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 A United Russia politician who was elected as St. Petersburg’s first ombudsman in the summer of 2007 amid indignant protests from the local human rights community, Igor Mikhailov, was stripped of his duties this week by the city’s Legislative Assembly. According to the official version offered by the parliament’s speaker Vadim Tyulpanov, Mikhailov brought the trouble on his own head by endorsing several members of his administrative staff to participate in the municipal elections held this fall. The ombudsman, who has vowed to defend his rights in court and said that he is prepared to take the fight to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, maintains he has apparently irritated the authorities by doing his job too vigorously. |
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TIRE TOWN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A feline resident of Hakkapeliita Village in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast strolls in front of new housing blocks on Wednesday. The housing has been built by Nokian Tyres for its employees, and the first human residents will move in to their new homes next month. Full story in Tuesday’s issue. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that many state corporations must change their legal status or be shut down, signaling the beginning of the end of the state behemoths. Medvedev also urged business leaders to help the Kremlin fight graft and called for the imprisonment of court intermediaries, whom he described as “the highest form of corruption.
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MOSCOW — The ruble could surge back to its 2008 highs next year, reaching 23 against the dollar, if oil prices remain high and there is an influx of foreign investment, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach said Wednesday. But the comments from the ministry’s top forecaster were more of a warning than a prediction. |
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The restructuring of the federal television and radio station Channel Five, based in St. Petersburg, which envisages its division into regional and federal channels, will only begin in a year’s time and will not lead to mass layoffs at the channel, its management announced on Tuesday. |
All photos from issue.
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 St. Petersburg residents are struggling to save a classic, early 19th-century building in the city center, just as they did more than 20 years ago when the Soviet authorities tried to demolish the same structure to make way for what became Dostoevskaya metro station. |
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MOSCOW — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday on a private visit to Russia that has been ridiculed by the Italian left, officials said. |
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KALUGA — Volkswagen Group will double production at its Kaluga plant and roll out a new model tailored for Russian drivers next year as it bets that demand will grow for budget cars, the company said Tuesday. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, who visited the plant with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for the launch of the assembly of complete knockdown kits, said the Russian market would grow by 30 percent by 2018 to become one of the world’s top five markets with sales of 3. |
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MOSCOW — The State Duma gave preliminary approval Wednesday to the federal budget for next year in a session where the Communists reappeared after a weeklong boycott to slam the budget proposals and berate their Cabinet nemesis, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. |
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 There are two types of media in Russia: influential and independent. The influential media — read: state-controlled — cannot be independent. Conversely, independent media, whose numbers are getting smaller and smaller, cannot be influential. The moment the authorities suspect that an independent publication or broadcaster that is critical of the government is influencing public opinion in a significant way, the chances that the media outlet will be forced to change its orientation and political views become very high. |
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Following Moscow City Duma elections four years ago, one of Russia’s top political analysts, Alexander Kynev, wrote that they had been “something of a ‘high point’ in the assault against the voting rights of citizens as the authorities tried to minimize political competition in the country. |
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 In an important turnaround in St. Petersburg’s musical world, the contemporary Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Enchanted Wanderer” is arguably the best show of the 2008-09 season at the Mariinsky Theater. This year’s Golden Mask for the best female role was awarded to the opera’s lead singer, Christina Kapustinskaya, while the Golden Sophite went to Sergei Alexashkin for the male lead. |
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Rock music may sound horrible, but it requires a weird and cynical mind to turn it into an instrument of torture, especially as many musicians whose music was allegedly used to break the will of terrorism suspects were against the Iraq War and Guantanamo prison from the very beginning. |
 As part of the Diaghilev. P.S. festival that opened in the city on Oct. 12, the Russian Museum has unveiled an impressive exhibition titled “Diaghilev. The Beginning.,” which highlights the period of Diaghilev’s life that preceded his activities as world-renowned impresario and creator of the Ballets Russes. |
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In the play “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde, the English playwright and poet whose face and name — though in slightly adapted form — grace the entrance of the Wild Oscar Pub, various characters take on fake identities to escape from their social obligations. |
 An exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum entitled “Treasury of the World. Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals,” which runs through Nov. 8, provides a rare opportunity to appreciate the era’s extraordinary craftsmanship. The exhibition comprises over 400 pieces from the personal collection of Sheikh Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah and his spouse Sheikha Hussah Sabah Al-Salim Al-Sabah. |
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 Russia’s first center of Finnish culture, business and science, Dom Finlyandii (House of Finland) is set to open in St. Petersburg on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa on Sunday. |
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By Michele A. Berdy Êàê èçâåñòíî … : As everyone knows … The other day a translator friend reminded me how much I loathe the phrase êàê èçâåñòíî (literally, “as is known”) and its various derivatives, such as êàê âñåì èçâåñòíî (as everyone knows) and îáùåèçâåñòíî (it is generally known). If I were editorial queen of the universe, I’d grab my red pencil and strike these phrases from the majority of texts. The main problem is that the ubiquitous êàê èçâåñòíî can serve several functions in Russian sentences, while the phrase “everyone knows that” is not nearly as common in English and usually serves one function. |
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 Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian super-circus credited with reinventing the art of big-top performance for the 21st century, begins a month-long series of dates in Moscow on Friday. |
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ADDIS ABABA — Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed on Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation. State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tons of food aid worth 121 million dollars between now and year’s end for 6. |
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MIAMI — A court in Miami sentenced Colombian drug kingpin Diego Montoya to 45 years in prison following his guilty plea on trafficking, murder and racketeering charges. |
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Issues Archive