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 The thick blanket of snow covering St. Petersburg’s streets after five days of almost uninterrupted snowfall is making getting around the city a struggle, both on foot and by car. In a repeat of events seen during heavy snowfalls last winter, city residents have rushed to buy shovels and city officials have expressed their dissatisfaction with the work of the companies in charge of keeping the streets and pavements clear of snow. |
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MOSCOW — A daring speech by one of the country’s most acclaimed journalists, who publicly blasted federal television stations for their servile attitude and penchant for propaganda, set the media abuzz and even prompted talk of a new perestroika. |
 “Nobody in the world could reproach us for occupying ourselves with trifles by gathering together ministers and discussing some cats,” said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during his speech at the International Tiger Forum in St. Petersburg last week. Putin’s words at the forum, which was devoted to saving the endangered global wild tiger population, demonstrated that Russia has finally started to address animal rights at a state level, and more importantly, putting the words into practice: A bill regulating responsibility for cruelty to animals has finally been passed, and the new law comes into force on Jan. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin likened ill-considered economic policy to terrorism and religious intolerance on Friday, telling a business forum in Berlin that Russian companies seeking to invest in Europe were facing a number of political and economic barriers. |
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Hanukkah Festivities ST. PETERSBURG — St. Petersburg’s Jews will start celebrating Hanukkah, one of the most important holidays of the Jewish calendar, on Wednesday. Festivities will last for eight days. On Wednesday, a large celebration will be held in the courtyard of the Grand Choral Synagogue located at 2 Lermontovsky Prospekt. |
All photos from issue.
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 IZHEVSK — Izhevsk, an industrialized city of some 600,000 in the Ural Mountains, is known for its designs, from the first Russian motorcycle in 1929 to the world-famous Kalashnikov rifle nearly two decades later. Now a local entrepreneur is calling on customers to produce their own designs — for custom-tailored dress shirts. Vasily Muntyan, 28, said he picked up the idea while traveling abroad, though his own problems with finding a decent shirt back home were what convinced to him to launch Rubashka-na-Zakaz, or Custom-Made Shirt. “Although none of us had any Internet experience, we decided to set up an online business,” he told The St. |
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END OF THE ROAD
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Pedestrians walking along Gorokhovaya Ulitsa on Monday, with the Admiralty building in the background. Gorokhovaya Ulitsa has been closed to traffic for repairs until June 2011. |
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MOSCOW — A bill toughening punishment for attacks on journalists was submitted Friday to the State Duma, just as police said they had a “real chance” of solving this month’s brutal beating of Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin. The bill proposes introducing a separate article in the Criminal Code on preventing journalists from fulfilling their duties through violence or threats, said Irina Yarovaya, a co-author of the bill, Interfax reported.
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MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday issued a declaration condemning the Katyn massacre and for the first time directly blamed Soviet leader Josef Stalin for the 1940 execution of more than 20,000 Polish officers. The resolution, approved in a 324-57 vote, calls the killings committed by Soviet secret police a “crime by the Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. |
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Alexei Plutser-Sarno, the spiritual guru behind the controversial art group Voina (War), has fled to Estonia for fear of arrest, he wrote Saturday on his blog. |
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MOSCOW — Researcher Igor Sutyagin, convicted of espionage in 2004 and deported to Britain in a spy swap this summer, published a story about how a Federal Security Service officer may have given him a truth serum in borshch and cognac during questioning. |
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The number of children killed by husbands as revenge against their wives and the number of women who suffered violence from police have grown in Russia in the last two years, women’s rights advocates said Thursday. |
 POCHEP, Bryansk Region — Russia will miss a 2012 deadline for destroying all of its chemical weapons, officials said Friday as they inaugurated a major new plant to dispose of them. The facility at Pochep, tucked between the Ukrainian and Belarussian borders 250 miles southwest of Moscow, is the latest of six plants built in Russia in recent years to dismantle its Cold War-era chemical weapons arsenals — the world’s largest. |
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 CHERSKY, Sakha Republic — The scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. |
 KARACHI, Pakistan — A cargo plane crashed in flames into a residential area in Pakistan’s largest city soon after takeoff Sunday, killing all eight crew members and at least three people on the ground, officials said. The crash was the second this month in Karachi, the main port city in the south, and the third in Pakistan in less than five months. The Russian-made plane slammed into a housing complex under construction in Karachi, sending fire and smoke into the sky and damaging about 20 buildings. |
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 NEW YORK — Walk along the boardwalk on a late autumn day, and Brighton Beach can seem like an old-age home by the sea, where stooped ladies wear rouge like armor and almost everyone lives in the shadow of a difficult past. |
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MOSCOW — Almost five months after customs duties were slapped on household goods of foreigners moving into the country, the government has yet to fulfill its promise to lift the regulations, which made relocating to Russia significantly more expensive. The commission of the Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, which oversees the issue, did not sign a protocol to remove the duty at its Nov. |
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The Petersburg branch of Rospotrebnadzor, the federal watchdog for consumer rights and human welfare, carried out an inspection into Lyubavushka company from Oct. 5 to Nov.1, and found a number of violations in all the supermarkets of the Polushka chain. |
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MOSCOW — Russian Railways and Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica announced Friday that they had signed a memorandum of understanding on the creation of a joint venture to develop signaling, telecommunications, automation and safety technology for the Russian rail system. |
 Travel agencies are calling for St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood to keep separate pricing systems for entrance tickets for Russian citizens. Both the museums are part of the Isaakievsky Sobor state museum complex, which recently announced a fixed uniform ticket price of 200 rubles ($6. |
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MOSCOW — Russia could import grain in the aftermath of last summer’s drought to help keep domestic prices low, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s economy will expand at a slower rate than previously forecast this year after “disappointing” growth in the third quarter, Morgan Stanley said, Bloomberg reported. Gross domestic product will probably rise 3.8 percent this year, compared with a previous estimate of 4. |
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MOSCOW — Vince Cable, the British Business Secretary, concluded a trade mission to Russia on Friday by co-chairing a meeting with Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, talks that the minister hailed as a “real breakthrough in our relations. |
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MOSCOW — Intourist, the face of Russia for foreign visitors from Soviet days to the present, and Thomas Cook, Europe’s second-largest tour operator, signed a $45 million agreement on Thursday to create a joint venture. Thomas Cook will get a 50.1 percent stake in the newly established company by paying $10 million in cash and the remaining $35 million in its own shares. |
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MOSCOW — German power company E.On, majority owner of Russian energy company OGK-4, launched a 400-megawatt, advanced-efficiency, gas-fired electricity plant on Friday at Shatura, 150 kilometers east of Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin proposed on Friday that the capital should attract big international firms to participate in the construction of new metro lines, which may be worth up to 1.5 trillion rubles ($48 billion). “Construction of the metro alone requires 500 billion to 1.5 trillion rubles,” Sobyanin said at a conference, citing his conversation with an unidentified minister. |
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 The brutal beating of Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin has outraged the professional community and human rights activists. Signatures are being gathered for an appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev calling for an investigation into this and a host of other crimes against journalists. |
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In mid-November, I went to hear Boris Nemtsov speak at Columbia University. A leading opposition figure, he began not by criticizing the Russian government but by stressing the importance of ratifying New START. |
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 Last week, Hollywood staLeonardo DiCaprio came to St. Petersburg for a conference on saving endangered Amur tigers and met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who called him a “real man.” In a speech, Putin said DiCaprio “broke his way through to us as if he were crossing a front line.” The actor arrived late for the forum because his plane from New York had to turn back after an engine burst into flames. |
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 WASHINGTON — The release of more than 250,000 classified State Department documents forced the Obama administration into damage control, trying to contain fallout from unflattering assessments of world leaders and revelations about backstage U.S. diplomacy. |
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s military announced provocative new artillery drills on a front-line island shelled in a deadly North Korean attack, then immediately postponed them Monday in a sign of disarray hours after the president vowed to get tough on the North. |
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DUBLIN — Ireland’s international bailout relieved investors Monday but outraged many across the country who find that a requirement to raid state pension funds to protect foreign creditors unjustly burdens average taxpayers for the mistakes of a rich elite. |
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KABUL, Afghanistan — A gunman wearing an Afghan border police uniform killed six NATO service members during a training mission Monday in the east of the country, NATO forces said in a statement. |
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Issues Archive