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Prisoners in at least three prisons in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast staged disorderly protests during the last week, adding to a list of similar such actions in some other Russian prisons. Human rights experts say the wave of disorder in prisons has to do with a recent toughening of prison regimes. On Sunday, at least 16 inmates at St. Petersburg’s central detention center, known as Kresty, refused food, Interfax reported, citing Alexander Sidorov, a representative of the federal penal service. Sidorov said the refusal amounted to a targeted hunger strike because the prisoners refused prison food but ate products sent to them in parcels. Boris Panteleyev, head of St. Petersburg’s branch of Committee For Civil Rights, said that according to information he obtained there were initially about 200 people who notified prison authorities about their intention to go on hunger strike, but their applications were not taken. |
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PIG OUT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Pigs race in a competition held in Lakhta, 15 kilometers to the north of St. Petersburg, on Saturday. Four pigs took part in the competition, which the organizers hope will be an annual event. |
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MOSCOW — The minimum wait time for a new Russian visa has risen to 10 days at many embassies in Europe where expatriates previously could get them in just a day. The consulates in Tallinn and Riga, once popular destinations for expats on visa runs, said Friday that U.S. and British citizens must now wait 10 days to receive any kind of visa. “I’m in shock,” said Paul Goncharoff, a Moscow-based U.
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 Too old for Halloween? Consider celebrating the holiday Russian style. This Wednesday, on Halloween night, there won’t be many little ghosts, witches or goblins prowling the streets of St. Petersburg for candy. Instead there will be stylish young adults — some in costume, most not — making their way to offices, stores, cafes, nightclubs and restaurants, where Halloween parties have become increasingly popular and extremely profitable during the past two years. |
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The article “3Q – 2007 Investment Report, St. Petersburg” printed in the Fall Real Estate Catalogue should have been attributed to Colliers International, which provided the material for the report. |
All photos from issue.
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Less than a thousand activists, human rights advocates and liberal politicians took part in a demonstration and meeting on Sunday to protest against intolerance, witch-hunting and all forms of hatred. Titled the March Against Hatred, the rally commemorated the birthday of the late hate-crimes expert Nikolai Girenko, who would have turned 68 on Wednesday. Girenko, Russia’s leading ethnographist and expert on ethnically motivated crimes, was gunned down at the doorway of his apartment on June 19, 2004. The murder has not been solved. The expert and his philosophy figured prominently in the march and the subsequent meeting on Sakharov Square. |
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WALK THIS WAY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Finnish choir Academen from Helsinki performing on Friday in a quartet competition organized by the Finnish Institute held at the Communications Museum on Pochtamtskaya Ulitsa. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s “chessboard murderer” was sentenced to life in prison on Monday for killing 48 people, after the supermarket worker told a court last week he felt like God as he decided whether his victims should live or die. The 33-year-old Alexander Pichushkin stood with his head bowed inside a glass cage in the courtroom as the judge, Vladimir Usov, read out the sentence.
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MOSCOW — The Central Elections Commission has confirmed the registration of 11 parties to take part in State Duma elections on Dec. 2, Interfax reported Sunday. Commission chief Vladimir Churov said three parties were denied registration because of problems with their applications. |
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Three men have been detained by the local police in connection with an attempted bombing at a rock concert at the ROKS music club earlier this month, the local news service Fontanka. |
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A pioneering group of prominent public figures, lawyers, accountants, legislators and City Hall officials have taken up the challenge of retrieving the missing funds in St Petersburg’s coffers, allegedly amounting to half of the city’s total income. Citing concerns over what they described as the city’s possible economic decline in the near future, as a result of “the adopted policy of ruining small businesses, who are the would-be contributors of more than half of the city’s budget,” the group announced the founding on Thursday of the Union of Small Businesses, aimed at lobbying the interests of small enterprises. “The city loses up to 55 percent of contributions from small businesses, just because it has been systematically ignoring the core sector of its economy in favor of less productive, larger businesses,” said Alexander Doronin, president of the newly-formed umbrella entity uniting the city’s once disparate tiny organizations in support of small businesses. |
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 MOSCOW — Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller on Friday was elected chairman of the board of Gazprom-Media, the media holding said. Miller, who was also recently elected the chairman of Gazprom’s pension fund, replaced Alexander Dybal, the previous board chairman, who earlier left for a post at Gazprom Neft. |
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MOSCOW — Capital flows into Russia have resumed and stand at $6 billion over the last month and at $60 billion for the year to date, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday. “We have secured the financial stability of our economy,” Kudrin told a conference of the Academy of National Economics. |
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Shtokman Stakes MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Total SA and StatoilHydro ASA will each pay $800 million to take part in Gazprom’s Shtokman natural-gas project, Kommersant reported, citing an unidentified official from the Russian energy company. |
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A long distance video-call between Governor Valentina Matviyenko and IT and Telecommunications minister Leonid Reiman organized to mark the launch of 3G (Third Generation) services from mobile phone operator MegaFon last week signaled that Russia’s national mobile operators are determined to introduce 3G services, which allow mobiles to carry data-heavy applications such as video conferencing and Internet access, to the country. |
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NEW YORK — Verizon Communications reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit on Monday driven by strong wireless subscriber growth, though analysts were unimpressed by its Internet subscription sales. |
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 At the beginning of the 1990s there was a popular saying – “Help will come from abroad.” Russians adopted foreign political institutions, adjusted foreign business models to Russian conditions and hired foreigners as consultants to supervise the changes taking place in both politics and business. Are expats still in demand in Russia in the 21st century? Experts say that foreign specialists still have some advantages compared to their Russian colleagues. However, the young generation of managers in Russia could soon win back jobs that so far have been traditionally occupied by foreigners. “Previously, western companies operating in Russia had to hire expats for top management positions. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The legal requirements for foreigners working in Russia change frequently and with little notice, causing delays. To obtain a work permit, foreign nationals currently face a psychiatric examination. |
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Nowadays, more and more employers understand that the basic size of their salary is not the only thing that concerns their employees. Modern job seekers know that they can demand more at work and look for the best social benefits packages on the market. According to Begin Group, companies on the Russian labor market offer a wide choice of social benefits packages, which besides base salaries and bonuses, usually cover fully or partially the cost of lunches at work and running a cell phone, as well as transport and medical insurance costs.
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Company employees in Russia are now stealing more from their companies than they did two years ago, contributing to a quadrupled cost of $12.8 million per company — more than five times the global average, PricewaterhouseCoopers said earlier this month. In 2007, company insiders were responsible for 38 percent of economic crimes, up from 13 percent two years ago, said the auditor, citing a biennial survey of 5,400 companies, including 125 leading companies in Russia. “An alarming finding” was that senior managers at firms in Russia were responsible for 41 percent of economic crimes — more than twice the proportion two years ago — according to the global study. |
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 According to the Russian constitution, foreigners have the same right to work as native residents of Russia. However, employers are obliged to observe numerous formal requirements required by Russian legislation. |
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Q; When it comes to staff “borrowing” or taking home office supplies, where should a boss draw the line? In which cases is some kind of action required and what should that action be? Michael Bartley, director, Four Squares real estate agency: “Four Squares’ managers spend a lot of time out of the office with clients, and draw on office supplies and equipment when necessary — including laptops and digital cameras for photographing properties. Although office supplies are a steady cost to the business, we take a liberal view on their use as long as the work is carried out to a high standard. It is a balancing act, maintaining internal financial discipline while encouraging creativity and responsibility. |
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 Most St. Petersburg companies increased staff salaries this year in an attempt to retain and motivate personnel. According to research issued by AVANTA Personnel recruiting company, 60 percent of local companies increased staff salaries in the first half of 2007. |
 Over the last few years, the popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com and their Russian equivalents VKontakte.ru and MoiKrug.ru has soared, particularly among office workers. What could be more tempting when sitting in front of a computer all day than messaging your friends, looking at their holiday pictures, seeing who their friends are and cyber-stalking people you dated or went to school with long, long ago? In fact, the popularity of such websites has become such that a third of employers in the U. |
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 With the Russian economy in rude health and new employment opportunities opening up, the vexing question of what time of year is best to move jobs has become more and more relevant. |
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When entering the Russian market, foreign companies run up against a whole range of problems involving the management of personnel, and industrial disputes count as one of the most awkward. This is mainly the result of the nature of Russian labor law, the mindset of employees and the increased activity of trade unions, especially at factories partly run by foreigners. The purpose of this article is to deal with the thorniest problems for foreign employers operating in Russia, as which, for the purposes of this article, we shall classify local divisions and representative offices of foreign companies operating in the Russian Federation, as well as daughter companies of foreign corporations in Russia. |
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 If the financial results of major multinational recruitment firms and the number of vacant internal recruiter jobs are anything to go by, global employment markets are humming with activity. |
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 On Tuesday, Russians began gathering around the Dubrovka theater to mourn the fifth anniversary of the hostage tragedy that shook the world. On Friday, the day the theater was stormed by special forces, about 1,000 people gathered outside the theater complex, and 129 balloons were released for every hostage who died in the rescue operation. |
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There has always been great irony in the fact that Peter the Great chose Holland as a model for reforming Russia. The imperial tricolor, which is derived from the Dutch flag, is the only thing he managed to transplant successfully onto Russian soil. |
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 Briton Andy Murray crushed Spaniard Fernando Verdasco 6-2 6-3 in the final of the St. Petersburg Open on Sunday to win his second title of the year on his debut appearance in Russia’s second city. The second seed broke Verdasco twice in each set to claim a comfortable victory after one hour 18 minutes. |
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DENVER — The Boston Red Sox beat the Colorado Rockies 4-3 Sunday to win the World Series and record their second four-game sweep of the Fall Classic in four years. |
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Spartak fell two points behind Zenit St. Petersburg for first place in the Premier League on Sunday, after managing only a scoreless away game to Moscow region side FK Saturn, Sport Express reported. Zenit picked up a full three points with a convincing 3-0 blanking of home team Spartak Nalchik to move out alone on top of the standings with just two weeks to play in the season, the newspaper said. |
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LONDON — The New York Giants held off a late rally from the winless Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium for a 13-10 win on Sunday in the NFL’s first regular season game outside North America. |
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