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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev’s decision to fire Sverdlovsk Governor Eduard Rossel won praise Wednesday from opposition politicians, who called for the removal of more regional leaders. “Rossel should have been replaced long ago,” Solidarity movement leader Boris Nemtsov said, adding that the Kremlin needed to fire more regional leaders who had been in power since the early 1990s, like Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev and Mayor Yury Luzhkov. “Some of them have outlasted Brezhnev,” he said, referring to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who served 18 years as Communist general secretary until his death in 1982. |
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WHITEOUT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A man walks across a bridge near the Peter and Paul Fortress on Tuesday, when the city saw its first major snowfall of the season. Heavy snow is forecast for Friday, but clearer weather is expected at the weekend. |
 Staff at St. Petersburg’s State Russian Museum hope to create generations of children who will appreciate art from birth, with special excursions for pregnant women. For three years now, Natalya Kuznetsova, senior researcher at the museum, has organized excursions there for expectant mothers. Every tour has a theme, for example, the image of water as an element, or the Virgin Mary.
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MOSCOW — Two Moscow police officers have started a hunger strike after being accused of abuse of authority during the detention of a senator’s nephew, who was allegedly involved in a drunken brawl, a lawyer for one of them said Wednesday. A criminal case against four police officers who broke up a January altercation could be sent to Moscow’s Tushinsky District Court in early December, Dmitry Bakharev, a lawyer for defendant Ruslan Kayumov, told The St. |
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Russia Is Victim of Hoax NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Russia became the seventh foreign mission to the United Nations to receive an envelope containing a white powder, later identified as flour, the Russian ambassador and New York police said. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian inventor of the globally popular AK-47 assault rifle, on Tuesday declared himself a “happy man” as he celebrated his 90th birthday with a burst of poetry. Lavished with honors for designing the iconic rifle, Kalashnikov said he had never intended for it to become the preferred weapon in conflicts around the world. |
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City Prepares for Flu Jab ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s Health Committee has ordered vaccines against the A(H1N1) virus, or swine flu, and vaccinations will begin next week, Interfax reported Thursday. |
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 MOSCOW — Russia and Austria agreed to work fast to complete talks to lay the South Stream pipeline, which would make Russian gas exports to Europe more reliable, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday, marking further progress for the ambitious project. |
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MOSCOW — Sukhoi Civil Aircraft announced Tuesday that it would delay the first delivery of its Superjet 100 to Aeroflot, in the latest in a string of postponements. |
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City to Get $1.3 Billion MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sberbank Head German Gref signed an agreement with St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko to invest at least 38 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) to help develop infrastructure in the region through 2020, the Moscow-based bank said on its web site Thursday. |
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 Who would have thought that the flu would be grabbing bigger headlines this fall than the economic crisis? The whole world has learned how Mexico decided to erect a monument to its dozens of swine flu victims. What we don’t hear about is how many people die every year in Mexico from other illnesses or from simple hunger, or how many fall victim to violent crime or drug addiction. |
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During his perfunctory election campaign, President Dmitry Medvedev made no mention of the need to modernize Russia, nor did he promise to become a popular video blogger or to set any world records for compassion by providing apartments to World War II veterans. |
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 The Second St. Petersburg Festival of British Music that kicks off on Sunday at the State Academic Cappella will treat audiences to gems of British classical music spanning the past four centuries. Aimed at showcasing British classical music in its diversity, the festival was launched in November 2007 by Rudi Eastwood, an aspiring British conductor and graduate of the U. |
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Òðàíæèðà: spendthrift, wastrel, big spender, high roller. The thing about ðåìîíò êâàðòèðû (apartment remodeling) is that it’s expensive. |
 “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow,”) believed to be Richard Strauss’s favorite and most musically challenging opera, is coming to the Russian stage for the first time. Internationally acclaimed British director Jonathan Kent is staging the work at the Mariinsky Theater, with premieres scheduled for Nov. |
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Everyone knows that the best part about having secrets is sharing them, and Secrets is an ideal restaurant for those who take their gossip seriously. Soft lighting and relaxing music create the perfect setting for a long, juicy conversation over dinner, while the partitioned main dining room and cozy banquettes offer a more intimate experience for diners seeking privacy. |
 This Saturday, Yabloko, whose name is the Russian for “apple,” will mark its 30th anniversary with a concert – and also showcase its lead singer Marina Kapuro’s solo album — at a concert at Zal Ozhidaniya, the club in the former Varshavsky (Warsaw) Railroad Station. The pioneering Soviet folk-rock act, which not only released the first (and only) quadraphonic album in the U. |
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WASHINGTON — Barack Obama leaves on his debut presidential tour of Asia on Thursday seeking to revive America’s prestige as a regional power, on a trip much heavier on symbolism than diplomatic substance. Obama will take a precious week out of his bid to enact an ambitious domestic agenda to show the region, and a rising China, that Washington is no longer distracted by crises elsewhere. |
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TOKYO — Japan’s Emperor Akihito, celebrating 20 years on the throne on Thursday, offered a rare defence of his father’s wartime record, saying Japanese aggression had been contrary to his wishes. |
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British men are among the ugliest people in the world, according to a dating website that says it only allows beautiful people to join. Only the male Russian and Polish applicants fared worse than British men, although Russian women had a 44 percent acceptance rate. Polish women did not appear in the table. |
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Issues Archive