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The appearance of posters depicting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on St. Petersburg streets and on local buses this week caused mixed reactions in the city, with most people condemning the posters. “This campaign is a real insult to people on the eve of Victory Day,” said Maxim Reznik, head of the local Yabloko branch. “It’s unbelievable that its initiators put up the images of that butcher and murderer of millions of people, and in doing so have divided people on the eve of this important holiday.” “We’ll do everything possible to get rid of these posters,” Reznik said. The idea of putting up posters of Stalin around the city belongs to the Communists of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast political organization. |
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GREAT LEADER?
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Pedestrians on Ulitsa Vosstaniya on Thursday walk past one of the portraits of Josef Stalin that have been controversially pasted up around the city to mark the 65th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. Widescale Victory Day celebrations will be held in the city on Sunday. |
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Dozens of British and Russian veterans of Arctic convoys that delivered vital aid to the Soviet Union during World War II were reunited at the British Consulate in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. Frank Bond, 87, who came from London accompanied by his daughter Emma, had not been back to Russia since the war until this week. He first came to Russia with a convoy in 1942 as a teenage sailor in the Royal Navy on the HMS Suffolk.
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St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko has banned military-themed strip shows and ordered a pub chain to change its name as part of preparations for large-scale Victory Day celebrations on Sunday. The pubs, of which one is located in the center and another in the suburb of Kolpino in the south of St. |
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MOSCOW — Veronika Moiseyeva, 24, a broadcast journalist, loses no sleep over holiday gifts because she knows she can always send her friends a virtual bouquet of flowers on Vkontakte. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The governors of Kaliningrad and Krasnoyarsk outearned the rest of the country’s 83 governors last year — or at least the half who met a deadline to release their income declarations. Governors were supposed to file income declarations with the Federal Tax Service and publish them on their official regional web sites by Friday. But only about half of them met the deadline, Kommersant reported Tuesday. The declarations, which all top officials were supposed to release for a second year running, are part of a campaign by President Dmitry Medvedev to crack down on corruption by requiring officials and their families to disclose their annual earnings and some assets. |
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REACH FOR IT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Builders work on the construction of a stage on St. Isaac’s Square for a charity concert to be performed on Saturday by Russian opera singer Vasily Gerello as part of the Victory Day celebrations. |
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A St. Petersburg court sentenced two young men who killed a 16-year-old schoolgirl and ate parts of her body to 18 and 19 years of imprisonment on Wednesday. Maxim Glavatskikh, a 21-year-old florist described as a “goth,” was sentenced to 19 years of imprisonment, while Yury Mozhnov, a 21-year-old unemployed man described as an “emo” was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment, the St.
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MOSCOW — A State Duma deputy has called on President Dmitry Medvedev to check whether Kalmyk leader Kirsan Ilyumzhinov might have divulged state secrets to aliens whom he claimed to have met in 1997. Ilyumzhinov, 48, a flamboyant politician known for throwing expensive chess extravaganzas since becoming president of the Buddhist republic in southern Russia in 1993, will finish his fourth term in office in October, and Medvedev will have to decide whether to appoint him for another five years. Ilyumzhinov told television host Vladimir Pozner on Channel One on April 26 that he had spent several hours in the company of aliens after they visited his apartment in Moscow in 1997. |
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 Two unidentified men threw a grenade into a Muslim store in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, injuring two people. “The men opened the door to the store, threw an explosive device inside and ran away,” said Vyacheslav Stepchenko, spokesman for the St. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is ready to simplify its migration legislation to attract foreign specialists — without whom modernization would be impossible. The State Duma’s Constitution and State Affairs Committee on Tuesday recommended that the legislature pass in its second reading amendments to the law on the legal status of foreigners. |
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MOSCOW — Software company 1C is asking the state for 500 million rubles ($16.8 million) to create a computer game simulator that will educate youth in patriotism, modernize the economy and rebuff those trying to falsify history. |
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 The last thing that Russia’s tentative economic recovery needs is for the country’s banking sector to trip it up. Loan growth is flat in 2010 so far, and if banks don’t start lending soon, the economy may continue to struggle to grow as cash-starved companies hold off on investment and consumers defer purchases. |
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It may seem strange that I am writing about the 2009 report by the European Union fact-finding commission on the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war since it was published a year ago. |
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 With St. Petersburg preparing for the biggest parade in its history on Sunday to commemorate 65 years since the victory of the Allied Forces over Nazi Germany in World War II, nearly all of the city’s museums, from art galleries to literary museums, have prepared a rich variety of exhibitions to mark Victory Day. |
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After an abrupt end was put to the May Day democratic rally Saturday, the meeting’s music program was also stopped when electricity was suddenly cut off during a performance — bringing back memories of underground rock concerts in the stifling atmosphere of early-1980s Soviet Union. |
 Portraits of the outstanding ballet dancers Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spesivtseva, Alexandra Danilova, Vera Nemtchinova and Adolph Bolm are among those from the private collection of the eminent fashion historian Alexander Vassiliev that can currently be seen at Rosphoto. |
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As temperatures rise, the out-of-town restaurants in the prestigious resort region to the northwest of the city are slowly coming out of hibernation. Chaliapin, located opposite Repino railway station, upped its game last year with a total renovation inside, and has just completed a badly needed external repair job. |
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 Eye-witnesses of the Victory Parade held in Moscow on June 24, 1945, remember a detachment of dog-handlers with their charges parading across Red Square. Among those who had the honor of taking part was Dzhulbars, a dog who was famed at the time. Possessed with an incredible ability to detect explosives with his sense of smell, Dzhulbars saved architectural masterpieces in Prague, Vienna, Hungary and Romania. |
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LONDON — Nigel Farage of the U.K. Independence Party, a high-profile candidate in the general election, walked away from a plane crash with minor injuries Thursday soon after voting started, his party said. Farage, an outspoken Member of the European Parliament, was in a light aircraft which crash-landed at an airfield in Northamptonshire just after 0700 GMT as he toured the constituency of Buckingham. |
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ABUJA — Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday took over the reins of power in the oil-rich nation riven by religious and political divisions hours after ailing president Umaru Yar’Adua died. |
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Issues Archive