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The controversial Okhta Center project was scrapped Thursday, as St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko canceled her Oct. 2009 decree allowing the planned Gazprom skyscraper to increase its height to 403 meters, contrary to the 40-meter limit for the area set by the law. “We had talks with Gazprom and took a mutual and final decision about moving the project to another site,” she was quoted as saying by Ekho Moskvy radio station. Matviyenko made the statement during a planned meeting with journalists during a congress of construction businesses in St. Petersburg. She said she had already signed the decree. Last week, Matviyenko first admitted that the move was possible. |
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WHITE NIGHTS
Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters
Pedestrians tackle Nevsky Prospekt, close to Gostiny Dvor, during a snowstorm that hit St. Petersburg on Thursday evening. Forecasters are predicting heavy snowfalls through the weekend, with temperatures set to fall to lows of minus 13 degrees Celsius. |
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A galaxy of Hollywood and other international movie stars including Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner, Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell and Mickey Rourke will attend a major charity concert in support of Russian children with cancer and serious ophthalmology problems in St. Petersburg on Friday. Stone said the event would be “a terrific opportunity to work on behalf of these children.
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 The monument to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin that was blown up by an unknown party in St. Petersburg’s satellite town of Pushkin on Monday night will be restored, the administration of the Pushkin district said. “The monument to Lenin will be restored but the terms of restoration are to be determined after an expert evaluation,” a representative of the district administration said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Surprising nationalists and opposition politicians alike, Moscow’s notoriously tough police force took no action as about 1,000 football fans chanting nationalist slogans blocked Moscow’s Leningradsky Prospekt Tuesday for an unsanctioned protest against the death of one of their own in an interracial brawl. |
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MOSCOW — A reputed Tajik rebel leader-turned-crime boss accused of killing at least 43 people, including 19 Russian soldiers, in 25 attacks was detained working as a vegetable seller in a Russian region, the Federal Security Service said Wednesday, Interfax reported. The FSB did not provide details on Abdulvosit Latipov’s arrest other than to say he resided in the Chelyabinsk region. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The World Bank has approved a $100 million loan to preserve cultural heritage sites in four northwestern regions that have been dubbed the “Silver Ring,” the bank said Wednesday. “This is another opportunity for the regions to use their cultural heritage and to include it in their economic strategy,” said Marina Vasilyeva, a spokeswoman for the World Bank’s Moscow office. The Russian government will contribute an additional $150.5 million to the “Preservation and Promotion of Cultural Heritage” project which will be run by the Culture Ministry from 2011 to 2017. The program foresees that restored sites will have a snowball effect on tourism and related infrastructure. |
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 A new high-speed train, the Allegro, will reduce the journey time between St. Petersburg and Helsinki to just three-and-a-half hours when it is launched on Sunday. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev would easily win re-election if the vote were held today and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stayed out of the race, according to a new survey by the Kremlin-friendly VTsIOM. Medvedev would scoop up 50 percent of the vote, followed at a distant second by Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky with 5 percent, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov with 4 percent and Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu with 3 percent, according to the poll on whom voters would pick if elections were held next Sunday. |
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Transport Prices Rise ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Prices for public transport in the city will increase from Jan. 1. Tickets for buses, trolleybuses and trams will increase from the current 19 rubles ($0. |
 WASHINGTON — A diplomat’s life is not just caviar and coattails. It is rubbery fish in Brussels, a nauseating revolving restaurant in Kazakhstan and an epic three-day Dagestani wedding featuring “stupendous” quantities of alcohol, a golden pistol, dancing women, the scent of danger and cauldrons of cows boiled whole. It is not all receptions and speeches. It also is the psychological terror of getting a phone call saying your spouse has died in an accident, but not really. |
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 MOSCOW — Filipp Kirkorov, the quintessential Russian pop star of the 1990s, has apologized to a television director he attacked last week and blamed the outburst, which could land him in jail, on an unspecified mental disorder. |
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MOSCOW — Pipe makers lamented the level of government support against cheap imports at an industry conference Wednesday, and asked for an extension on protective duties for oil and gas pipes from Ukraine. Anti-dumping duties run an average of 15 to 20 percent. |
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Hyundai will increase its 2011 production target for its new factory in St. Petersburg from 150,000 to 200,000, the manufacturer announced at the opening of a new facility this week. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday promised 122.9 billion rubles ($3.9 billion) in federal funding to modernize the medical and pharmaceuticals industry. “These serious resources are to act as a sort of seed capital for the modernization of the industry, for a quality breakthrough in innovation,” he said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and the United States agreed Tuesday to carry out a study on removing bomb-grade uranium from Russian research reactors. “Together we’ve done a great deal in returning fuel from third countries. |
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 It is very easy to predict the Kremlin’s reactions. Amid the general euphoria over the rapprochement between Russian and U.S. leaders at the November NATO-Russia Council summit in Lisbon, I predicted in a previous column that any cooperation between Moscow and Brussels was doomed to be limited in scope. |
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While leading publications like The Guardian, El Pais, Der Spiegel and The New York Times were publishing in-depth analytical articles based on documents released on WikiLeaks, the web site’s Russian partner, Russian Reporter magazine, created an unpleasant surprise by running a series of articles containing outright lies. |
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 The French connection is key to this year’s international Arts Square Festival, St. Petersburg’s premier classical arts winter event. The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chausson trio and pianist Francois Weigel will represent France at this year’s event, which is packed with performances of French composers’ work, from Ravel and Debussy to Boulez and Faure and contemporary masters such as Philippe Fenelon. The musical fiesta kicks off on Dec. 14 at the Shostakovich Philharmonia with a performance by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic orchestra under the baton of Yury Temirkanov, the festival’s founder and the artistic director of the Philharmonic. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
The Center of Korean Traditional Performing Arts will sing and dance at the Hermitage Theater on Tuesday as part of the Aroma of Korea festival. |
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Elton John’s visit to St. Petersburg this week to perform with percussionist Ray Cooper seems like an echo from the Soviet past, as the same duo came to Moscow and Leningrad in 1979, and Elton John is now remembered as “the first Western star to tour the Soviet Union.” It should be noted, however, that three years before Elton John’s first visit, Cliff Richard, who was making a comeback tour in support of his 1976 “I Am Nearly Famous” album, played a few shows in St.
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 Heroes and villains of Russian history are at the heart of a new exhibition that opened in the Benois Wing of the State Russian Museum on Wednesday. Entitled “The Favorites of Clio,” referring to the Classical Greek muse of history, the display showcases around 350 works by some of Russia’s finest 19th-century artists such as Ilya Repin, Nikolai Ge, Valentin Serov, Vasily Perov, Mikhail Nesterov and Konstantin Makovsky. |
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From the people behind the miniature soup and sandwich cafe Soup and Wine and the Italian restaurant Testo, both located on Kazanskaya Ulitsa, now comes the pan-Asian cafe Ping Pong. |
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 BEIJING — China’s campaign to vilify this year’s recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and sabotage the award ceremony showed signs of backfiring Thursday, as criticism of Beijing rose and the imprisoned Chinese dissident seemed to be turning into a celebrity. |
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KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. military is cutting ties with an Afghan security firm run by relatives of President Hamid Karzai that has been accused of bribing both government officials and Taliban commanders, according to documents obtained Thursday. |
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PARIS — Travelers in Paris and Frankfurt slept at the airport after snow and ice caused travel chaos. Pop singer Shakira canceled a concert in Germany, while the French prime minister missed a gala at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Many European commuters suffered through traffic jams on slushy streets Thursday, and Scotland even called in the army to clear the snow. |
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LONDON — WikiLeaks’ payment processor said Thursday that it was preparing to sue credit card companies Visa and MasterCard over their refusal to process donations to the secret-spilling website. |
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Issues Archive