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One of Russia’s leading experts on racial issues and hate crimes was violently attacked on Tuesday in what her colleagues and human rights advocates see as an attempt to force the expert to change her testimony in a high-profile legal case. Valentina Uzuniva, was attacked by a female assailant, wearing a mask and was dressed in camouflage, who hit Uzunova several times on the head and took a dossier on a court case Uzunova has been working on dealing with charges of extremism. The assailant also took Uzunova’s earrings. Uzunova, 59, who received treatment in the Alexandrovskaya Hospital, sustained a concussion and hematomas on her head. |
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RIVERSIDE ROMANCE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A young couple and group of sightseers enjoy the view on the Strelka of Vasilievsky Island, close to the Rostral Columns. Weather forecasters are predicting that temperatures will rise and the skies will remain clear over the weekend. |
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MOSCOW — A drive to scrap hefty import duties on foreign aircraft gained a powerful supporter Wednesday as First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said it was “normal and natural” to lift duties on those types of planes that are not made in Russia. Ivanov’s comments, during a visit to an aircraft maker in Voronezh, came after Russian carriers signed a flurry of deals to buy Western planes at this week’s Paris Air Show.
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MOSCOW — On Jan. 21, Manana Aslamazian walked through customs at Sheremetyevo Airport with a little more undeclared cash than is allowed. Five months later, she faces a decade or more in prison, and the nongovernmental organization she heads — the Educated Media Foundation — is in tatters. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Wednesday it would submit an amendment to the State Duma that would allow political parties to use billboards for campaign ads. |
All photos from issue.
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A 20-month jury trial rocked by judicial flaws that initially led to acquittals, prompting public condemnation and a retrial, ended Tuesday with the St. Petersburg City Court sentencing four white supremacists a total of 39 years in jail for murder. The court sentenced Andrei Gerasimov to 14 years in a high security prison for masterminding and taking part in the killing of 29-year-old Congolese student Roland Epassak in September 2005. Viktor Orlov, the youngest culprit in the group aged between 19 and 26, was sentenced to 7 years in jail, while Andrei Olenov and Yury Gromov will each serve a 9-year term. |
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EASY RIDER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Cult actor Dennis Hopper (l), with director of the State Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky, at the opening of a show of Hopper’s photographs and collages at the museum on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Wednesday he was ready to run for president next year and castigated opposition coalition The Other Russia as a Western stooge. At a news conference, Zyuganov described himself as “one of the five or six most experienced politicians in Russia” and said that such a leader “must be ready to fight for the presidency.
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MOSCOW — Prosecutors have wrapped up the investigation into the murder of 15 women whose bodies were discovered in a mass grave in the Urals in February, prosecutors announced Wednesday. Eight men have been charged with the rape and murder of the victims, aged 13 to 26, most of whom were forced to work as prostitutes. |
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Sterkh Corporation has opened the largest logistics complex in the Northwest. Occupying 60 hectares territory at the junction of thef Vyborgskoye Schosse, Gorskoye Schosse and the ring-road, Logopark complex will handle up to 8,000 units of transport vehicles a month, the managing company said Tuesday in a statement. |
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Local company EnergoProekt has opened a plant for the production of metal frames used in construction. As well as using the frames in its own projects, the company wants to meet growing demand from retail and logistics companies and power enterprises. |
 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree merging the country’s top energy shippers in a move to create a $5 billion national shipping giant and help develop the country’s huge offshore oil and gas projects. “You know that I have signed a decree forming a new company on the basis of the two existing ones — Sovcomflot and Novoship,” Putin told Sovcomflot’s chief, Sergei Frank, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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Kazkakh Loan LONDON (Bloomberg) — Kazkommertsbank, Kazakhstan’s biggest bank by assets, is getting a $300 million syndicated loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and two other banks. |
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 Recent deals between President Vladimir Putin and the heads of Central Asian states have secured Russia a role in the delivery of some, if not all, natural gas from these former Soviet republics to Europe. But Putin’s success here in outmaneuvering the United States was not a simple result of Moscow pressure or of vague “Eurasianist” ties that some Russian pundits claim have underpinned a Slavic-Turkic symbiosis since the Mongol conquest. |
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The State Duma has passed a bill on first reading establishing a corporation devoted to nanotechnology. This state-owned entity will carry out commercial activities tax-free, and receive 180 billion rubles ($6. |
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 Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass visited St. Petersburg last month to read from his latest book “Peeling the Onion” (2006) at the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University. The book, which can be described as an auto-biographical novel, reveals that the 79-year old writer, for many decades an outspoken left-leaning critic of Germany’s treatment of its Nazi past, was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. |
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Sonic Youth was unhappy about the sound quality of a gig they played in St. Petersburg in 1989. Was the band happier after its concert here on Monday? The show caused a mixed reaction as Russian bloggers attacked Light Music, the promoter of the Sonic Youth concert, again for the poor sound quality. |
 St. Petersburg is changing. Controversial skyscrapers are transforming the city’s landscape, new buildings are being built in old neighborhoods, and ancient tramlines are giving way to motorways. Not all the changes are happening on a grand scale visible to all. Behind the facades, the city’s infamous courtyards, little by little, are transforming too. Some are already lost and some will soon be gone forever. |
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 French music duo AIR perform live on Saturday marking the start of this year’s Stereoleto series of summer concerts. French guitarist Nicolas Godin compares his band AIR’s modus operandi to the intricate workings of a Faberge egg. |
 For most of us, the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin of June 1905 is etched in our minds by images from Sergei Eisenstein’s great film: the sailors refusing the rotten meat, the brutal officers preparing to shoot them down, the sudden explosion of violence, the massacre of innocent townspeople on the Odessa steps, the cheering sailors of the Black Sea Fleet as the ship sails defiantly past them on its way to freedom. |
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If you’re going to broadcast a recorded concert and pretend it’s live, it’s best to check the footage for large clocks. This simple rule was ignored on Rossia television the other evening, when it gave two hours to a patriotic concert on Red Square, offering plenty of sweeping shots of the Kremlin clocktower. |
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Olli’s Pizzeria // 34 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 320 0600. // www.ollis.ru // Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. // Credit cards accepted. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with beer 675 rubles ($26) They say pandas are endangered. But no one shed a tear when the Golden Panda on Kazanskaya Ulitsa finally died a death at the end of last month. Menacing the corner with Grivtsova since 2000, this restaurant was notoriously dark and dim, and served up a pitiful simulacra of Chinese food that at the time helped tarnish the reputation of this noble cuisine in St. Petersburg. No more. The smart brains behind Olli’s, a chain of pizza restaurants, launched their latest outlet at No. |
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 Who knew that serial killing is an addiction that sufferers hope to overcome by attending A.A. meetings and murmuring the serenity prayer? That, at least, is how the buttoned-up title character of “Mr. |
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ISLAMABAD — Pakistani Islamic scholars honoured Osama bin Laden in response to Britain’s knighthood for Salman Rushdie, as a senior ruling party member said he would not hesitate to kill the novelist. Meanwhile the country’s religious affairs minister, who caused outrage by remarking that the award given to the “Satanic Verses” author justified suicide attacks, announced that he may visit Britain next month. |
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LONDON — Manchester City said on Thursday that the Premier League club were backing an 81.6 million pound ($162.6 million) takeover bid led by ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. City said its board intended to recommend the bid from UK Sports Investments, a vehicle indirectly controlled by Thaksin and his son and daughter, Panthongtae and Pinthongta Shinawatra. |
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BEIJING — China’s police have been given new orders — no strangely dyed hair, no beards, no sideburns; and leave your scarfs and jewellery at home. The Ministry of Public Security has issued the order to “establish a good image for the people’s police”, domestic media said on Thursday. |
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