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 The Central Election Commission in Moscow was due to hold a special session Friday to review the conflict between the St. Petersburg branch of liberal opposition party Yabloko and the St. Petersburg election commission that banned the party from upcoming election to the city’s Legislative Assembly. Now that the option to vote “against all candidates” no longer exists and with Yabloko thrown out of the election, the party’s supporters have been left wondering how to act. However Yabloko and the opposition coalition Other Russia are considering a bold alternative: suggesting that voters can take ballots out of the polling station and hand them over to party representatives, who would then calculate the results as a “protest vote. |
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SHIPPING SNOW
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Soldiers clearing snow on Palace Square on Wednesday. Over the preceeding 24 hours, 40,581 cubic meters of snow had been cleared from the streets of St. Petersburg, with 1,933 snow-clearing vehicles carrying out the work, the city authorities reported on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov unveiled an ambitious spending plan Wednesday allowing Russia to maintain its nuclear deterrent while developing its conventional forces. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, aircraft carriers and an early warning radar system will figure prominently in the Defense Ministry’s eight-year, $189 billion plan, Ivanov said in comments before the State Duma.
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A bill introducing “additional measures to tackle corruption in St. Petersburg” passed its first reading Wednesday in the Legislative Assembly. According to its author, Legislative Assembly deputy Vladimir Yeremenko, the document is intended to help battle “corrupt civil servants, bribe-takers who have merged almost entirely with state, commercial organizations and criminal groups… that very same force that might destroy the state from within. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that cash-rich Russian companies failed to clinch $50 billion in deals over the past year due to Western trade barriers and pledged to do something about it. Lavrov, speaking at a conference celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, also said the barriers and “the discriminatory approach of Western countries” were a sign that European companies perceived the Russians as a “serious competitor.” “We need to fight this, and we’ll be doing it together,” Lavrov told a room packed with more than 200 of the country’s business leaders. During a meeting with the same business leaders in the Kremlin on Tuesday, Putin praised their “healthy ambitions,” saying they had come of age and were ready for great expansion plans abroad. |
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SAINT’S DAY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
St. Petersburgers at the Smolenskaya Cemetery paying their respects on the saint’s day of the city’s patron, St. Ksenia the Blissful, on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Renowned cellist, conductor and human rights activist Mstislav Rostropovich is recovering in a Moscow hospital. He is not in serious condition, his spokeswoman said Wednesday. “He has fallen ill, but he will be okay,” said Rostropovich’s spokeswoman, Natalya Dollezhal. Dollezhal declined to discuss Rostropovich’s illness but said he was on the mend and “getting ready for his anniversary.
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MOSCOW — A senior United Russia official on Wednesday staked the pro-Kremlin party’s claim on the politics of nationalism as the long campaign for the State Duma gets under way. “No other political party can employ nationalist rhetoric and raise the ‘Russian question’ without slipping into extremism,” said Andrei Isayev, a United Russia Duma deputy and co-coordinator of the party’s Russian Project. |
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One of Russia’s largest oil companies, Surgutneftegaz, will invest around $2 billion into a new oil processing complex in Leningrad Oblast, in an effort to increase production capacity. Its subsidiary, Kirishinefteorgsintez, operates the only oil processing plant in the Northwest region. The new complex will be created on the base of the existing plant, Interfax reported Tuesday, and is due for completion in early 2009. The total cost of the project increased from an initial $736 million, mainly because of the growing cost of metals, Interfax cited Vadim Somov, general director of Kirishinefteorgsintez, as saying at a St. Petersburg news conference on Tuesday. |
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LENTA LOGIC
/ For The St. Petersburg Times
The cross-docking area of Lenta’s new 20,600 square meter distribution center, opened in St. Petersburg on Tuesday. The $20 million project will optimize logisitics and reduce handling and storage. |
 MOSCOW — Jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky dismissed the money-laundering charges brought against him this week as a “shameful farce” aimed at keeping him in prison until after the 2008 presidential election and predicted that judges would find him guilty after a short trial. “Those who devised the Khodorkovsky affair to steal Russia’s most successful oil company … are afraid to see me free and want to insure themselves against my release on parole,” Khodorkovsky said in a statement posted on his web site late Tuesday.
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InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has announced plans to develop a new Crowne Plaza St. Petersburg in an historic building in the city center. Last year the British company opened a Crowne Plaza hotel in Moscow. According to the agreement, signed between IHG and Rastor Investments, the Crowne Plaza St. |
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Runaway State ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — The Kremlin will transfer ownership of St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport to the city after the regional government lobbied to take the company over instead of having it auctioned off, Kommersant reported. |
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MOSCOW — British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Alistair Darling led a group of 20 top-level British CEOs on Wednesday in calling on the Kremlin to clarify investment rules in the first Cabinet-level visit to Russia since the recent souring of bilateral relations. “Investors must know where they stand from the start,” Darling told reporters after meeting Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. |
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 Recent changes to Russian labor migration policy have long been overdue. But while they are certainly a step in the right direction, the new rules may have unintended consequences that would damage the economy and send negative ripples through the economies of its neighbors. |
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President Vladimir Putin held an unexpectedly substantive annual news conference last week. It was surprising because, whereas Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko apparently thinks leaders were given tongues in order to keep people in line, Putin, as a former intelligence officer, seems to believe that his should be used to conceal his true motives. |
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 On the morning of Jan. 29, Mohammad Faisal Siksik was hitching a ride on the hot, dusty road that runs along Israel’s border with Egypt. Dressed in a black coat and carrying a bag, the 21-year-old asked a local motorist to take him the short distance south to the city of Eilat. |
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Last week brought another insight into the music tastes of senior Kremlin official. Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of presidential administration and and the Kremlin’s ideologist, and Dmitry Medvedev, the first deputy prime minister often seen as President Vladimir Putin’s preyemnik, or successor, revealed they are both fans of Deep Purple, according to Vedomosti newspaper. |
 A slang-filled diary narrating the adventures of two Russian dropouts in London won a prestigious literary prize in 2000. Now the book has been turned into a low-budget, English-language film, “Bigga Than Ben,” with a cast of British and Russian actors including Andrei Chadov and Ben Barnes. It is set to premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival in California next month. The book’s authors, Pavel Tetersky and Sergei Sakin, were close friends who traveled to London in 1999 with the aim of staying as long as possible. |
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 St. Petersburg’s Iva Nova — one of Russia’s best live acts — will unveil its new album on St. Valentine’s Day. Iva Nova, a crazed all-women band that combines Russian folk and punk, has a reputation as one of the best live acts on the club circuits of both Moscow and its hometown of St. |
 Ilya Kormiltsev, poet, translator, the head of the radical publisher Ultra Kultura and a former songwriter for the Soviet rock band Nautilus Pompilius, died in London on Sunday. He was 47. Late last month, Kormiltsev was reported to have been hospitalized in London, diagnosed with cancer of the spine in its worst stage. A persistent critic of the Kremlin’s politics, Kormiltsev protested when former Nautilus Pompilius’ singer Vyacheslav Butusov performed, for a fee, for 5,000 activists of Nashi at the Kremlin-backed youth movement’s summer camp in July 2006. |
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 The great and the good are reviving pre-Revolutionary traditions with increasingly lavish parties. Internationally renowned opera diva Yelena Obraztsova is resting leisurely in her ornate armchair, the singer’s regal profile reflected in the mirror. |
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A new work by British composer Peter Dyson, entitled “Sinfonietta: The Unknown” and inspired by the Russian-Finnish War, premieres on Sunday at the Herzen University’s Kolonny Zal. The idea came to the composer after he read a piece in The St. Petersburg Times about Russian and Finnish war veterans going out to the Karelian Isthmus on summer weekends with metal detectors to look for bodies of fallen colleagues in order to rebury them. “In the process I discovered the disproportionate numbers of dead on both sides so I started to go out to the places myself and look,” Dyson recalls. “I guess it was the churchyard at Muola — now Pravdino — that really made me think. |
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 When it comes to the Eurovision Song Contest, the British tend to take an ironic postmodern approach — i.e., sending the nation’s worst band and laughing off the resulting nul points. |
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The Other Side Gastro Bar & Refuge 1 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa. Tel: 312 9554 Open 12 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, 12 p.m. to 5 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Menu in Russian and English Two beers and two sandwiches: 540 rubles ($20.30) Rapidly emerging as a favored spot among foreign visitors and long-term residents alike, The Other Side offers what too many bars in St. |
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Novotel tells us that the head chef at its Cote Jardin restaurant, Serge Fery, will be pushing the boat out for the traditional Russian Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) celebrations. |
 The biblical story of Babel takes up a handful of verses in the 11th chapter of Genesis, and it illustrates, among other things, the terrible consequences of unchecked ambition. As punishment for trying to build a tower that would reach the heavens, the human race was scattered over the face of the earth in a state of confusion — divided, dislocated and unable to communicate. |
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 AMSTERDAM — Four Dutch goals in the second half made up for a poor first half as the Netherlands scored a comfortable 4-1 win over Russia in a friendly international on Wednesday. Ryan Babel opened the scoring with a goal in the 68th minute with fellow substitute Wesley Sneijder doubling the lead two minutes later. |
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PALERMO —?Italian police are questioning a 17-year-old boy over the death of a policeman in soccer riots in Sicily last week which led to the suspension of matches all over the country, they said on Thursday. |
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PARIS — Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has said he will not take part in this year’s race, the French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) announced on Thursday. AFLD said they had postponed their disciplinary hearing into Landis scheduled for Thursday after the American promised not to participate in any race in France until the end of 2007. |
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PARIS — Russian Nadia Petrova made light work of Germany’s Martina Muller to reach the quarter-finals of the Paris Open with a merciless 6-1 6-2 victory on Thursday. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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