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Foreign managers and other employees are facing difficulties in obtaining the documents necessary to continue to work in Russia after the quota for work permits for foreigners for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast was filled last month. The local migration services are unable to help the lines of individuals and HR managers flooding their offices, as the decision on whether or not to increase the quota for the year can only be made in Moscow by the Federal Migration Service. At a roundtable on labor migration policies organized by the American Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Sergei Smirnov, deputy head of immigration issues for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, said the decision would be made at the end of this month or the beginning of October. |
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TIMUR’S TERRITORY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Music critic Artemy Troitsky attending the opening of the “Timur’s Territory: St. Petersburg — New York” exhibition at the State Hermitage on Wednesday. The exhibition features the works of the late St. Petersburg artist Timur Novikov and marks the 50th anniversary of his birth. |
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MOSCOW — When U.S. Senators Barack Obama and John McCain go live on air to battle over foreign policy in their first presidential debate Friday, last month’s conflict with Georgia might mean that Russia will feature more prominently, the candidates’ top advisers said. Viewers should not expect a fiery debate on this point, however, as the topic is still likely to be overshadowed by the drama of the global financial meltdown and attention to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.
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MOSCOW — Ruslan Yamadayev, a former State Duma deputy and a member of a Chechen clan that challenged President Ramzan Kadyrov’s authority, was gunned down in central Moscow late Wednesday. An unidentified attacker walked up and fired a pistol several times into Yamadayev’s Mercedes S500 after Yamadayev stopped for a red light at 10 Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya, near the White House, Interior Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin said in televised remarks. |
All photos from issue.
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Up to 10,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride are expected to travel through St. Petersburg in the next six months, according to the local branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona. The next cargo is expected to arrive in town in early October. Arriving by sea, the radioactive material will then be sent by rail to the town of Novouralsk in Siberia for reprocessing and storage. Most of the cargo arrives in Russia from the Netherlands and Germany but Russia has signed contracts with India, Pakistan and China — states that are rapidly bolstering their nuclear programs — and looks set to receive even more spent nuclear fuel and uranium hexafluoride for reprocessing. |
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BARGE HAULERS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Workmen pulling cable on Palace Square on Wednesday in a scene that echoes Ilya Repin’s “Barge Haulers on the Volga” painting of 1870-1873, on display at the Russian Museum. |
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MOSCOW — Transportation Minister Igor Levitin said Wednesday that there were no mechanical problems with the Aeroflot Nord airliner that crashed near Perm on Sept. 14, killing all 88 people on board. “This was not a case in which the plane should not have been allowed to fly because of a technical defect,” Levitin said, adding that both of the jet’s engines were in proper working order before the flight and there had been no midair explosion, Interfax reported.
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 NEW YORK — Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has briefed Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin about foreign policy challenges regarding Moscow, particularly Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August. “It was great,” Palin told reporters of her hour-long session with Kissinger as she left his Park Avenue office. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday criticized the director of Polyus Gold for “whining” in a comment that may have played a part in dampening investor demand for stock in one of the world’s largest gold miners. |
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MOSCOW — Consumer prices rose 0.5 percent in the first three weeks of September, according to official data Wednesday that pointed to an acceleration in inflation this month. Prices jumped 0.2 percent in the week to Monday — the biggest weekly increase since mid-July. With about a week to go, September’s inflation rate looks set to surpass August’s 0.4 percent. Prices are already up 10.2 percent in the year to date. “It is a horrible number,” said Yulia Tseplyayeva, chief economist for Russia and CIS at Merrill Lynch, forecasting that prices would rise 0.7 percent in September as whole. Increases in the cost of eggs, meat products, salt and sweet goods in the latest week offset a 1. |
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 A brand-new model of the Kirovets front loader tractor, made by the St. Petersburg Tractor Plant — a subsidiary of the Kirov Works — was one of the objects on display at the Rossiisky Promyshlennik (Russian Industrialist) exhibition held this week at Lenexpo, the city’s main exhibition center. |
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ASTANA — Russia’s ally Kazakhstan has pulled out of business deals worth billions of dollars in Georgia, a state company official said Thursday, a month after the conflict between Russia and Georgia. State energy company Kazmunaigaz has abandoned plans to build a refinery in the Georgian port city of Batumi, while its subsidiary Kaztransgaz has cancelled the purchase of Georgian gas distributor Tbilgaz, the official said. |
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“Higher quality service for lower prices” is the motto with which the luxury vehicle rental service, Dollar Rent A Car, plans to penetrate St. Petersburg’s promising car rental market. |
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 From uploading amateur recordings onto the Internet to releasing an album and performing in Moscow, Alina Orlova has come a long way in the past two years. The Lithuania-born singer/songwriter and artist, 20, who sings in Lithuanian, English and Russian, will make her St. |
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Amid nationalistic hysteria in the Kremlin-controlled media, the local rock band DDT will perform an anti-war concert called “Don’t Shoot.” Named after a song that the band’s frontman Yury Shevchuk wrote in 1980, when the first coffins from Afghanistan arrived in his hometown of Ufa, the concert is the band’s comment on the recent hostilities in Georgia. |
 Ethnomechanica, a world music festival set up, for the first time, by the team behind SKIF (an annual festival of experimental music, jazz, rock and folk, held in April), began Thursday with a film program about urban and rural folklore. Bands and DJs will perform in two rooms of the former film theater Priboi, where the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, run by the late musician’s widow Anastasia Kuryokhina, is located. |
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Russkaya Rybalka (Russian Fishing) // 452a Primorskoye Shosse // Tel: +7 901 310 9998 // Open noon through midnight // Dinner for four with wine: 7,423 rubles ($297) The restaurant Russkaya Rybalka (Russian Fishing) poses a number of problems. |
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CAPE TOWN — South Africa’s parliament on Thursday elected Kgalema Motlanthe, deputy leader of the ruling ANC, as interim president of a country gripped by the worst political crisis since the end of apartheid. Motlanthe, overwhelmingly elected in a secret ballot, replaces Thabo Mbeki, who resigned on Sunday after nine years in power. |
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HONG KONG — The European Commission proposed on Thursday tests and restrictions on Chinese food products containing powdered milk as UNICEF and the World Health Organisation called China’s growing milk scandal “deplorable. |
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Issues Archive