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About 800 workers at the Ford Motor Company’s plant near St. Petersburg prolonged a strike in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad Oblast, on Thursday, with no agreement to end it in sight. Previously, 950 workers signed a declaration on Tuesday that they were ready to begin work and were not on strike, said Yekaterina Kulinenko, Ford’s spokeswoman. On Tuesday when the strike began the Ford’s administration limited the access of workers to the plant. “Due to the strike action and the stoppage of production, the administration does not see any necessity in the presence of workers at their work stations (except employees providing an agreed minimum of work during the strike),” Kulinenko said. |
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PIG ON A PLATE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Tables laden with fine food for the Golden Cuisine 2007 culinary competition at the Manezh Kadetskogo Corpusa. The event featured chefs from Russia and abroad competing for honors. |
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A major political uproar has broken out over an extraordinary political statement passed by the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday. It urged voters “to unite around the national leader Vladimir Putin” ahead of the forthcoming elections to the State Duma. Russian electoral law bans both federal and local government structures and other power structures from engaging in political campaigning or distributing election propaganda.
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All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Several co-authors of the Constitution on Wednesday warned that using legal loopholes to allow President Vladimir Putin to run for a third term would threaten the legitimacy of the country’s fundamental law. With Putin required to leave office when his second term ends in May, his supporters are increasingly calling for constitutional amendments and the exploitation of legal loopholes to keep the presidency in his hands. But Oleg Rumyantsev, who helped draft the Constitution from 1990 to 1993, warned against “hastily” changing the country’s supreme law to accommodate a particular leader. |
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BLOWN AWAY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman clears away part of the street decorations that were put up for the reopening of Izmailovsky Prospekt on Wednesday following extensive repairs to the road surface. |
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MOSCOW — A student in the southern republic of Adygeya was convicted Wednesday and sentenced to one year in prison for posting a video purportedly showing the execution of two men on the Internet. A court in Maikop, the republic’s capital, handed down the sentence after Viktor Milkov was convicted for inciting ethnic hatred by posting the three-minute video on his Livejournal blog in August, Gazeta.
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MONDAY — The Interior Ministry on Wednesday warned Moscow and St. Petersburg authorities that an impostor posing as a police officer might attempt to physically harm opposition activists during anti-Kremlin rallies in the cities on Saturday and Sunday. The warning came on the same day as the event organizers, The Other Russia coalition, accused authorities of unlawfully cracking down on its members, several of whom said they had barricaded themselves into their own homes for fear of arrest. |
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Etyud Ltd., a St. Petersburg based company that operates the fast-food chain Chainaya Lozhka (Tea Spoon) has announced regional expansion and plans for an IPO in 2011. By then, the chain hopes to comprise 400 tea-rooms generating turnover of $300 to $400 million. |
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The government may impose limits on oil products shipments by river in 2008 following a large fuel oil spill from a river barge in the Kerch Strait earlier this month, industry and government sources said Wednesday. |
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Business FM radio station financed by media magnate Arkady Gaidamak plans to win an audience of 400,000 people in St. Petersburg. The radio station, which started broadcasting in the city in May this year, already has a regular daily audience of 140,000 people, the managers said Wednesday at a press conference. |
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MOSCOW — The current account surplus will shrink by less than expected this year because of high oil prices but will turn negative by 2010, a senior Economic Development and Trade Ministry official said Wednesday. |
 MOSCOW — Lawyers and colleagues of Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak mounted a fierce defense of the imprisoned official Wednesday, calling for his immediate release as he faces charges of attempted embezzlement. Storchak’s court-appointed lawyer appealed his arrest, and a date for the hearing is expected by the end of the week, Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said. |
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MOSCOW — Norilsk Nickel’s largest shareholders moved a step closer to sealing a key deal Wednesday that could see Vladimir Potanin gain control of the mining giant and end months of speculation over the fate of business partner Mikhail Prokhorov’s stake. |
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MOSCOW — Russian companies’ widespread use of pirated computer software may be partly because of ignorance about the costs and risks involved, according to a survey released Wednesday. More than 80 percent of commercial enterprises across the country continue to use unlicensed or pirated software, according to the survey, which was commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by IDC, a global provider of market intelligence. |
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 The south Caucasus, which are the three nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, have always been the “lands in-between” — between the Black and Caspian Seas, between Europe and Asia, between Russia and Iran and between Christianity and Islam. And, more recently, they stood between Soviet authoritarianism and European democracy. |
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Historically, subventions have been considered a way of providing state support to investors following the introduction of Chapter 25 of the Tax Code which limited the reduction of the tax rate by regions to 4 percent. |
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 The other day a student told me that he had no memory of the Soviet Union or its collapse. He was only four-years old when it happened, so for him the Soviet Union and communism are as much parts of history as the American Civil War or the Roman Empire. They have no palpable relevance for his life in the age of the “green menace” of Islam or the iPhone. With periodic visits to the Soviet Union no longer available as a reality check, that student is left with archives, memoirs, diaries and testimonies to recreate what the Soviet Union might have been. |
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 The historian and author Orlando Figes visited St. Petersburg last month to take part in the Jewel of Russia Russian-British cultural festival. Fresh from a rash of media appearances to promote “The Whisperers,” Figes was happy to discuss his new book over a Coke and a sandwich in the lobby of the Astoria Hotel. |
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Although the Other Russia coalition has not been permitted to take part in State Duma elections, due on Dec. 2, it did come up with alternative candidates on its party list, and in St. Petersburg this included musician Mikhail Borzykin of local band Televizor. Indeed, “Get Out of Control,” “Your Daddy Is a Fascist” and “Fed Up” — the songs that Borzykin wrote in the Soviet Union of the 1980s — seem more relevant than ever these days. Televizor will perform at Orlandina on Friday, while the Other Russia will hold a protest rally, called a Dissenters’ March, at noon on Sunday. The main disagreement so far is about the location; the authorities only agreed to a distant route, where the demonstration will have little impact, while the organizers were insisting on Palace Square as this paper went to print. |
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 Talented bass-baritone Ildar Abdrazakov, a rare breed of Russian singer that has built an international career performing almost exclusively an Italian and French repertoire, comes to town this month for two performances at the Mariinsky, the theater where he began his career. |
 Eduard Limonov, the controversial politician whose National-Bolshevik Party, NBP, has been recently banned by a court as “extremist,” has been busy working with chess champion and oppositionist Garry Kasparov in The Other Russia, a coalition that aims to revive and defend Russian democracy. Limonov has been demonstrating with Kasparov and others in the Marches of Dissenters, anti-Kremlin rallies that have often been brutally suppressed by the police. |
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 This week, Ogonyok and Russian Newsweek magazines took a pop at the feeble state of the Russian music industry, or specifically the singers’ penchant for lip-synching and the producers’ penchant for switching the lineup of their girl groups — a musical genre that one described as “singing knickers. |
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Gimnazya // 21 Konnogvardeisky Bulvar. Tel: 570 0770. // www.gimnazya.ru // Dinner for two with wine 2790 rubles ($116) It will take someone with a worldly palate and broad appreciation of generally incongruous cultures to comprehend the selection of dishes available at the new restaurant Gimnazya. Located a few steps from Ploshchad Truda, Gimnazya is housed in a small, one-story building that resembles a mix of an Italian villa and an elegant coach house. While the exterior hints at a former splendor, it does not given guests an accurate measure of the grandiosity of the rooms inside. Technically there is only one dining room. The main dining hall spans the length of the building. |
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 A kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” tells, if more often shouts, the story of the bastard monarch who ruled England with an iron grip and two tightly closed legs. |
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MOSCOW — Russia celebrated Thursday their qualification for the Euro 2008 finals, praising Croatia’s glittering performance at Wembley and Russia manager Guus Hiddink. “Hvala Vam, Hrvatska!” or “Thank You Croatia!” shouted the headline, written in Croatian, on the first page of Sovietsky Sport daily, rejoicing in the sensational 3-2 win over England at Wembley on Wednesday night. |
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