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MOSCOW — Foreigners hoping to uproot their families and move to Russia face a major new headache: new customs fees that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Moving companies said Wednesday that dozens of shipments that arrived after July 1 have been left stranded after customs officials told them that every kilogram after the first 50 would be slapped with a minimum charge of 4 euros ($5). The tariffs, which emanate from a new customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, introduce a hurdle for the influx of foreign specialists advocated by President Dmitry Medvedev. “This will not stimulate people to move to Russia,” said Norbert Gooren, general manager at AAA Logistics, a U. |
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THE SANDMAN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
An artist works on the creation of one of the exhibits at the 9th International Festival of Sand which opened on the beach in front of the Peter and Paul Fortress on Monday. The event, featuring 24 teams, will run until the end of August. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged Wednesday that his much-trumpeted campaign against corruption has yielded no palpable results and urged lawmakers to start conducting parliamentary investigations to fight the problem. Parliamentary investigations are nearly a forgotten practice in Russia after all but vanishing under Vladimir Putin, who shifted sweeping powers to the executive branch during his eight-year presidency.
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Opposition and human rights activists and journalists have been campaigning this week in support of the imprisoned Sergei Mokhnatkin, who they say is an innocent victim of Russian legal arbitrariness. Mokhnatkin, 56, who earlier complained of the police choking and beating him at a rally, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in custody last month on charges of attacking a police officer and breaking his nose. |
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MOSCOW — The battle over the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky escalated Tuesday when an Interior Ministry investigator for the first time fought back against accusations of murder and corruption. |
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The 9th International Festival of Sand Sculpture opened on Monday, with 24 teams from nine countries, including Germany, Holland, Latvia and the Czech Republic competing. The teams have been provided with 500 tons of sand and given five days to perform tasks set by the competition organizers. |
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Extremist Arrested ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police have arrested an Uzbek citizen who is alleged to be a member of an extremist Islamic organization and is currently on international wanted lists. |
All photos from issue.
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Russian property developers are preparing to destroy the world’s largest and most valuable field collection of genetically diverse fruits and berries — including almost 1,000 types of strawberries from 40 countries — from which commercially grown varieties are derived. The site, which belongs to the Vavilov Horticultural Research Institute, is home to more than 4,000 varieties of fruits and berries, some of which have become extinct in their natural environments. It now looks set to be used for the construction of holiday homes. Developers received access to the site when the St. |
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FREE FALLING
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A boy jumps from the embankment of the Fontanka River, close to Nevsky Prospekt, on Wednesday. Forecasters are predicting that the hot weather in the city will continue into next week. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Wednesday found the opposition New Times magazine guilty of defaming a United Russia deputy by writing that he “supervised” an ultranationalist youth group and awarded him a token 1 ruble (3 cents) in damages. Analysts warned that the verdict spelled a setback for free media that would encourage self-censorship. The author of the disputed article, Yevgeny Levkovich, and other people blamed poor semantics for the ruling, noting that the word used in the article, kurirovat, or “supervised,” could be interpreted to mean “in control of” or “to provide support for.
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MOSCOW — More than a third of all inmates suffer from illnesses, including AIDS, syphilis and tuberculosis, a senior federal prison official said Tuesday. Nikolai Krivolapov, deputy head of the Federal Prison Service, said illnesses affect about 340,000 of the country’s 846,000 inmates, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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MOSCOW — Several of the 10 Russian agents detained in the United States in June and handed over to Russia last week will change their identities under a witness protection program, a Russian intelligence official said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — South African media holding Naspers invested $388 million in Digital Sky Technologies on Wednesday in a stake swap that gave DST full control of the popular Mail.ru service. Naspers subsidiary Myriad International Holdings will receive a 28.7 percent stake in DST in exchange for Naspers’ 39. |
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MOSCOW — Costs to repair Raspadskaya’s largest mine after fatal explosions earlier this year will likely reach 8.6 billion rubles ($281 million), the coal producer said Wednesday, scaling back a higher estimate from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — Dividends do not seem to be a priority for the country’s 30 largest banks, with only 11 of the 19 that made a profit last year sending some of their earnings back to shareholders. In relative terms, Bank St. Petersburg paid the largest dividend among stand-alone lenders, while in absolute terms, the biggest payout was from state-run VTB, according to data from lenders ranked by the Central Bank as the 30 largest. |
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 A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of “market confidence.” It may have been fear of communism that agitated governments when Karl Marx penned the opening line of his famous manifesto in 1848, but today it is the dread that market sentiment will turn against them and drive up the spreads on their government bonds. |
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This week brought bad news for Amnesty International and other human rights activists. They had declared Igor Sutyagin, former defense analyst at the Moscow-based Institute for U. |
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 Bad Religion, an influential Southern Californian band that blends convincing, melody-based punk rock with intelligent, anti-establishment lyrics, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a tour and a live album. Although the band has not yet been to Russia, it managed to annoy the Russian authorities last year, when a St. Petersburg district prosecutor ordered a rock record shop to stop selling Bad Religion paraphernalia with “Crossbuster” — the band’s logo featuring a black cross with a red prohibition sign over it — on the grounds that it “might be promoting certain intolerant national, racial or religious attitudes.” Bad Religion, whose most recent album is “30 Years Live,” a collection of live recordings made at U. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Models walk at the opening of an exhibition of work at the Manezh created by artists from the Artists’ Village in Ozerki. |
 Bad Religion, an influential Southern Californian band that blends convincing, melody-based punk rock with intelligent, anti-establishment lyrics, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a tour and a live album. Although the band has not yet been to Russia, it managed to annoy the Russian authorities last year, when a St. Petersburg district prosecutor ordered a rock record shop to stop selling Bad Religion paraphernalia with “Crossbuster” — the band’s logo featuring a black cross with a red prohibition sign over it — on the grounds that it “might be promoting certain intolerant national, racial or religious attitudes.
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Podpolny Front (Underground Front), an occasional supergroup comprising local politically-minded band frontmen, has come up with a song in support of the right to assembly, which is guaranteed by the constitution, but largely ignored by the current Russian authorities. Called “Pesnya 31” (Song 31), it has been made available as a YouTube video and was premiered by two members, Vadim Kurylyov of Electric Guerillas and Mikhail Novitsky of SP Babai, at a protest rally on Monday. The Underground Front also includes Mikhail Borzykin of Televizor, Alexander Chernetsky of Razniye Lyudi, Sergei Parashchuk of NEP and Yury Rulyov of Patriarkhalnaya Vystavka. |
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 This year, a book written by the English mathematician and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, is riding a new wave of popularity. |
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By a cruel twist of fate, our trip to this modest caf? on Galernaya Ulitsa came immediately after the bizarre annual Russian rite that is the medical tests that expatriate personnel must undergo in order to receive a work permit. Having spent the morning on a team outing giving blood and filling plastic pots with urine, this was to be our treat, our compensation for having to stand in line interminably, blood seeping out of wounds inflicted in the name of the standards of health in the Russian workplace. Although by no means a disaster — most of the dishes were, in fact, excellent — the unbearable heat in the city made eating in this confined basement an option perhaps best left until winter. |
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 For two hot days this weekend, the beach at the Peter and Paul Fortress will be turned into a giant stage where top jazz bands will perform at the international PetroJazz festival This year, musicians from St. |
 Tragic events and suffering are the main themes this year at World Press Photo, which opens Friday, showcasing the top 200 press photos of the year at Loft Project Etazhi. In 2010, more than 100,000 photos were sent to the organizers of the international photojournalism contest. |
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A rare and fascinating insight into Buddhist rituals can be gleaned this summer at the Roerich museum where an exhibition of Cham Dance masks opened earlier this month. |
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The 20th “Message to Man” international documentary short and animated film festival opened in St. Petersburg on Thursday, promising opportunities for communication between filmmakers from around the world. Film director Alexei Uchitel, the festival’s president, said the selection commission had watched 2,853 films from 83 countries in order to choose the most interesting works for the competition. |
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The Sheremetevsky Palace unveiled a new exhibition Saturday devoted to the famous Soviet ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, who was for years ignored by his native country after defecting to the West. |
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Issues Archive