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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that a final list of the country’s top 1,000 managers, which the Kremlin is compiling to help fill senior government posts, has been completed and will be made available to the public. The recruitment drive, first announced last summer, is a response to the difficulties the state is facing in identifying and recruiting competent personnel for public service, top officials say. It also highlights the lack of a proper recruitment system for government posts and the need for a new generation of managers to replace the Soviet-era nomenklatura, and Kremlin watchers say the initiative is an attempt to lessen the influence of civil servants directly loyal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Medvedev has reached out to Communists, nationalists and liberal politicians alike to create the pool of potential applicants, with the Kremlin contacting all four parties in the State Duma and asking them to submit the names of potential candidates for government jobs. |
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BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Pigeons walking in the grounds of the Catherine Palace, former residence of the Romanov tsars, in Tsarskoe Selo on Wednesday. Forecasters are predicting overcast weather and snowfall over the weekend with temperatures set to hover around freezing point. |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank sought to put a limit on the ruble’s gradual slide on Thursday, setting its floor 10 percent below current levels after the currency stabilized in recent sessions. The central bank said it would stop widening the ruble trading corridor from Jan. 23 — a process which cut nearly a fifth off the currency’s value since November — and would switch to a managed float.
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 More than 150 people gathered in central St. Petersburg on Tuesday to mourn lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova, who were murdered in Moscow on Monday, and protest against political killings. Markelov was known for taking on human rights cases and defending left-wing and anti-Nazi activists, while Baburova was also an anarchist and anti-Nazi activist, so a plan for mourners to gather by Bukvoyed book store on Ligovsky Prospekt was quickly hatched on leftist and activist e-mail and Internet forums late Monday, just hours after the two were murdered. |
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Brit Paper Bought MOSCOW (SPT) — Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev has purchased a controlling stake in British newspaper The Evening Standard, the newspaper’s parent company announced Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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A temporary center to help migrant workers who have been fired will be opened in St. Petersburg, the city’s ombudsman has said. Igor Mikhailov announced the plan after meeting Zhafar Ponchayev, the head of the Muslim Board of St. Petersburg and the Northwest Region, Fontanka. |
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The Dzerzhinsky District Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of the Memorial human rights group and declared the Dec. 4 police raid on the organization’s local headquarters at 23 Ulitsa Rubinshteina illegitimate. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday warned regional governments to get serious about fighting unemployment and ordered his representatives to the federal administrative districts to “deal with” those who are neglecting a federally funded effort to create jobs. |
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Russian Oscar Hopeful ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A Russian film has been nominated for an Oscar, it was announced in Hollywood on Thursday. The film was nominated in the Best Animated Short Film category. |
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The first Starbucks coffee shop in St. Petersburg will open in the Leto trade and entertainment complex currently under construction on the Pulkovskoye Highway, a source close to the company has revealed. The cafe will occupy an area of 170 square meters on the first floor, according to Stanislav Bilen, senior consultant at the St. |
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St. Petersburg’s Sea Port is set to expand during the next 16 years after City Hall approved a plan on Tuesday for developing outer harbors for the port in Kronshtadt, Bronk, and Lomonosov by 2025. |
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H&M to Open in 2010 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — One of the world’s biggest retailers, the Swedish company H&M (Hennes&Mauritz) may enter the St. Petersburg market in 2010. The company is holding negotiations with the construction company Briz on the possibility of leasing 2,000 square meters in the Galeria retail complex that is under construction near Moskovsky railway station. |
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 President-elect Barack Obama has formed his team of advisers, but it would be difficult to call them “friends of Russia.” This reflects in part the cool relations Washington and Moscow have had for nearly eight years. No wonder the Kremlin is taking a close look at statements made by members of the new administration to discern whether Washington will support many of the same positions adopted by former U. |
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President Barack Obama’s plan to save the U.S. economy is so ambitious that it surpasses even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. |
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 An exhibition that criticizes City Hall’s town-planning policies has been forced to relocate from the Mayakovsky Library where it was due to run through Jan. 31. The exhibition, which depicted what St. Petersburg may look like in the future, was abruptly closed by the library’s management last week — a move caused by pressure from the authorities, the organizers believe. |
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For me, 2009 is going to be Ãîä Ðåìîíòà (Repair Year). There are two basic ways to remodel your apartment. The Smart Way is to spend several months doing research, getting bids, picking out tile and paint, and then having the whole messy job done while you are out at the dacha. |
 A wobbly table in a blue wooden house overlooking silver birch trees is witnessing the worldwide revival of interest in the work of an often underrated 19th-century Russian composer. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whose “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” in “The Nutcracker” ballet delights children and adults alike, wrote his later works at the table in his last residence in the small town of Klin, about 85 kilometers northwest of Moscow. |
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The opening of Russia’s first organic vegetarian restaurant makes the election of a black president in the U.S. seem unsurprising, even standard in comparison. |
 An official portrait of former U.S. First Lady Laura Bush by Siberia-born, St. Petersburg-educated artist Alexander Titovets was unveiled at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this month as former president George W. Bush helicoptered into history and the memorializing of his regime began. Titovets, who emigrated to the U.S. from St. Petersburg in 1992, landed the commission partly because he and his wife, Lyuba, settled in El Paso, Texas, not far from Midland, Texas, where Laura Bush was born and now resides with her husband in retirement. |
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 If I were a Martian or happened to be born around 1990 then I would’ve totally dug “Stilyagi” (translated as “Style Hunters” but given the English title “Boogie Bones” by the film’s creators. |
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SHIJIAZHUANG, China — A Chinese court on Thursday sentenced two men to death for their role in a tainted milk scandal that killed at least six children, while the woman most widely blamed for the tragedy got life in jail. Nearly 300,000 children fell ill last year after drinking milk intentionally laced with melamine, a toxic industrial compound that can give a fake positive on protein tests. |
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