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St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko unexpectedly announced last week that the city authorities might offer state oil and gas giant Gazprom alternative locations for the company’s controversial Okhta Center skyscraper. “I believe it is possible that we will offer Gazprom some other sites for the construction of such a large investment project,” Matviyenko said was quoted by Interfax as saying last week. Matviyenko said no official decision had yet been made about the construction of the 396-meter tall skyscraper, set to house the headquarters of Gazprom Neft, and that the main opposition to the project was its planned location across the Neva from Smolny Cathedral. |
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UNKNOWN SOLDIER
Peter Andrews / Reuters
A Polish army officer talks with President Dmitry Medvedev during a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw on Monday. Medvedev began a two-day visit to the Polish capital on Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The federal budget will supply 300 billion rubles ($9.6 billion) of funding for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, excluding airports and roads, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday. Experts say some of that funding will help accelerate regional development. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he expects big business to contribute to what some say will be a $20 billion to $50 billion overall tab, with Roman Abramovich and Gazprom as two sources likely to be tapped.
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City Hall hopes to stimulate St. Petersburg’s birth rate with a plan to give families with three or more children plots of land in the Leningrad Oblast. Experts and mothers are critical of the measure, however, and say it will not lead to a baby boom. “We’ll devise our own regional program to encourage people to have three and more children,” City Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Wednesday in response to President Dmitry Medvedev’s annual address to the Federation Council. |
All photos from issue.
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Local musicians have seized four nominations at this year’s prestigious Grammy awards, presented every year by the American Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The Mariinsky label’s recording of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera “The Enchanted Wanderer” performed by the Mariinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Valery Gergiev is a finalist in two categories: “Best Opera” and “Best Work by a Contemporary Classical Composer.” St. Petersburg conductor Mariss Jansons, who began his career at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and now spends most of his time abroad, has also been nominated in the “Best Classical Album” and “Best Orchestral Performance” categories for a recording of Bruckner’s Third and Fourth Symphonies with the world-renowned Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, where he is principal conductor. |
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HEADS UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman walks past two signs on Nevsky Prospekt. One is a World War II-era plaque warning that artillery shelling was likely to fall on this side of the street. The other is new, and warns of falling ice. |
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MOSCOW — Investigators were considering Monday whether the pilots who crash-landed a Tu-154 at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport over the weekend were heros for saving 165 of the 167 people on board or responsible for the emergency that required the landing. The pilots reported that all three of the engines on the jet operated by South East Airlines, formerly known as Dagestan Airlines, failed about 15 minutes after a 2 p.
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The city’s Mega malls launched a charity project on Dec. 1 that will enable visitors to help make the New Year wishes of children in need come true. Shoppers will be able to make wishes come true for about 200 children who attend the Day Rehabilitation Center for Neglected Children, the social shelter Nadezhda and the Social Community organization, said the press service of IKEA, the malls’ anchor tenant. |
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MOSCOW — The religious group Jehovah’s Witness says their local leader is being persecuted in Russia under a vague anti-extremism law. The group said Monday that Alexander Kalistratov is going on trial in the Siberian town of Gorno-Altaisk for alleged “incitement of religious enmity and hatred. |
 Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi rejected claims in a U.S. diplomatic cable that he profits from close relations with Moscow, declaring as he stood next to President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday that the two leaders act only in the interests of their people. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court sentenced a Latvian national to three years in a maximum-security prison Friday after convicting him of hijacking the Arctic Sea freighter in July 2009. |
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MOSCOW — A new batch of classified embassy cables published by the WikiLeaks web site shows that U.S. diplomats in Moscow possess impressive writing skills but have trouble tapping government sources for information. In fact, many of the 37 reports published at cablegate.wikileaks.org since late Wednesday cite the same political experts that are widely quoted by national and international media, including The St. Petersburg Times. They also feature interviews with journalists like Ekho Moskvy editor Alexei Venediktov and at least one reference to a St. Petersburg Times report on illegal logging in the Ivanovo region. The cables, which date from May 2006 to February 2010, reveal that the diplomats seem to have little more access to the inner circles of power than foreign correspondents. |
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 WARSAW, Poland — Russia’s ambassador said Thursday that President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Poland will open a new chapter in relations with Poland. Medvedev arrived in Warsaw on Monday for talks with Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk which will continue on Tuesday. |
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A former Komi prosecutor who made a YouTube appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev over “fabricated” charges that resulted in two people getting life prison terms was sentenced to 18 months in jail Friday after being convicted of deliberately giving false evidence. |
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MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — A 23-year-old Moscow resident accused of masterminding a vast worldwide spamming network pleaded not guilty Friday in a U.S. court to violating a U. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is ready to begin a new arms race if NATO fails to come to terms with Moscow over a joint missile shield in Europe, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” last week. “Russia will simply be obliged to protect its own safety by different means,” including new offensive weapons and nuclear missile systems, Putin said, echoing President Dmitry Medvedev’s warning to the United States in his state-of-the-nation address last Tuesday. |
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Mom ‘Harassed’ MOSCOW (SPT) — A solicitor representing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention last year, said Magnitsky’s mother has been harassed by undercover reporters preparing a critical documentary about her son. |
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Government officials said Friday that while the number of highly skilled foreign specialists working in Russia under a new, simplified visa regime is “not big,” a significant increase in take-up is expected next year. Mikhail An, deputy director of the Economic Development Ministry’s department of investment policy and public-private partnership, said companies were looking at how the law was working before participating more fully. He made the statement at the Association of European Businesses’ fourth annual migration conference. Federal Law No. 86 introduced July 1 permits highly skilled foreign specialists — classified as those with an annual salary of at least two million rubles ($63,500) — to be employed in Russia under a preferential visa and work permit system. |
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FIGHT FAN
Konstantin Chernichkin / Reuters
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (l) congratulates Russia’s Baysangurov after the boxer’s victory over Colombia’s Gutierrez in their junior middleweight fight for the IBO title in Brovary on Saturday. |
 MOSCOW — PepsiCo will acquire a controlling stake in juice and dairy giant Wimm-Bill-Dann to become the biggest food and beverage company in Russia, the companies announced Thursday. As a result of the deal Pepsi will have 49 manufacturing facilities and employ some 31,000 people in Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia, making it “the crown jewel of PepsiCo Europe,” Zein Abdulla, chief executive of PepsiCo Europe, told reporters.
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MOSCOW — Cables from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow published late Wednesday by WikiLeaks have shed light on Washington’s attitude toward President Dmitry Medvedev’s modernization agenda. A cable from Christmas Eve last year states that “Medvedev’s modernization drive provides American officials another potential hook for cooperation. |
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Ferry to Stockholm ST. PETERSBURG (Vedomosti) — St. Peter Line will launch a passenger cruise ship, the Princess Anastasia, on a Petersburg to Stockholm route in April next year. |
 MOSCOW — Foreign investors are more interested in the legal environment, tax incentives and attitude of the authorities in a region than location, natural resources or infrastructure, according to research released Friday. The findings, drawn from interviews by KPMG in cooperation with the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, suggest that regional governments that are not blessed with oil fields or rich mineral deposits can still compete for foreign direct investment. |
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 MOSCOW — Troika Dialog global markets division head Peter Ghavami has been arrested in the United States on a fraud charge. Ghavami, a Belgian national, was arrested upon arrival at John F. |
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 Awarding Russia the right to host the World Cup in 2018 was, in fact, the best outcome. FIFA’s decision, reached amid claims and counter-claims of corruption, puts Russia on the spot once and for all to clean up its reputation. However the decision was arrived at, the reality is that Russia’s reputation as a “difficult” market has reached an all-time low. |
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Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov recently gave an interview in Snob, the magazine he owns. He notes that when lecturing he always asks the audience to name the most effective manager of all Russian leaders in the last 500 years. |
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 MOSCOW — Flying tables, a sofa that lights up and other furniture turned into unusual and enchanting objects are on display at “The New Decor” exhibition at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. The show’s aim is to question our daily surroundings as artists explore interior design as a means of engaging with changes in contemporary culture. “The New Decor challenges visitors’ perceptions of their own environment and explores a new chapter in the history of exhibitions looking at art and design,” said Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London and the exhibition’s curator. Thirty-six renowned artists, including Jimmie Durham, Mona Hatoum, Martin Boyce, Yuichi Higashionna, Loris Cecchini, Jin Shi, Pascale Marthine Tayou and the Raqs Media Collective, look at the possibilities and interpretations of daily objects in the show. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Mourners attend a ceremony held at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace to commemorate the poet Bella Akhmadullina, who died on Nov. 29 at her home near Moscow. |
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GENEVA — Some 2,000 letters, postcards and photographs sent by the last Russian tsar’s siblings to their private tutor will go under the hammer in Geneva this month. The correspondence from Tsar Nicholas II’s younger brothers George and Mikhail and their sisters Ksenia and Olga to their Swiss tutor Ferdinand Thormeyer has never before been published, Swiss auction company Hotel des Ventes said.
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 VERKHNIYE MANDROGI, Leningrad Oblast — Visitors to this small settlement on the outskirts of the Leningrad Oblast can catch a glimpse of a time long-forgotten by immersing themselves in 19th-century rural Russian life. Located 260 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg, Verkhniye Mandrogi is a rustic, wood-crafted village that has thoroughly recreated the simple life of pre-revolutionary Russia. Surrounded by forests and flanked by waterways on both sides, this timeless settlement along the Svir River offers something for almost anyone who wants to unwind from big-city life. |
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 The latest WikiLeaks revelations are causing blushes and choking fits around the world, and one Dagestani oil magnate will definitely not be inviting those friendly American diplomats back for another party. |
 In the 1950s, millions of people reappeared in Soviet society, like ghosts returned from the dead. They had been revolutionaries, scientists, petty criminals and bureaucrats; some were their children. Some had been gone for months; others, for decades. But they all shared a common fate of having endured what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “Gulag Archipelago” — the immense forced labor and exile system that existed across Russia for almost a quarter century under Josef Stalin. |
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 GENEVA — Iran and six world powers came to the table Monday for the first time in a year. They exchanged pleasantries, but remained far apart on how deeply their talks should tackle the West’s greatest concern — Iranian nuclear activities that could lead to the manufacture of atomic weapons. |
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PONTOISE, France – Continental Airlines Inc. and one of its mechanics were convicted in a French court of manslaughter Monday because debris from one of its planes caused the crash of an Air France Concorde jet that killed 113 people a decade ago. |
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A pair of suicide bombers disguised as policemen killed 50 people Monday in an attack targeting a tribal meeting called to discuss the formation of an anti-Taliban militia in northwest Pakistan, officials said. The attack occurred on the grounds of the main government compound in Mohmand, part of Pakistan’s militant-infested tribal region. |
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ROME — An Italian fishing boat on Monday pulled the remains of two American balloonists from the Adriatic Sea, ending a two-month hunt for the pair’s bodies in one of ballooning’s darkest chapters. |
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Issues Archive