposition to dealing with the Palestinian election winner until it recognized Israel. Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas official said in Gaza that leaders of the group, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction, “would be delighted” to visit Russia if Putin tendered a formal invitation.
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Nine athletes from St. Petersburg are taking part in the Winter Olympic Games which open Friday in Turin, Italy, part of a Russian team of more than 150 athletes. Russia’s Olympic hopes are spread across a few key sports in the bid for athletic achievement in Turin. In biathlon, returning Olympic Champion Olga Pyleva competes in the 10 kilometer pursuit, leading a strong team of women biathletes. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday urged the Federal Security Service to prevent foreign governments from interfering in Russia through NGOs and said terrorists should be hunted down “in caves ... like rats.” In a speech at the annual meeting of the top brass of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, at its Lubyanka headquarters, Putin also criticized NGOs for a lack of diligence when accepting foreign grants. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has appointed his aide Viktor Ivanov as head of a commission charged with encouraging citizens of former Soviet republics to move to Russia. |
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Leading Finnish dairy producer Valio is set to build a milk plant in Leningrad Oblast, company president Harry Salonaho said at a meeting with regional governor Valery Serdyukov, Interfax reported Tuesday. “We proposed the project of a new modern plant in the Gatchinsky district to the governor. |
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City Hall has launched the “St. Petersburg Stamp of Quality,” a certification system for companies operating in the city. The certification, in operation since November 2005, is voluntary and accessible to ‘practically’ all goods and services from both local and national companies, the web site of the city’s committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade reported on Feb. |
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Cinema Sale ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An investment subsidiary of Alfa-Group, acquired a 100 percent stake in the local multiplex chain Kronverk Cinema from Banking House St. Petersburg, Alfa-Group said Wednesday in a statement. The value of the deal was left undisclosed. |
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MOSCOW — Energy security will top an ambitious and politically charged agenda for the first major event of Russia’s G8 presidency, a two-day meeting of the group’s finance ministers starting in Moscow on Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Steelmaker Severstal said Wednesday that it planned to take control of a number of its raw material suppliers owned by its chairman and key shareholder, Alexei Mordashov, in a bid to improve transparency. The move, which will be handled through an issue of new shares, could add as much as $4. |
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MOSCOW — Rosneft may conduct its initial public offering at more than one overseas exchange, but decisions regarding how large the offered stake will be and whether the IPO will be conducted before or after the oil major’s consolidation have yet to be made by the company’s owner, the state, Rosneft’s president said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — The head of a Group of Eight task force urged Russia to switch from fossil fuel to environmentally friendly sources of energy and to do more to conserve energy. Corrado Clini, a senior official in Italy’s environment ministry, is in Moscow this week under the auspices of a joint Italian-Russian working group set up at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, last summer to develop energy-saving technologies and invest in ecologically clean types of fuel. |
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At the end of this week at the historic Hotel National, which stands in the very heart of Moscow, finance ministers of the Group of Eight nations gather to discuss international economic and financial policy issues. As the ministers meet, we hope they reflect on two of the greatest challenges confronting the world: persistent poverty and the sometimes difficult adjustments associated with globalization. |
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Mikhail Dmitriyev, the one-time liberal economist who now heads a think tank called the Center for Strategic Research, contributed a comment to Kommersant last week titled “In Defense of Nationalization. |
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 The condemnation of communist regimes by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) earlier this month has provoked an emotional debate in Russia about the moral, legal and historical status of the former Soviet Union. The speaker of Russia’s Parliament, Boris Gryzlov, snubbed the call by PACE for former communist countries to reassess their repressive histories and to “condemn them without any ambiguity,” The New York Times reported. |
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Tigran Keosayan’s film “A Hare Over The Abyss” (“Zayats nad bezdnoi”), a romantic comedy released last week in anticipation of St. Valentine’s Day, is the latest example of a wave of nostalgia not just for the Brezhnev era but for Leonid Brezhnev himself. |
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Dolphin, Kalinov Most, Butch and Stas Bartenyov and Yesli are in the line-up for a high-profile anti-Nazi concert taking place in Moscow this week. Called “For Russia without Fascism, War and Violence,” the show is a charity event with proceeds to go to Grazhdanskoye Sodeystviye (Civic Assistance), an organization dealing with refugees’ problems in Russia. |
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The hardline repressive regime than runs Belarus is a distraction from the more subtle charms of Grodno, Khatyn and Minsk. Dubbed the last dictatorship in Europe, Belarus is an authoritarian state where little political freedom exists. |
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Something of an institution in the city, the husband-and-wife artistic team Olga and Alexander Florensky, co-founders of the Mitki arts group, have demonstrated over the last two weeks that they are still on top form. Even before they’d managed to complete a grandiose project entitled “The Russian Trophy,” the artists announced a new series of events to be run under the title “The Universal Museum of Wilhelm Winter. |
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ISTANBUL — A Turkish court on Tuesday began hearing the case of five prominent journalists who face possible jail sentences in a trial which is seen as a fresh test of curbs on freedom of expression in the European Union candidate nation. Prosecutors filed charges against the columnists in December for comments they made about a conference on the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I. |
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OSLO — Scientists said on Tuesday they had found a “Lost World” in an Indonesian mountain jungle, home to dozens of exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants. |
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TURIN, Italy — The Olympic athletes’ villages were given a big thumbs down by many leading competitors at the Winter Games on Tuesday. World Cup champion Bode Miller, a favorite in the Alpine ski racing, has opted out of the village in the resort of Sestriere, preferring to stay in the camper bus he uses on the World Cup tour. |
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ZARAGOZA — Diego Milito smashed in four goals as Real Zaragoza continued their devastating form in the King’s Cup with a 6-1 demolition of Real Madrid in the first leg of their semi-final on Wednesday. |
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Formula 1, the most powerful league of racing cars, may be joined by a motorcycle driver as he considers replacing two wheels with four. Last week Valentino Rossi, five-times Moto GP champion, lined up for Ferrari as the Formula 1 teams gathered up in Valencia, Spain to test their equipment for the upcoming season. |
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Issues Archive