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Contradictions abounded in this year’s annual address delivered by Governor Valentina Matviyenko to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday. Matviyenko’s speech received a predictable welcome from the pro-Kremlin United Russia faction that holds the majority in the city parliament. However the speech was slammed by the Communist and Just Russia factions of the assembly for containing an overdose of wishful thinking, lacking consistency and balance, and failing to give details of a credible program of social reforms. Matviyenko brought a customary sense of pomp and pride to the presentation. “Throughout the past year, Russia’s northern capital has been striving to strengthen its reputation as an international business and cultural center: the level of the 11th International Economic Forum was unbelievably high; the Mariinsky Theater’s anniversary became an event of international significance; the world’s sports elite flocked to the city to attend the award ceremony of the Laureus prize,” Matviyenko told the parliamentarians on Wednesday. |
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PRIVATES ON PARADE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Military cadets on Wednesday rehearsing for the May 9 Victory Day parade on Palace Square. The parade celebrates the end of World War II and this year will feature more military equipment than has been the case since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. |
 MOSCOW/BRUSSELS — European Union efforts to agree a long-delayed mandate for partnership negotiations with Russia stalled again on Thursday despite a prediction of imminent agreement from Luxembourg’s prime minister. Diplomats said Lithuania maintained its veto on starting the talks to demand assurances on energy supplies, cooperation over a missing businessman and Russian movement on frozen conflicts in former Soviet republics.
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TBILISI — Georgia said on Thursday it would seek Western support to replace Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway province of Abkhazia with an international force, but NATO struck a cautious note. “Russia’s presence, the presence of the Russian contingent in the conflict zone, is becoming a risk factor,” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told a meeting with foreign ambassadors broadcast by national television. “We plan to start intensive negotiations with countries that are Georgia’s friends about the expediency of the Russian peacekeeping contingent’s presence in the conflict zone,” he added. Russia sent peacekeepers to Abkhazia in 1994 after it brokered a deal between Tbilisi and Abkhaz separatists ending nearly two years of war in which thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands were made refugees. |
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 Time was when getting your hands on an individual’s income, property and telephone numbers required a trip to a nearby kiosk to buy pirated discs containing illegal databases. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A senior government economic official on Wednesday urged foreign investors not to fear new legislation that limits foreign investment in the country’s most strategic, and lucrative, sectors and asked them to give it time to work. The bill, passed by the State Duma earlier this month, aims to ensure majority state control over 42 strategic sectors, including energy, aerospace and telecommunications. “Don’t be scared of this law, but approach it with the belief” that it will one day run smoothly, Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Stanislav Voskresensky told a investor conference hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin called Boris Yeltsin “one of the most striking politicians of the 20th century” as he honored the former president at the unveiling of a new monument at his grave Wednesday, the first anniversary of Yeltsin’s death. |
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The Federal Space Agency on Wednesday denied media reports that the lives of a crew returning from the international space station were in danger during their unusually rough ride in a Soyuz capsule on the weekend. “This is nothing but a smear campaign,” agency spokesman Alexander Vorobyov said. |
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Tambov Mayor Charged MOSCOW (SPT) — Prosecutors have formally charged Tambov Mayor Maxim Kosenkov with kidnapping in connection with the abduction of a Ukrainian man in Moscow, Interfax reported Wednesday. |
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LONDON — British-based car retailer Inchcape has agreed to buy Russia’s Musa Motors Group for up to $700 million to tap the country’s fast-growing luxury car market, it said on Thursday. Inchcape, whose main markets are currently Australia, Belgium, Greece, Hong Kong, Singapore and Britain, said it was buying 75. |
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Lenta’s warring shareholders seem to have finally come to an agreement after Alexei Bobrov replaced Vladimir Senkin as general manager of Lenta LLC, and changes were made to the board of directors of Lenta Ltd. |
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McDonald’s to Expand ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — McDonald’s plans to increase the number of its restaurants in Russia to 233 restaurants by the end of 2008, Interfax reported Tuesday. McDonald’s will open 40 new restaurants this year. Last year the company opened 21 restaurants in Russia, investing 1. |
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The merger between Exigen Services and StarSoft Development Labs has brought expected benefits, managers said Thursday at a press conference. Over the last year, turnover of the companies, which united under the name of Exigen Services in January 2007, increased by 40 percent to more than $70 million. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom warned Wednesday that its patience was running out in the talks to finalize the purchase of Kovykta from TNK-BP, saying the government could simply seize the license for the huge field from the besieged Russian-British venture. “We can’t wait forever,” Gazprom deputy chief executive Alexander Medvedev said at a news conference. |
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Judges from the Golovinsky District Court have probably presided over quite a few puzzling cases in their careers. But the case of U.S. Pastor Phillip Miles must have seemed particularly strange to observers and the general public, if not to the judges themselves. Two months ago, the 57-year-old pastor at the Christ Community Church in Conway, South Carolina, decided to bring a gift for a friend living in Perm. His idea for a present was 20 hunting rifle rounds. What was he thinking? After all, there is probably no country in the world that allows outgoing or incoming passengers to carry undeclared ammunition, whether for hunting rifles or other firearms. |
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 Imagine a huge and diverse country bordering the European Union yet spanning 11 time zones — one with a developing and dynamic market, an annual growth rate of about 7 percent over the last eight years and a growing and increasingly affluent middle class. |
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Modern Chechnya, like France under Louis XIV, is going through the final stage of its centralization. The latest victim in that process is the Vostok battalion commanded by Sulim Yamadayev. Vostok is an elite Defense Ministry unit that reports to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. |
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 Tuesday’s premiere of a new production of the classic ballet Spartacus at the Mikhailovsky Theater is not just another opening of another show but an important event for cultural life in St. Petersburg. After all, the director of the ballet, Georgy Kovtun, says that it should be “suicide” to stage Spartacus in St. |
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This week, local television channel 100-TV banned a live appearance by Televizor, a local band whose recent lyrics criticize Kremlin’s policies and whose frontman, Mikhail Borzykin, has been a frequent participant of opposition rallies. |
 Diverse genres of music will be represented, as they are every year, at SKIF, the annual contemporary music festival that commemorates the late local musician Sergei Kuryokhin, and run by his widow Anastasiya Kuryokhina. With its opening night on Thursday, headlined by the Norwegian trio of Nils Petter Molvaer, Thomas Stronen and Eivind Aarset, already behind it, SKIF looks forward to further highlights including Harmonia, Germany’s reformed Krautrock band from the 1970s that featured Brian Eno as a member in 1975/76, performing Friday. |
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 A colleague of Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) shrewdly wrapped up that great impresario’s work into three categories: “To reveal Russia to itself; to reveal Russia to the world; to reveal the world — the new world — to itself. |
 LONDON — A Danish choreographer has dug up a forgotten film score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and turned it into a ballet danced by Cuban star Carlos Acosta. Kim Brandstrup, whose “Rushes — Fragments of a Lost Story” premiered at Covent Garden in London on Wednesday, stumbled across an incomplete score Prokofiev wrote for a film version of Pushkin’s classic short story “The Queen of Spades. |
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 There can be few more literal or expressive examples of Soviet ideology in architecture than the Maslennikov Kitchen Factory in Samara. On the ground, it appears to be a normal multistorey building, but when you walk around it you notice its slightly unusual shape. |
 Confronting the career-ending possibilities presented by a mass grave unearthed in central Moscow, a government supervisor in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel, “Stalin’s Ghost” (2007), frets aloud: “What if the grave runs under the entire court?” Not one to miss a straight line, Arkady Renko, the stoic, indefatigable investigator who is making his sixth appearance since his debut 27 years ago in Smith’s “Gorky Park,” weighs in. |
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 This week, the festering Yana Rudkovskaya and Viktor Baturin divorce scandal has erupted again in the tabloids. Who needs Heather Mills and Paul McCartney? This couple — or at least one half of it — has been spraying its personal life over the tabloids with the same kind of gusto as the glass-of-water-throwing Heather “Mucca” Mills. |
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Madridsky Dvor // Suvorovsky Prospekt 26 // Tel.: 271 2094 // Open daily from 12pm until the last customer // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with alcohol: 3,410 rubles ($145) Indoor fountains, pseudo-stone sculptures, arches and lampposts. |
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One way to enjoy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” — at least vicariously — is to think of the movie as the Judd Apatow Stock Company’s Hawaiian vacation. Those pasty-faced funny guys have been working awfully hard over the past few years, so who can begrudge them a few weeks of surf, sun, babes and fun? I don’t know if Apatow himself, a producer of this movie (the director is the first-timer Nicholas Stoller), went along for the trip. |
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 BANGKOK — Rice prices in Thailand, the world’s top exporter, surged to $1,000 (500 pounds) a tonne on Thursday as concerns about food security first triggered by a handful of Asian export bans spread as far as the United States. This week’s five percent jump takes prices to nearly three times their level at the start of the year, intensifying fears of social unrest in Asia as millions of the region’s poor find themselves struggling to pay for staple goods. |
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HARARE — A shipment of Chinese arms bound for Zimbabwe will be recalled after South African port workers refused to unload the vessel and neighboring countries barred it from their ports, China said on Thursday. |
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 BARCELONA — Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson praised Cristiano Ronaldo’s performance in the 0-0 draw with Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final first leg on Wednesday despite his failure to convert an early penalty. “Cristiano Ronaldo was a bit unlucky with the penalty,” said the Scot. |
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BARCELONA — Formula One’s governing body launched an anti-racism campaign on Thursday at the Spanish Grand Prix circuit where McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton was abused in February. |
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