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MOSCOW — Confusion surrounds the new rules governing the customs union among Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus that went into effect on Thursday, as businesses struggle to understand the new regulations and Belarus waffles over its future role in the grouping. |
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IRKUTSK — Three months ago, Viktor Kondrashov’s election as mayor of this sprawling Siberian city was widely seen as a humiliating defeat for United Russia, which backed another candidate. |
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Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman has decided to refuse the one-million-dollar Millennium Prize that he was awarded by America’s Clay Mathematics Institute for solving the Poincare conjecture. Perelman informed the institute of his decision a week ago, Interfax reported Thursday. |
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St. Petersburg police will return 100,000 copies of a report titled “Putin. Results. 10 Years” written by one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement, Boris Nemtsov, and economist Vladimir Milov. |
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Violations of the right to life and other basic human rights have become routine in St. Petersburg, argues the city’s Human Rights Council in its newly released survey of human rights abuses. The document, which was released this week, talks about army recruits being beaten to death by senior conscripts, prison inmates tortured by guards, and anti-fascist activists and non-Slavs being stabbed to death in the streets of St. |
All photos from issue.
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St. Petersburg will see the introduction of a new tradition on Saturday with the celebration of Dostoyevsky Day. The aim of the event, according to the city’s culture committee, is to preserve the memory of the great Russian writer and his literary legacy and cement the connection between his name and the city of St. Petersburg, where he spent much of his life. The ceremonies will begin with the laying of flowers at the Dostoyevsky monument in the Alexander Nevsky monastery. The committee says that the event will soon become an annual affair. Most of the day’s events will take place at the Fyodor Dostoyevsky Literary Memorial Museum on Kuznechny Pereulok. The street will be turned into an open-air stage, allowing people to get involved in the action and meet famous characters from the writer’s celebrated novels, including “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov. |
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SNEAK PREVIEW
Alexander Zubkov / For The St. Petersburg Times
The Lord Mayor of London (c) tours the Galleria shopping center on Thursday during a visit to St. Petersburg. The mall is due to open in the fall. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev broadly sided with the country’s fiscal hawks Tuesday as he unveiled proposals for state spending in the next three years, providing a boost to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s efforts to rein in the federal budget deficit. But the long-awaited address, delivered to top lawmakers and the full Cabinet, also had a populist flair, promising some salary hikes, and it avoided discussion of raising taxes on the country’s gas industry, which analysts say could be a quick way to mend the state’s finances.
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Children Defenestrated ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A 32-year-old woman threw her two young children out of an 8th floor window in St. Petersburg on Wednesday before jumping herself, Interfax reported. “Lyubov Kuzmina threw her children Pavel, aged six, and Maria, aged four, from the window of her room on the 8th floor at 22 Zvyozdnaya Ulitsa before jumping herself. |
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MOSCOW — Norilsk Nickel’s two largest shareholders have cast off the final semblances of a state-brokered truce in their battle for control of Russia’s largest miner, with Vladimir Potanin’s Interros scoring a tactical victory over Oleg Deripaska’s United Company RusAl. |
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A delegation of businessmen from Bordeaux visited the city this week to build contacts with local companies. The Days of Bordeaux in St. Petersburg have become an annual tradition. |
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 Looking back at the meeting in Washington last week between Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, it is rather dizzying to consider how far the U.S.-Russian relationship has progressed in just over a year. In the summer of 2008, the Russia-Georgia conflict plunged U. |
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A unique event took place last week at the European University in St. Petersburg: A conference devoted to the interaction between Russian scholars and scientists living abroad and their colleagues at home. |
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 The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review, one of the city’s finest bands, returns after an 18-month hiatus — with a new lineup and a new singer. The formerly St. Petersburg-based American vocalist Jennifer Davis, who was with the band from 2002 until returning to the U.S. in 2008, will be replaced by local singer Yulia Kogan. The band will comprise founding member Denis Kuptsov on drums plus the full lineup of the respected local Afro-Cuban/ska-influenced band Markscheider Kunst. Kuptsov, who founded the band, which blends ska and jazz, adding elements of funk, jive and swing in 2001, said the ensemble had reformed due to public demand. “Everyone around wanted it so much, talked about it all the time, wrote to me by email, via our web site and MySpace page, asking me when and where, when and where,” he said. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Veteran Russian rockers Auktsyon will perform at Zal Ozhidaniya on Friday, July 9. |
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Markscheider Kunst, the Afro-Cuban band that emerged from the legendary TaMtAm club and features some of the best musicians in the city, will launch a new album with a concert this week. Called “Utopia,” the album was released on the new Berlin-based record label Eastblok Music in April, but the Russian edition will come out on Friday and will be available at the show, according to singer and guitarist Sergei Yefremenko.
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 The legendary Pushkinskaya 10 arts center, whose foundation 21 years ago was the result of a long period of struggle for freedom and independence by artists, kicked off a month of 21st birthday celebrations last weekend. In the Soviet Union, the prevalence of socialist realism as the dominating art school rendered home exhibitions by nonconformist artists illegal, but despite threats from officials, residents of Leningrad visited forbidden artists’ apartments to see their paintings. |
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Back in December last year, Kholst Maslo opened, boasting a location inside the arch of the General Staff Building on Palace Square. Upon inspection however, the restaurant turns out to be situated just before the arch of Rossi’s vast classical building, and ironically, most of its windows look out onto Lidval’s drab grey Style Moderne building housing the city’s Rostelecom headquarters. |
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The 10th Music of The Great Hermitage festival will open its doors Saturday, running through July 14 at the New Hermitage and the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. The annual international festival, which is organized by the State Hermitage Museum and the Hermitage Music Academy, assembles leading musicians from all over the world every year and is unique both for its concert venues — the courtyards and halls of the Hermitage — and for the diversity of musical genres and trends presented at the festival. |
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The St. Petersburg Art Week, one of Russia’s largest exhibitions and contests, opens to the public Tuesday in the exhibition hall of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists. |
 As Russia celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov, the writer and playwright is being honored at theaters in St. Petersburg and around Russia. At the Chekhov International Theater Festival in Moscow at the beginning of this year, Daniel Veronese impressed audiences with his expressive performance of “Uncle Vanya,” and director Daniele Finzi Pasca, whose “Corteo” production for Cirque du Soleil is currently in town, struck spectators with the spectacular special effects used in his “Donka (A Letter to Chekhov). |
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 The second Baltic Biennale of Contemporary Art opened on June 16 at St. Petersburg’s Derzhavin museum and will run through July and September, bringing together artists from Russia, Germany, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Finland, Sweden and Estonia. |
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