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 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the Leningrad Oblast town of Pikalyovo on Thursday in an attempt to alleviate concerns surrounding the town’s dire economic situation. Pikalyovo’s three main enterprises, including, most notably, oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s BasElCement Pikalyovo, have ground to an almost complete halt, leaving about 4,000 people jobless and with mounting unpaid wages going back several months. Putin forced Deripaska to sign an agreement with Fosagro to supply raw materials to the BasElCement plant in Pikalyovo, Interfax reported. This action should allow work at the plants to restart. He also ordered that all outstanding wages be paid by Thursday. |
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THE CAR TSAR
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaking at the official opening ceremony for the new Nissan production plant on Tuesday. The $200 million plant, located to the northwest of St. Petersburg close to the ring road, has a capacity of 50,000 cars per year. See story on page 6. |
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Last Month’s failed mutiny at a tank base near Tbilisi was financed by a wealthy St. Petersburg banker with ties to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a senior Georgian lawmaker said. The banker, Alexander Ebralidze, owner of Konstans Bank, with an estimated fortune of at least $250 million, told The St. Petersburg Times that he was not behind the mutiny and did not know Putin personally.
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All photos from issue.
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The Communists of St. Petersburg will file a suit on Friday at Moscow’s Gagarinsky district court against the Rossia television channel asking for 1 billion rubles in compensation for moral damages for producing a color version of Tatyana Lioznova’s hugely popular Soviet classic “Seventeen Moments of Spring.” The original series, set in Germany in 1945, was originally released in 1973 and immediately become one of the nation’s most popular programs. It tells the story of the Soviet agent Maxim Maximovich Isayev, a man on a dangerous mission among the highest echelons of the Nazis where he is posing as Standartenfuhrer von Stirlitz. The film is loosely based on Yulian Semyonov’s 1968 novel of the same name. |
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 The Indian frigate Beas arrived in St. Petersburg on Wednesday for a four-day official visit. The ship, under the command of Captain Sunil V. Bhokare, is moored at the Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment together with its Russian host, the corvette Steregushchy. |
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MOSCOW — The names of police officers will be sewn on their uniforms, and police cars will be equipped with video cameras under new anti-corruption measures being implemented by the Interior Ministry. Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said Tuesday that police officers would start wearing badges with their names on by the end of the year to give people the opportunity “to report the actions of a certain police officer,” RIA-Novosti reported. |
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 The dark clouds over Russia’s economy may be lingering as long as the dreary weather during this year’s International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, but the opening day of the event focused on optimistic new projects in the city’s business, education and innovative technology spheres. |
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The Belarussian Central Bank’s web site is not exactly what you call an exciting read, but surfing its statistics section these days is harrowing, to say the least. |
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Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said Wednesday that his government needed more time to decide whether to permit construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, dealing a setback to his visiting Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The government will consider allowing the pipeline to cross Finland’s economic zone under the Baltic Sea in September or October, Vanhanen said after talks with Putin in Helsinki. Finnish President Tarja Halonen said after a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev in April that a decision might be made when the countries’ prime ministers had their next talks, which she said would take place in July. The choice of months for a Nord Stream decision may not be accidental, as Russia and Finland, which are at odds over Russia’s restrictions on logging exports, will hold a forum on the timber trade in the fall. |
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 Japanese automobile concern Nissan Motor Corporation opened a $200 million plant in St. Petersburg, its first in Russia, in a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Governor Valentina Matviyenko on Tuesday. |
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On a cold February day in 1999, then-Ford CEO Jacques Nasser came to the Kremlin with an interesting proposal: Ford would open a factory in Russia, building its inexpensive Focus model using both imported and Russian-made parts. Over the next five years, the U.S. auto giant would have to incease the use of locally made components until its Russian costs represented half the value of each car. Eager to open up the economy — devastated half a year earlier by a debt default and ruble collapse — to foreign investment, the Kremlin agreed. Ford laid out $150 million to build a factory on the site of a former Russky Diesel plant in Vsevolozhsk, just outside St. |
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 The Deposit Insurance Agency outlined the new structure of failed bank KIT Finance on Wednesday, heavily relying on Russian Railways and TransFinCapital to rehabilitate the brokerage — one of the first victims of the financial crisis last October. |
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Gref: Russia At Bottom ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Sberbank Chief Executive Officer German Gref said Russia’s economic contraction is slowing “sharply” and the country is at the bottom of the crisis. Further economic decline is unlikely, Gref, a former economy minister, told reporters in St. |
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 Russian experts and policymakers have increasingly raised the question of productivity, stressing that the country’s lag behind leading global economies has become an acute nationwide challenge. On May 15, President Dmitry Medvedev addressed the issue at a meeting on modernization and technological development and emphasized that “we must not forget one simple, unfortunate fact: labor productivity in this country is currently equivalent to only one quarter of the labor productivity in the United States. |
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There are several reasons for the relative calm regarding Russia’s economy. First, the crisis looks worse on the pages of newspapers and analytical reports than on the streets of Moscow, where it doesn’t appear that we are in the middle of a deep crisis. |
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 Frank Zappa, the legendary U.S. musician and composer (1940-1993), never performed in Russia, despite his immense underground following in the Soviet Union. Now his music is finally coming to St. Petersburg, performed by Zappa Plays Zappa — the act founded in 2006 by his son Dweezil Zappa, who has temporarily put aside his own music career in order to pay homage to his father and introduce his “timeless” music to newer generations. |
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At first glance, the solid wooden door and its elegant handles are reminiscent of an archetypal pub on an idyllic Edwardian street. Yet the interior of this new pub, although elegantly stylized in green wallpaper with faint streaks of gold and solid wooden paneling everywhere else, feels more like an Australian bar than an old man’s tavern. |
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