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Prices rose by as much as 30 percent for 9 out of 10 food products in September, the Russian Statistics Committee (Rosstat) has said, leaving ordinary people stressed and angered as basic products such as milk and vegetable oil are hit by rising inflation. “I’m in shock,” Svetlana Rudakova, a 35 year-old hairdresser, said. “I’ve got two children and I’m scared to think how we’ll manage our financial situation now. Of course, I can go on a diet myself and not eat butter and cheese, but I can’t do that with my children and my husband!” The most obvious rise hit dairy products such as butter, milk, and cheese. In St. Petersburg the price for half a kilogram of Valio butter went up from 70 rubles ($2. |
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 The police on Thursday disrupted an environmental picket outside the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, detaining more than 10 activists from local and international ecological groups campaigning against the import of spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium hexafluoride. |
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MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy pledged Wednesday to promote deeper relations between their countries but gave only minor indications that they had found common ground on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. The two presidents agreed that Iran should make its nuclear program more transparent, but Putin reiterated Russia’s position that it had no “objective data” indicating that Tehran was working on a nuclear bomb. |
All photos from issue.
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St. Petersburg’s leading fashion event, Defile on the Neva, is in full swing, having kicked off Wednesday at the Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa with shows by local fashion icon Lilia Kiselenko and Voronezh designer Tatyana Sulimina. Living up to its reputation of an event that gives center stage to well-established fashion gurus such as Tatyana Kotegova, Tatyana Parfyonova and Larisa Pogoretskaya, Defile on the Neva, now in its seventh year, features an array of Russian fashion’s biggest names. The name “Defile” comes from the French défilé, meaning fashion show. Friday’s program at the former cadets riding school fuses a show by debutant Vera Chaplinskaya with famous brands of the caliber of Asya Kogel and Janis Chamalidi. |
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GREEN GIANT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A street cleaner looks at a statue made of about 600 tennis balls erected on Nevsky Prospekt on Thursday. The statue is part of the run-up to the St. Petersburg Open-27 which begins on Oct. 22. |
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MOSCOW — Support among voters for United Russia has risen to a record high after President Vladimir Putin announced that he would run on the party’s ticket in this year’s State Duma elections, according to a recent opinion poll. The poll, released late Tuesday, indicated that 54 percent of voters questioned planned to vote for United Russia in the Dec.
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov has appointed Vasily Yakemenko, leader of pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, to head the newly established State Committee for Youth Affairs, the White House press service said Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of the committee along with changes to the makeup of the Cabinet on Sept. |
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As inflation rages with nearly 90 percent of food products becoming up to 30 percent more expensive in September than the month before, The St. Petersburg Times asked what people think about the crisis. |
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Two new cottage villages designed according to the standards of European and American residential suburbs will be completed in the Pushkinsky district by 2010. They will provide housing for 18,000-20,000 people, Regnum news agency reported Tuesday. The Novaya Izhora and Slavyanka villages will be constructed by Baltros managing company, which plans to provide the cottages with connections to gas pipelines, electricity networks, water supply, cable television and the Internet. |
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M.video, one of the largest Russian consumer electronics retail chains, announced its intention to launch a public offering of ordinary shares, including shares held by its shareholder, Svece Limited, the company said Tuesday in a statement. |
 MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry has ordered the country’s airlines to improve their customer service or risk losing their licenses. Ministry regulations, to come into force Oct. 20, will require all air carriers to conform to a list of customer service standards in dealing with passengers on the ground. |
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MOSCOW — United Company RusAl said Tuesday that it planned to build the world’s largest aluminum smelter near the Volga River and to finance the expansion of a nuclear power station to secure energy for the 1. |
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VILNIUS — Leaders of five former Soviet-bloc countries signed a deal in Vilnius on Wednesday to build a new oil pipeline linking the Black and Baltic Seas that will cut their dependence on Russia and give Central Asian producers a new route to Europe. During a two-day meeting of officials from more than 20 countries, the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine agreed to extend Ukraine’s Odessa-Brody pipeline, allowing it to carry Caspian oil to Poland and beyond. The line will give Azerbaijan new markets in the other four countries, importers who say Russia’s politics make it an unreliable supplier. The world’s second-largest oil producer cut off supplies to Poland during a dispute with Belarus in January, shut down a pipeline to Lithuania last year, and last week threatened to halt gas shipments to Ukraine. |
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 VAALIMAA, Finland — Next time you complain about waiting in a line, spare a thought for the many truckers who spend days at a time in lines that stretch for kilometers at the Finnish-Russian border. |
Wider Road to Finland HELSINKI (Bloomberg) — Lemminkaeinen Oyj, a Finnish construction and road-paving company, won contracts valued at $141 million to widen a Finnish highway running to Russia. The work will be carried out together with local contractor Kesaelahden Maansiirto Oy. The company will widen from two lanes to four a section of Highway 6, which connects the Helsinki region with Russian border crossings at Nuijamaa and Imatra. |
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 Suppose that the Kremlin, as Iran’s monopoly supplier of nuclear where-withal, decided it could live with a few atomic weapons in the hands of the mullahs. Suppose Russia, flush with money and superpower fantasies, believed that weakening and humiliating the United States was well worth the instability that might come with its refusal to help block Iran’s drive toward nuclear arms. |
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On Oct. 7, 2006, Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the entrance to her Moscow apartment building. And no matter how many demonstrations the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi stages on that day to honor President Vladimir Putin’s birthday, it will remain the day that Politkovskaya was killed. |
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 The new management at the Mussorgsky Opera and Ballet Theater is keeping its promise: following extensive restoration work that began in June, the theater, sometimes referred to by its historic name, Mikhailovsky, and also the Maly, has just opened its new season, confounding skeptics who doubted the make-over could be completed in just four months. |
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By Michele A. Berdy People seem to associate the word apple, or ÿáëîêî, with one kind of apple that they grew up eating, and that one sort was imprinted on the brain as the quintessence of apple. |
 The 175th theatrical season of the Mussorgsky Opera and Ballet Theater opened Saturday with the classic Minkus ballet “Don Quixote” with Denis Matviyenko in the title role. A soloist of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater and the New National Theater of Tokyo, Japan, Matviyenko was until 2002 a dancer with the Mariinsky Theater and the performance was something as a homecoming for the dramatic blond star. In the words of Andrei Kuligin, assistant director of the ballet company, who has worked as the dancer at the Mussorgsky for more than 20 years, new life is being breathed into the ballet repertoire by the renovation of the theater. |
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 Scholars from the U.S., Russia, Europe and Africa celebrated 200 years of U.S.-Russian diplomatic ties in St. Petersburg last month by exploring the once-hidden African-American contribution to Russian and Soviet history. |
 Brilliant, thorough, clear-eyed yet also profoundly affectionate, “Nureyev: The Life,” by Julie Kavanagh — author of “Secret Muses,” a biography of the choreographer Frederick Ashton — is so unusual in its depth of both reporting and integrity that a reader arriving at the last page is left dumbstruck. In the making for over a decade, “Nureyev” unscrolls everything that matters about the sensibility, the actions, the ambitions and even the unconscious impulses of the dancer who serves as its titanic subject, and it places them in the full contexts of the theater and society of his era. |
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 Recently, Russian tabloids have been discussing blond opera and pop singer Nikolai Baskov, who is separating from his wife, Svetlana. Or then again, maybe he isn’t. |
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James Cook Pub and Cafe // 45 Kamenoostrovskaya, Petrograd Side. Tel: 337 2433 // Open for breakfast and until 2 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with beer: 2,320 rubles, $93 While pubs are not a rarity in St. Petersburg, late-night revelers are often searching for a new joint to quench their thirst for kilts and spirits. The James Cook pub on the Petrograd Side, a sister restaurant to the popular James Cook located in the center on Shvedsky Pereulok, is well-equipped with both. The restaurant cannot be reached from the street, where exit doors tell customers to enter to the left, through the Stone Island Hotel. This James Cook is composed of two main rooms. |
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 Erica Bain, the gunslinging heroine of “The Brave One,” is the host of a public radio talk show called “Street Walk” that takes a sentimental, nostalgic view of New York City. |
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MOSCOW — Second seed Maria Sharapova was unceremoniously bundled out of the Kremlin Cup on Wednesday, losing to Belarus’s Victoria Azarenka 7-6 6-2 in the second round. It was Sharapova’s second successive defeat by an 18-year-old after the world number four went out of the third round of the U. |
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MOSCOW — Guus Hiddink will extend his contract as Russia manager through 2010, the Dutchman said on Wednesday, ending media speculation he could leave to coach elsewhere in the near future. |
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LONDON — England is unconcerned about playing next week’s crucial Euro 2008 qualifier against Russia on Luzhniki stadium’s artificial surface, the Football Association said Tuesday. Media reports suggested that the Russian Football Federation had changed their minds about upgrading the surface for the October 17 match to maximize home advantage in a match they have to win. |
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