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 MOSCOW — A Moscow jury found Alexander Pichushkin, the so-called Bittsevsky Maniac, guilty of 48 murders Wednesday in the trial of the country’s most-prolific known serial killer in more than a decade. Prosecutors also made the stunning admission that authorities missed a chance to stop Pichushkin’s rampage in 2002, when a police officer ignored the story of a woman who survived one of his attacks. |
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A 37,000 year-old baby mammoth named Lyuba, the finest example of a fully preserved mammoth ever discovered, will be brought to St. Petersburg in December where further research will be carried out on the specimen after it was found in western Siberia in May this year. |
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MOSCOW — A senior Kremlin aide welcomed the upcoming Polish government reshuffle Wednesday and said the change might finally allow Moscow to reach a new EU partnership agreement. “We couldn’t talk with Poland’s previous government,” Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin’s adviser on EU relations, said at a news conference. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Nationalist politician Dmitry Rogozin is being tipped as Russia’s new permanent representative to NATO, an appointment that could bode ill for the country’s already troubled relations with NATO. Rogozin refused to say whether he was in line to replace Konstantin Totsky at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Rogozin, speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio late Wednesday, said he would only comment after the Kremlin made an official announcement. An assistant to Rogozin, Sergei Butin, said by telephone that Rogozin had not been informed about any Kremlin decision. Two presidential spokesmen and a senior Kremlin aide said they knew nothing about the appointment. |
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LOAD OF RUBBISH
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A Greenpeace protester stands outside City Hall on Thursday holding a sign calling for Governor Valentina Matviyenko to support the separation of rubbish for recycling. |
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Two insurgents were arrested Wednesday in Ingushetia on suspicion of bombing a passenger train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg in August, the Interior Ministry said. If the suspects prove to be both insurgents and train bombers, it would mean militants have again begun venturing out of the North Caucasus after a lull of more than two years. Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said the suspects had been transferred to Moscow for questioning.
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MOSCOW — Support for United Russia has increased sharply since President Vladimir Putin decided to head its list of candidates for State Duma elections in December. But the popularity of A Just Russia, a second pro-Kremlin party, has plummeted, casting doubt on its chances of getting into the next Duma, according to a monthly survey released by the independent Levada Center on Wednesday. |
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Laventa, a St. Petersburg-based company that operates home furnishings supermarkets under the SantaHouse brand, plans to become a nation-wide retailer over the next few years. Laventa opened its first regional supermarkets in Rostov-na-Donu and Ufa in October this year. By the end of 2007, ten new supermarkets will open in St. Petersburg, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Samara, Lipetsk and Moscow. In the long term the company expects to operate 150 supermarkets across Russia. “We want our customers to feel comfortable and come to our supermarkets as often as possible. In Ufa and Rostov-na-Donu, as well as in other cities, we will realize the same marketing concept that proved successful in St. |
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HITCHING A RIDE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A model poses with a Toyota Land Cruiser 200 at the vehicle’s European premiere on Wednesday. The ‘Off-Road King’ was unveiled at the Auto Exhibition at Lenexpo this week. |
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MOSCOW — The government has shelved indefinitely plans to set a prohibitive 30 percent tariff on wheat exports designed to keep the cereal at home during the forthcoming sale of government grain stocks, market sources said Wednesday. The proposal may be revisited depending on market reaction to a lesser tariff, due to be introduced Nov. 12. “We still have to see the market reaction to the new tariff and the intervention sales,” one of two market sources said.
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Gas Prices Set to Go Up MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom raised its forecast for Europe’s natural gas price next year to $275 per 1,000 cubic meters from $265 this year, Vedomosti reported, citing unidentified company officials. The forecast is less than Russia’s Economy Ministry and most analysts expected, the newspaper reported Thursday. |
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By the end of this year ICICI Bank Eurasia, a subsidiary of an Indian financial institution, expects to increase its assets up to $1 billion. The bank will focus on improving quality and speed of service while expanding into Russia’s regions, the bank’s managers said Wednesday at the opening of a branch in St. |
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MOSCOW — The fight for embattled oil producer Russneft intensified Wednesday as Swiss-based commodities trader Glencore announced that it had entered the race for some of the firm’s assets. Russneft has been operating without a president and formal owner since founder Mikhail Gutseriyev fled the country in August to avoid what he called politically motivated charges of tax evasion. |
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 They tried to put a good face on it, but the truth is that President Vladimir Putin publicly humiliated U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates during their recent meeting in Moscow. Before even hearing their latest pitch on missile defense, Putin heaped scorn, even raising serious new objections. |
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A prominent opposition spokesman recently wrote an excellent article proving that the results of the December State Duma elections would be falsified and that the exact number of votes each party will receive had been predetermined. |
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 The opera deals with Russia’s first attempt to elect a tsar — let’s put aside speculation about how contrived that election might have been — and it enjoys its Russian premiere in the heat of the current parliamentary election campaign. “Boris Goudenow,” the first-ever opera written by a European composer on a Russian theme, is a timely arrival to the Russian opera scene. |
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If you are having a shmooze over some nosh, but maybe you do not like schmaltz, whether you know it or not, you are speaking Yiddish. Though the language has made inroads into English, it has all but died out in daily use in its homelands of Eastern Europe. |
 Fourteen teenagers from St. Petersburg and Hamburg will team up with thespians from the local Comic-Trust theater troupe to take part in a piece of bold historical kitsch on Nov. 3 at the Teatr Na Mokhovoi. “Antony and Cleopatra,” the company’s unorthodox take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, blends together genres and styles of visual theater to create a spicy visual cocktail. The production is an adaptation of an existing street show which was first performed by Comic-Trust in France in 2003 and has been performed in Germany and Portugal since. |
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 In an exciting development for ballet in St. Petersburg, the Leonid Yakobson Theater of Choreographic Miniatures, a chamber ballet company formed in 1969, has for the first time performed an original full-scale ballet which premiered earlier this month at the Alexandrinsky Theater. |
 For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, “a gray blur,” a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him. |
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After countless biographies of Stalin, a new book gives voice to the millions of ordinary Russians who suffered the dictator’s reign of terror in silence. |
 The other week, TNT showed the first episode in a new series of its sketch comedy “Our Russia.” This time around, it has a few new characters and has killed the sushi waitress from Ivanovo. But the most intriguing detail is that it is now being directed by Pyotr Buslov – the maker of the two “Boomer” gangster movies, where bad guys with soul cruise through mournful Russian countryside with Sergei Shnurov rasping at top volume. |
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Le Borshch // 11 Nab. Reki Fontanka // Open 12 p.m. through 1 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with wine: 2,400 rubles ($97.10) While its kitschy nouveau-russki name cannot help but raise some doubts or a snicker or two, the small new restaurant on the Fontanka, Le Borshch, has succeeded in creating a genuine marriage of French and Russian cuisine. |
 John Carpenter’s original 1978 “Halloween” was a slumber-party spook tale about a mask-clad bogeyman hacking his way through a sleepy Illinois suburb. Rob Zombie’s remake wants to be all that and a case study as well, devoting its first act to the childhood of the future serial killer Michael Myers, a chubby, sweet-faced, socially awkward boy whose mental illness is transformed into murderous rage by school bullies and a home life of Dickensian squalor. |
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BEIJING — Chief Olympic inspector Hein Verbruggen foresees no “risks or dangers” in the preparations for next year’s Beijing Games, although the problem of air pollution was being closely monitored. Speaking on Thursday at the end of a three-day visit by the IOC’s inspection team, Verbruggen said he was confident the Games would be of the highest standard even if there was still much detailed work to be done over the remaining 288 days. |
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PARIS — Tour de France organizers have designed a balanced route for the 95th edition of the world’s premier stage race next year with a brutal climb up L’Alpe d’Huez in the final week set to potentially decide the eventual outcome. |
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