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MOSCOW — From Boris Yeltsin to Margaret Thatcher, from Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky to General Augusto Pinochet — Timothy Bell, the British godfather of PR, has faced some real challenges. And now, the 66-year-old, staunchly conservative spin doctor again has his work cut out for him if he is to alter public perceptions of his latest client — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko’s nickname as “Europe’s last dictator” is sure to feature prominently on Bell’s things-to-tackle list. “He would like his country to be better understood, and his successes to be better grasped” Bell said by telephone Friday. Bell, a member of Britain’s House of Lords whose most recent work has revolved around his friend and the Kremlin’s self-exiled enemy Boris Berezovsky, was invited by Lukashenko to his presidential office in Minsk for a midday meeting Thursday. |
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SLAVIC ICON
/ Reuters
A woman walks past a billboard bearing a photographic portrait of the outgoing President Vladimir Putin and the word ‘Russia’ in the town of Leposavic in north Kosovo on Saturday. |
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Doctors treating a Ghanaian student after he was stabbed 36 times by a suspected neo-Nazi gang on Wednesday said Monday that his life was not in danger after he underwent multiple operations including brain surgery, according to Aliou Tunkara, president of St. Petersburg’s African Union. “They attacked to kill, but quite against their expectations, the victim survived,” said Tunkara, who linked the timing of the attack to Wedneday’s UEFA Cup soccer match played in St.
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Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Monday that St. Petersburg’s European University will reopen in the near future after a flap involving fire regulations and heated accusations that it was closed for political reasons. “The city’s fire inspectorate was satisfied with the most recent series of corrections to the violations of fire safety regulations,” Matviyenko said in a telephone conversation with the university’s rector, Nikolai Vakhtin, adding she would make sure the conflict gets resolved as soon as possible. |
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Radiation levels near a stationary train in the city’s Avtovo residential district were 30 times higher than the accepted norm, city ecologists said after they took measurements next to it on Saturday. |
All photos from issue.
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As the leader of the Yabloko oppositional liberal party Maxim Reznik began a third week in custody in a case he calls “fabricated,” protests demanding his immediate release continued both in Moscow and St. Petersburg and political pressure from the authorities on the local branch of the party continued. Meanwhile, it has been announced that a meeting in support of Reznik is planned for Sunday. Last week, Reznik’s case was discussed during a closed-door meeting between Yabloko’s national leader Grigory Yavlinsky and President Vladimir Putin, their first such meeting since 2006. |
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IRISH IN THE ARCTIC
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Sixth International St. Patrick’s Day Festival of Folk-Rock Music at the Arktika Club on Ulitsa Berga on Saturday. Several groups played at the event for about 200 guests. |
 MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday he saw a chance to move relations with the United States forward after he received what he called a “serious document” from U.S. President George W. Bush. There were no details on its content but officials traveling with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the letter set out the issues the two sides should focus on to resolve differences.
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Air Ticket Hike? As London’s two largest airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, increase aircraft landing duties, air passengers from St. Petersburg to London can expect rising ticket prices, Fontanka.ru reported. In 2008-09 duty at Heathrow could rise by 23. |
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MOSCOW — An adoptive U.S. mother of three Russian children has been charged with murdering an infant and abusing a 4-year-old boy who was found suffering from malnourishment. |
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 Consumer rights advocates have urged the public to be vigilant when purchasing food products following a survey that revealed a series of market brands to be unfit for human consumption. According to Anatoly Golov, co-president of the North West Russian Union of Consumers, about 50 percent of oil, dairy and meat products on the market do not meet quality standards. While 30 percent of such products contain ingredients not indicated on the label, others carry false information about the contents, he said. The findings by the North West Russian Union of Consumers, the St. Petersburg Civil Control Consumers’ Public Organization and the St. |
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FINE FURNITURE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Some of the items on offer at the Ralph Lauren furniture gallery, which opened on Friday at Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Ralph Lauren Home also opened a gallery in Moscow last October. |
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If P&C Insurance, a leading property and accident insurance company in Scandinavia, is acquiring the Russian insurance company Region as a means of entering the Russian insurance retail market, the company said Friday in a statement. At the beginning of 2007, If opened a Russian office that is based in St. Petersburg and also has a branch in Moscow.
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MOSCOW — Oil and gold prices punched through to new highs last week, a rare bright spot for some speculators in what was otherwise another week of shuddering losses in the United States. Washington-based Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity groups, saw one of its funds collapse Thursday, overloaded by $22 billion of debt, sparking new fears about what lies around the corner. |
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Oil firm Gazprom Neft said Saturday that it did not expect organic growth of oil production this year, although output would rise by 14 percent because of the acquisition of a new asset. |
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MOSCOW — A day after apparently settling a gas price dispute with Ukraine, Moscow set the scene on Friday for further tough talks with Kiev by saying adamantly that the era of low prices was over for good. Gazprom and Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz Ukrainy on Thursday struck a deal on prices for this year and said they would remove an intermediary in their trade. |
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Gazprom Plans Gas Hub MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom plans to create Europe’s largest natural-gas exchange in St. Petersburg as Russia seeks to turn its tsarist capital into a hub for trading commodities, Kommersant reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s Economy Ministry has proposed to cut the value-added tax to 12 to 13 percent from the current 18 percent from 2009 as a measure to boost growth in non-energy sectors of the economy, a document showed on Sunday. The proposal comes after both outgoing President Vladimir Putin and President-Elect Dmitry Medvedev took the side of the industrial lobby in a tax debate that dragged on for years despite strong opposition from Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. |
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LONDON — Central Bank deputy head Konstantin Korishchenko told a sovereign wealth conference that the bank was “really worried” about inflation, while ruling out a stronger ruble as a weapon against price increases. |
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MOSCOW — Russian services conglomerate Sistema has sold its engine business for $190 million as part of its strategy to focus on services sector, the firm said on Monday. Sistema, controlled by billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, said in a statement its subsidiary, RTI Systems, had completed the sale of Sahles, which owns 71. |
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Russia is the largest country in the world by land area and the seventh largest in terms of population. It may also have the eighth-largest economy, which is rapidly climbing up the rankings. But its size does not insulate it from the financial turbulence that is increasingly seizing up the world economy. |
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It recently emerged that one of the most popular Russian social networking sites, Vkontakte.ru, was founded by relatives of St. Petersburg entrepreneur Mikhail Mirilashvili, who was imprisoned almost 7 years ago for kidnapping. |
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You wouldn’t have known by looking around Moscow that March 2 was election day. The ratio of strictly commercial to political ads was 10,000 to one. You had to peer intently to find an image of President Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev. Of course, why waste good rubles on placards and posters when the outcome was never in doubt? In the end, commercial interests simply trumps the political. |
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ᇂËÒÚ¸: envy ᇂËÒÚ¸ in Russian is an evil emotion. The verb Á‡‚ˉӂ‡Ú¸ (to envy someone) is related to the word ‚ˉ‡Ú¸ (to see — ‚ˉÂÚ¸ in contemporary Russian) and seems to have been first associated with ‰ÛÐÌÓÈ „·Á (the evil eye). If someone looked enviously at you, he could hex your success. Later under Christianity, this black magic became one of the seven sins. Today in Russia, Á‡‚ËÒÚ¸ comes in two main types, ·Â·¾ Ë ˜½Ð̇¾ (white and black), which represent a benign pleasure on the one hand and a bitter and rancorous ill will on the other. Although Western philosophers have noted this distinction, we don’t commonly distinguish between these two kinds of envy in everyday speech, which makes their translation rather awkward. |
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 The game is over” were the first words uttered by Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout when he was arrested by Thai police on March 6 after the nearly 10-year “game” came to a dramatic end. |
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An appeal by a Protestant group to close the 2x2 cartoon channel for purportedly promoting violence and hatred was well-timed. The appeal, which the Consultative Council of the Heads of Protestant Churches in Russia sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office on Wednesday, came less than a week after 2x2 had to pull two shows over a warning from the government media watchdog that the shows promoted “a cult of violence and brutality. |
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A gust of wind blows open a canvas tent flap to reveal a man reclining on a camp bed, flicking through a newspaper, while his wife puffs daintily on a cigarette. |
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As a veteran foreign-language teacher, I was intrigued by the recent New York Times article “Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home.” If you have good Internet access and a broadband computer connection, it seems that you can now study a new language interactively with a native speaker who wants to learn yours — and it’s free for both of you. |
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 BEIJING — China said on Monday it had shown great restraint in the face of violent protests by Tibetans, which it said were orchestrated by followers of the Dalai Lama seeking to wreck the Beijing Olympics in August. But even as the governor of Tibet said no guns were used against protesters in Lhasa, troops poured into neighboring areas to enforce control as the regional capital counted down to a midnight deadline for protesters to give up. |
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TEHRAN — Staunch opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad complained on Monday about vote counting in Iran’s parliamentary election, in which conservatives have retained their grip on the assembly, a news agency reported. |
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PARIS — Victorious left-wing leaders stepped up demands Monday for French President Nicolas Sarkozy to make big changes in government, after inflicting heavy losses on his right-wing camp in local elections. Sarkozy was also facing pressure from part of his own UMP party, which lost dozens of towns to the opposition Socialists including prized cities Toulouse and Strasbourg, in a vote cast as a referendum on his first 10 months in power. |
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MITROVICA, Kosovo — NATO troops came under fire during Serb riots in the northern Kosovo flashpoint of Mitrovica on Monday, in the worst violence in the territory since the Albanian majority declared independence last month. |
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GENEVA — Five years after the United States led an invasion of Iraq, millions of people there are still deprived of clean water and medical care, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday. In a sober report marking the anniversary of the 2003 start of the war, which ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and unleashed deep sectarian tensions, the humanitarian body said Iraqi hospitals lack beds, drugs, and medical staff. |
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BORMIO, Italy — Bode Miller said he felt deflated after Alpine skiing’s World Cup finals, even though he was happy about a season that brought him his second overall trophy. “The finals were really kind of a letdown for a lot of people,” said the American. “The downhill obviously was shaping up to look really positive and a really cool finish for the season. To get that cancelled, it hit everyone.” The men’s downhill, which had been due to open the five-day finals on Wednesday, was cancelled because of soft snow, leaving Miller second in the final standings behind Swiss Didier Cuche. Miller, racing as an independent after splitting with the United States team, still captured the overall cup he first won in 2005. |
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 ITALY — Canada’s Crispin Lipscomb scored a surprise victory Sunday in the World Cup season-ending men’s halfpipe at Valmalenco, Italy, The Vancouver Sun reported. |
 MOSCOW — Zenit St Petersburg began the defense of their Russian premier league title with a tepid 0-0 home draw against last year’s runners-up Spartak Moscow on Sunday. Chances were few and far between for Zenit and Spartak in their first match of league season at St. |
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INDIAN WELLS, California — Big-serving Andy Roddick crashed out of the Pacific Life Open on Sunday while second-seeded Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova advanced after a battling 6-1 4-6 6-3 win over Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova. |
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ATHENS — Pollution at the Beijing Olympics poses no immediate threat to athletes’ health but could affect world-class performances, the International Olympic Committee’s top medical official Arne Ljungqvist said on Monday. “I believe the conditions will be good for athletes although they will not necessarily be ideal,” the IOC medical commission chief told reporters in a conference call from Sweden. |
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 In her spirited memoir “Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life,” Sofka Zinovieff chronicles the extraordinary adventures of her grandmother, Sofka Dolgorouky. A charming White Russian emigre turned World War II prisoner turned outspoken British communist, Dolgorouky led a turbulent life full of passion, conflict and tragedy, but until the very end she remained “the life and soul of the party.” Dolgorouky was born in 1907 into a St. |
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 President Vladimir Putin’s surprise visit to see “Gore ot Uma” at the Sovremennik Theater and his criticism of the rendering of the principal role has sparked interest in the play itself, long considered a classic work of Russian literature. |
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September 2000: Putin promises to support foreign investors and production-sharing agreements. May 2001: Putin replaces Gazprom CEO Rem Vyakhirev with longtime St. Petersburg ally Alexei Miller. February 2003: TNK-BP formed through BP’s $6.75 billion investment into the joint venture with three oligarchs, the largest ever equity deal in Russia at the time. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive