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 St. Petersburg’s School No. 197 is piled high with hundreds of packages bearing labels such as “Female Warm Clothes,” “Teenager Clothes,” “Towels,” and “Baby Clothes.” The school at 29 Ulitsa Furshtadskaya has been designated as a collection point for items to be donated to South Ossetia, the region at the center of the military conflict that erupted between Russia and Georgia last week. “It’s only the third day we’ve been operating but we’ve gathered tons of things,” said Igor, one of the volunteers working at the center. “On Tuesday we had about one thousand people come along. Now we’ve already stopped counting,” he said. On Thursday, city residents continued to bring warm clothes, footwear, linen, toys and other items to the center. “I came here because I survived World War II, and because I know what hunger and cold is, and what it’s like to be hiding from fascists,” said Olga Fyodorova, 72, her eyes full of tears. |
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WATER WORKS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
An exhibit at the Power of Water exhibition at the State Russian Museum. The Russian caption at the bottom reads “Russian Water.” The exhibition, which opened on Thursday, runs until Nov. 11. |
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MOSCOW — Hackers knocked down Georgian government web sites days before Russian tanks rolled into the country’s territory, in what experts said Wednesday was an ominous sign that cyber-attacks might foreshadow future armed conflicts. Major Internet security firms reported massive attacks on Georgian web sites by hackers using botnets, a network of “zombie” computers that can be used to overwhelm servers with millions of unsolicited requests.
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All photos from issue.
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 An anti-war rally drew dozens of protesters to central St. Petersburg on Tuesday despite government-controlled media presenting Russians as unanimous in supporting the invasion of Georgia. Russian media has been waging an anti-Georgian campaign since hostilities between Georgia and Russia began last week. Around 60 people gathered on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa, next to a statue of writer Nikolai Gogol, with about 40 holding banners, on Tuesday evening. One of the posters criticized the Russian media's response to the conflict with the slogan, "We Need Information, Not Propaganda." Others read, "Stop the War" and "Human Life Is Priceless. |
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WHIP HAND
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Victor Ignatov, a Cossack, holds up a traditional whip with which he would like to punish Georgia in defence of Russia, as he addresses a gathering of Russian nationalists on Marsovo Pole on Thursday. |
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Responding to the concerns of foreign students who are regularly attacked by skinheads and radical youth groups, the Vyborgsky District Police Department is introducing two patrol routes that cover the areas where most of the incidents occur, according to police statistics. “According to police reports that we have collected since January 2008, most of the crimes and attacks on foreigners and members of antifascist organizations in the Vyborgsky district have occurred on weekends in areas surrounding the Udelnaya and Ozerki metro stations,” reads a police statement posted on the St.
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MOSCOW — In an unusually harsh ruling, a Moscow court has sentenced a deputy editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta to eight years in prison in a lawsuit initiated by a deputy agriculture minister. The Meshchansky District Court sentenced Boris Zemtsov to a maximum-security prison after convicting him of extortion and drug charges, Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said Tuesday. |
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 Owners and staff of small businesses from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Lipetsk, Tambov and other Russian cities held a “meeting of empty baskets” outside the headquarters of Russia’s Ministry for Economic Development on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Ploshchad on Wednesday in an effort to attract attention to the plight of small businesses in the country. |
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St. Petersburg’s aspirations to become a Russian Detroit and car-making economic cluster have been thrown into doubt after City Hall’s Department of Economics, Industry and Trade passed new legislation to bring in ecological limitations for the Shushary industrial zone, where car plants have already been built by Toyota and General Motors. |
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MOSCOW — Any plans to use Georgia as a bridge for more energy supplies to Europe are likely set to gather dust now that the tiny country’s fierce armed conflict with Russia has exposed the insecurity of the route, analysts said. Georgia has been a key conduit of oil and gas from Central Asia to the West that bypasses Russia, and Europe has been hoping to build another pipeline to bring more gas from the area. |
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MOSCOW — Novolipetsk Steel said Wednesday that it agreed to buy John Maneely Company, the United States’ largest independent steel pipe and tube manufacturer, for $3. |
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 It was bound to happen at some point — President Dmitry Medvedev would have to face the difficult test of responding to a serious crisis. It came last week, when Georgia attacked South Ossetia with a barrage of Grad truck-fired missiles. His first official battle as president was not a very original one — the fight against corruption. |
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The missile attacks on South Ossetian towns that Tbilisi started on Aug. 7 have had catastrophic consequences. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili showed the entire world his ruthless aggression and violence against the Ossetians. |
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 “The Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler’s controversial Off-Broadway play that became a global sensation in the late 1990s, first appeared in Russian translation in 2005. Now it has been revived by Teatro Di Capua, an Italian company under the auspices of director Juliano Di Capua, for a run at St. |
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As someone who is always looking forward to my next snack or meal, I’m very happy in Russia. Russians are good eaters. They like good food, they like a lot of good food and they like to make every meal a celebration, be it a pot of óõà (fish soup) prepared on a bonfire by a lakeshore, or êóõíÿ ôüþæí (fusion cuisine) at a restaurant so trendy there is face control for shoes. |
 MOSCOW — A frothy cappuccino or fresh mozzarella salad is no longer enough. Russia’s growing middle classes now want service with a smile. With much of Europe and North America saturated, the newly affluent among Russia’s 143 million people are an attractive target for Western coffee shop chains eager for growth, and Starbucks and Costa Coffee are among brands now found in Moscow. But where once any alternative to Soviet-style fried meats and dill-laced boiled vegetables was a thrill, increased competition now means superior service is important to attract and retain customers. |
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 The month of August marks the middle stage in the process of choosing the winner of The Big Book, Russia’s biggest literary award worth 3 million rubles ($130,000). |
 How would you deal with having more serfs than you knew what to do with? Count Nicholas Sheremetev had to cope with this question for most of his life. In 1795, approximately 1.5 percent of Russia’s 360,000 male nobles owned more than 1,000 serfs. As the head of the Sheremetev family, Nicholas at his death in 1809 owned 210,000 serfs. |
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Korchma Salo // 36 Liteiny Prospekt. Tel: 579 2402 // Open daily from 11 a.m. until midnight // Menu in English, Russian and Ukrainian // Dinner for two without alcohol 1,333 rubles ($55) // Credit cards accepted Korchma Salo means “Lard Tavern” in Ukrainian, after the traditional source of fat in national cuisine. |
 It has been a slow week for the tabloids, which perhaps explains why they have been giving a lot of space to the distinctly untabloid story of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Mind you, even the British tabloid The Sun covered that, distilling his life and career into the pithy phrase that he “exposed Stalin’s Soviet evil. |
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 ISTANBUL — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began talks here Thursday on closer ties with Turkey and Tehran’s controversial nuclear program on his first ever bilateral visit to a NATO-member country. Heavy security measures were in place for Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, with snipers placed on rooftops around the Ataturk airport and police closing off the road leading into the city. |
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HARARE — Zimbabwean authorities confiscated opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s passport on Thursday, preventing him from leaving the country to attend a regional summit in South Africa, an MDC official said. |
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 BEIJING — Japanese swimmer Kosuke Kitajima and Chinese gymnast Yang Wei led a golden day for Asia on Thursday that showcased the continent’s growing sports might. Kitajima, Asia’s greatest swimmer, stole the spotlight from Michael Phelps with an unprecedented “double-double” in the Olympics breaststroke, adding the 200 meters gold to earlier victory in the 100, after wins in both events in Athens 2004. |
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BEIJING — Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian threw down his Olympic bronze medal in protest on Thursday after his bid for greco-roman gold was ended by a decision denounced by the Swedish coach as “politics. |
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BEIJING — He’s the hero of the Beijing Olympics — but Michael Phelps has become the bane of bookmakers. Gamblers have joined Phelps’s winning streak with online betting sites reporting a spike in money riding on the U.S. swimmer and higher interest overall from gamblers in the Games. |
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BEIJING — Teenage welterweight Billy Joe Saunders lost to Cuba’s Carlos Banteaux in the second round of the Olympic boxing competition on Thursday and immediately set his sights on London in four years’ time. |
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