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A third St. Petersburg court ruled Tuesday that City Hall’s ban of a gay pride event last summer was illegal, two days before the European Court of Human Rights ordered Russia to pay damages to a gay rights activist. The city’s Petrogradsky district court followed the examples set earlier this month by the city’s Moskovsky and Admiralteisky district courts to rule in favor of the gay community. “The court has upheld our complaint and called the conduct of the authorities illegal,” Maria Yefremenkova, head of the St. Petersburg Gay Pride organizing committee, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday. “The judgment also obliges the Petrogradsky district authorities to allocate us a place and time to hold a demonstration. |
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SERVICE WITH A SMILE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman feeds the birds in the Catherine Park at Tsarskoye Selo, 30 kilometers to the south of St. Petersburg, on Tuesday. Forecasters are predicting cloudy, rainy weather over the weekend, with temperatures set to fall as low as minus 1 deg. Celsius. |
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LONDON — The Russian-born physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize say their education in Moscow was among the best in the world, but they have no desire to return to the land of their birth or be involved in the Kremlin’s Skolkovo innovation center. The physicists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, said the Kremlin could throw money at science, but research would still be stymied by corruption, red tape and a lack of the vital international teams and facilities needed to engage in groundbreaking work.
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The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) ruled last week that the name of Russia’s Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu must be removed from the labels of water filters developed by controversial St. Petersburg scientist Viktor Petrik and produced by the Golden Formula company. |
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Hooligans Trash Lobby ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Around 50 suspected football hooligans smashed up a hotel lobby and attacked a group of Croatian citizens in central St. |
All photos from issue.
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 An eagle sculpture stolen from the railings surrounding the Alexander Column on Palace Square was returned to the State Hermitage by a St. Petersburg resident Sunday, the museum announced on its web site Wednesday. The woman, a regular visitor to the Hermitage, found the statue two weeks ago while walking in a public garden on Naberezhnaya Admirala Makarova. After her discovery, she contacted the Hermitage via email and took the sculpture back to the museum, accompanied by her son and her daughter. The announcement is the latest episode in an ongoing saga: The eagles decorating the Alexander Column railing have continually been stolen since its reconstruction in 2003, raising questions about its security. |
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ALMA MATER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A crowd gathers around the monument to poet Alexander Pushkin in Tsarskoye Selo on Tuesday.
The historic lyceum where Pushkin studied in the town celebrated its 200th anniversary on Oct. 19. |
 MOSCOW — A brazen attack on the Chechen parliament in Grozny killed at least six people, including Islamist insurgents, and injured 17 others Tuesday morning, a sign that post-war stability in the republic remains fragile. “At least three attackers managed to get inside the Chechen parliament and blew themselves up,” Mariam Nalayeva, a spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee’s Chechen branch, said by telephone from Grozny.
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The police thwarted an unauthorized rally in St. Petersburg against the general census Wednesday, arresting all the participants seconds after it started. “Don’t let yourself be counted,” read the banner held up by five members of The Other Russia, the newly formed party led by author and oppositional politician Eduard Limonov. |
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MOSCOW — Europe and Russia can build a visa-free zone with common economic and security spaces before 2025, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday. |
 DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — They call him Tajikistan’s Osama bin Laden. In the wild mountains east of the capital, Dushanbe, thousands of soldiers are on the hunt for a man authorities say is masterminding a plot to turn this impoverished and unstable country on Afghanistan’s northern border into a haven for Islamist terrorists. |
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MOSCOW — A string of attacks on policemen in Astrakhan this summer was carried out by radical Islamists whose leader was killed Tuesday after being identified by his detained followers, investigators said in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — The government expects to drum up 1.8 trillion rubles ($58.5 billion) by 2015 from privatizations of federal property, including stakes in some 900 companies, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said Wednesday. Some of the funds raised will go into the federal budget, but cash will also be used to develop the companies, Shuvalov said after a closed-door meeting on state property with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and several other ministers. |
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MOSCOW — U.S. President Barack Obama’s senior economic adviser says Russia will join the World Trade Organization within the next 12 months. Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, said at a briefing Wednesday that the objections of U. |
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MOSCOW — The Amsterdam Court of Appeals has ruled that it would not recognize the 2007 sale of Yukos Finance BV, a Dutch corporation, by Russian court-appointed receiver Eduard Rebgun. As a result, $800 million in cash assets remains in limbo. The court on Tuesday upheld a district court ruling made on Oct. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg-based supermarket chain O’Key on Tuesday announced the price of its global depositary receipts (GDRs) on the London Stock Exchange. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s big three mobile operators — MTS, VimpelCom and MegaFon — will “voluntarily” decrease prices on both international and domestic roaming services by as much as 30 to 50 percent before Dec. 1, Federal Anti-Monopoly Service chief Igor Artemyev said Wednesday. Artemyev made the statement at a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Press and Communications Minister Igor Shchyogolev. |
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 Ever since the global economic crisis shook the world in 2008, we have been hearing dire warnings about the imminent end of capitalism. In Russia, these warnings have particular significance since the Soviet Union predicted the downfall of capitalism ever since the country’s ideological idol, Karl Marx, wrote his famous words about capitalism sowing the seeds of its own destruction. |
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Sergei Sobyanin occupies the second-highest post in the country after being sworn in as mayor of Moscow on Thursday. The first is either the president or the prime minister, depending on which of them is calling the shots. |
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 An operatic thriller, Agatha Christie-style, with overtones of Bulgakov is how the renowned British stage director Graham Vick perceives Leos Janacek’s opera “The Makropulos Affair.” The director is preparing to present his version of one of the most enigmatic operas of the 20th century at the Mariinsky Theater on Oct. 23 and 24 and Nov. 1 and 12. “The Makropulos Affair” is one of the most complex operas a stage director can face, Vick says. According to the director, this particular work by the Czech composer is further than any other from Russian culture. At the same time, the black humor and grotesque elements in it bring it close to works by Bulgakov, the director believes. |
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Yury Goldenshtein / For The St. Petersburg Times
Local theater troupe Comic Trust performs its ‘White Story’ production for a disabled audience as part of the ‘Theater is an Accessible Medium’ project at the Litsedei Theater on Monday. |
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Æäó íå äîæäóñü!: I can’t wait! Russians are experts at waiting. Before the 1917 Revolution, they waited for spring, for rain, and for a good tsar. During the Soviet period, they waited in lines for food, cigarettes and newspapers. They waited for hours in hushed rooms to see party bosses. They waited for days or weeks to buy a ticket south for a vacation.
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 The winning entry and shortlist of the 10th My Canon international photography competition are currently on display for all to see at the Central Manezh Exhibition Hall. This year’s theme was “My Contemporary.” More than 4,000 photographs from around the world were submitted, of which 100 were then selected for the 15th St. |
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If the name Kvartira (Apartment) No. 55 leads you to expect a converted communal apartment packed with Soviet kitsch, have no fear: European-style understatement is the byword at this modestly upscale wine bar. |
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 TIJUANA, Mexico — Mexican authorities seized over 105 tons of marijuana in the border town of Tijuana after clashing with drug traffickers. It was the largest seizure in years amid an increasingly brutal war on drug cartels that has claimed some 28,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide crackdown in 2006, deploying some 50,000 troops who have so far failed to stem the tide of violence. |
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KARACHI — Pakistan said Wednesday there was no need to send the army into Karachi to bring the country’s biggest city under control after politically motivated killings left more than 70 people dead in days. |
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OTABATO, Philippines — Nine people were killed Thursday when a bomb exploded aboard a packed passenger bus in the troubled southern Philippines, authorities said. The military and police said Muslim militants or bandits who are known to operate on the southern island of Mindanao could have been behind the attack, with extortion a possible motive. |
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LONDON — Britain’s government unveiled the harshest spending cuts for decades on Wednesday, slashing budgets by around a fifth and taking the axe to the country’s comprehensive welfare system. |
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Issues Archive