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Stockmann Group has announced the completion of the main stage of construction of its new retail complex on Nevsky Prospekt amid protests from the media and general public about the appearance of the new buildings. The object of controversy is a planned nine-story, 35-meter glass structure that will rise above one of the two newly constructed buildings, which were supposed to be exact replicas of the two 19th-century buildings demolished by Stockmann in late 2006 and early 2007. Architecture experts and preservationists say a number of laws and regulations were violated in the course of the construction, resulting in a view of the city’s main thoroughfare being destroyed because the new buildings at the intersection of Nevsky and Ulitsa Vosstaniya will differ from the original ones. |
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SHIP AHOY!
Dmitry Lovetsky / Reuters
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (l) and his Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen attend the ceremonial opening of the Ecubex container service, owned by the Maersk Line company, on board a ship in St. Petersburg’s port on Monday. |
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MOSCOW — About 20,000 protesters denounced government policies and called for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign at dozens of rallies over the weekend, organizers said Sunday, far less than the tens of thousands of people they had hoped to attract. Opposition groups had hoped for a large turnout that would increase the pressure on the government after they attracted 12,000 people to a Kaliningrad rally in January that rattled the federal authorities.
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The respected U.S.-based Clay Mathematics Institute has awarded a $1-million prize to the reclusive St. Petersburg mathematician Grigory Perelman for proving a mathematical theorem known as the Poincare conjecture. No reaction has yet followed from the scientist, who in 2006 turned down the prestigious Fields Medal awarded by the International Mathematical Union, which is seen as the world’s highest honor in mathematics. |
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Moscow Air Crash MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Eight people were injured, two seriously, after an airliner crash-landed one kilometer from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. administration lower hurdles to Russian investment and offered U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a list of trade complaints during a meeting Friday. Putin told Clinton in public comments before the talks that trade between the two countries last year collapsed from $36 billion to $16 billion because of the global recession. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will continue ruling Russia in a tandem after 2012, when Medvedev’s first presidential term expires, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said Friday. |
 MOSCOW — When Spanish police announced the arrest of about 80 reputed mobsters across Europe last week, many media reports trumpeted the development as the latest crackdown on the Russian mafia. But soon the reporting shifted and introduced a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon in the West: the Georgian mafia. |
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After receiving Maly Gostiny Dvor from the Federal Property Management Agency last year, City Hall has announced plans to put the building, which is located in the historic center of St. Petersburg, up for auction. According to a resolution from the Committee for City Property Management (KUGI) dated Feb. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday called on government agencies to look into rising prices for fertilizer and oil products while promising 100 billion rubles ($3. |
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MOSCOW — Ukraine’s new government is close to completing work on a bill that would let Gazprom and European Union companies join the country in operating its vast gas pipeline network, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Kluyev said Friday. The announcement could lead to a breakthrough in gas supply negotiations between Moscow and Kiev, which have been fraught with disputes in recent years, including two that disrupted supplies to Europe. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian Orthodox Church made a request to the government that it lower gas prices for Ukrainian chemical companies, saying it was a “sensible initiative” to assist the companies, which help the Ukrainian church. |
 MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry wants to return to the use of separately administered funds to pay for road construction, but the Finance Ministry opposes the idea, saying it would lead to corruption and be impractical to finance. Transportation Minister Igor Levitin said last week that the proposal to create road funds had been submitted to the government. |
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MOSCOW — Beginning in October, stand-alone currency exchange booths could vanish under a Central Bank plan, but the same facilities could remain open as banks’ transaction windows if they employ a second person and can provide additional financial services. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that Russia’s centrally planned version of Silicon Valley would be built in the Moscow region town of Skolkovo, eschewing existing technoparks and instead building a new supermodern technology town from scratch. |
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MOSCOW — Russia plans to raise its share of the growing global market for constructing and operating nuclear power plants to 25 percent, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday, as a “nuclear revival” in many countries pushes up demand for its services. |
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The local job market did not have an easy time in 2009. Both employers and employees pursued one main goal – survival. Companies tried to reduce their expenses by all available means, including by making employees redundant and cutting salaries and social packages. |
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Despite the advantage that the financial crisis has given employers, who, thanks to the economic downturn, can now choose from a broader range of specialists while offering lower salaries, the beginning of 2010 has shown slight improvement in job seekers’ interests, particularly in certain vacancies, St. |
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It doesn’t take international companies entering the Russian market long to notice that health and safety standards here are far more relaxed than in most Western countries. Health and environmental safety (HSE) training for local employees is usually a key focal area for foreign companies, and was one of the issues discussed at a seminar on Friday devoted to the safety of doing business in Russia, organized by St. Petersburg International Business Association (SPIBA.) Kristian Jul Rosjo, HSE director for Statoil E&R Russia, said differences between Russia and Scandinavia in attitudes to HSE were in evidence. “When we inspect construction sites, we find that people [in Russia] don’t use helmets,” he said. |
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 Last summer, VTB24 bank opened its own training center in St. Petersburg, said Nadezhda Revenkova, head of the bank’s new facility, though she declined to state the volume of investment in its establishment. |
 A few years ago, I met with an HR manager from a Russian telecom company in Moscow. I was hoping his company would select my company to deliver some corporate training courses, and they did. I remember that the HR manager, Ivan, told me that whenever you start a company, the most important department is the HR department. |
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Twenty-five years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Twenty years ago, at the Congress of People’s Deputies, he was elected as the first and — as it turned out — last president of the Soviet Union. A few days ago, state-run pollster VTsIOM published the results of a survey showing that Russians are gradually taking a more positive view of the perestroika period. Today, 41 percent of those surveyed hold a negative attitude toward perestroika, compared to 56 percent five years ago. Even with this positive trend, it will be many years before Russia and the West give a common appraisal of the events which occurred between 1985 and 1991. |
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 It is sometimes said that Germany has become a “second France” in its “selfish” approach to the European Union, but is France really on its way to becoming a “second Germany”? If Germany is Russia’s main economic partner, perhaps France should be its principal strategic partner. |
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I was recently denied a Russian entry visa. This gave me the opportunity to visit the Russian Consulate in New York, a rare occasion since I usually get my visa through an agency that spares me such visits for a small fee. The consulate is located on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side on 91st Street, which would have been an elegant block except for the grim crowd shoving and clustering nervously at its doors. |
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Issues Archive