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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday welcomed the U.S. Senate’s decision to ratify a landmark U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control treaty, but Russian legislators said they need to study a resolution accompanying the document before following suit. Medvedev’s spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said that when he signed the New START treaty with President Barack Obama, they agreed that the ratification process should be conducted simultaneously. She said that Medvedev voiced hope that both houses of Russian parliament would ratify the pact, but added that they would need some time to analyze the Senate’s conditions for its ratification before making their decision. |
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PETER’S CITY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Bronze Horseman statue, under a dusting of snow, on Thursday. Forecasters are predicting more snow on Friday and Saturday |
 MINSK, Belarus — Seven presidential candidates who ran against the country’s authoritarian leader could face up to 15 years in prison and one was beaten so badly in the election’s aftermath he is unable to walk, his lawyer and a human rights organization said. Pavel Sapelko said Wednesday he suspects his client, Andrei Sannikov, has a broken leg, yet he was refused an X-ray.
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Milana Kashtanova, a 22-year-old Estonian citizen who spent more than nine months in a coma after being hit by a chunk of falling ice in February, 2010, is claiming 50 million rubles ($1.6 million) in physical and moral damages. Kashtanova, who had come to St. |
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A Dubai court on Wednesday slashed the prison terms for two men convicted in the 2009 slaying of former Chechen commander Sulim Yamadayev from life to just three years in a surprise ruling that highlighted the international intrigue surrounding the case. |
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MOSCOW — The head of Interpol’s Russia office warned on Wednesday of a surge in marriage scams in which Russian women posing as potential brides trick Western men out of money. Timur Lakhonin also blamed Europe’s “policy of double standards” for Moscow’s failure to secure the extradition of wanted suspects. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — With flamed-haired former spy Anna Chapman and a sleek race car, Young Guard’s congress on Wednesday offered the ingredients of a James Bond thriller. But the pro-Kremlin youth group was all business, making high-powered appointments that appeared aimed at stemming Kremlin worries that nationalist violence might overshadow State Duma elections next year and the presidential vote in early 2012. It remained unclear, however, how Chapman — who was deported from the United States in a spy swap in July and has posed half-naked for men’s magazines — and her appointment Wednesday as a senior Young Guard member would help the group fight rising nationalism among the country’s disenchanted and bitter youth. |
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FATHER FROST
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Ded Moroz or ‘Father Frost,’ the Russian equivalent of Father Christmas, hands out advertising leaflets outside the Kolizei cinema on Nevsky Prospekt, in the center of St. Petersburg, on Thursday. |
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As the head of Gazprom said for the first time this week that the plans for the controversial 403-meter-tall Okhta Center skyscraper have finally dropped and that it had no immediate plans for any large-scale construction in St. Petersburg, local preservationists launched a Christmas postcard campaign asking Stockmann to remove a tall glass structure from its new trade center on Nevsky Prospekt.
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 MOSCOW — Clashes with police, scuffles at a construction site, sieges of administration buildings and a fire that some believe was arson. These are things residents of a downtown Moscow neighborhood had to deal with after an Oscar-winning director decided to build a hotel next to their homes. “Some people have threatened us verbally over the telephone. |
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MOSCOW — Plans to plug a budget gap by raising the value added tax level and pension age are “unacceptable,” Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said Wednesday, reopening a war of words with Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. The Finance Ministry has proposed such measures to narrow the budget deficit that it expects to swell to 4. |
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The St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s Office has deemed a controversial recalculation of payments for heating last winter illegal, the organization reported on its Internet site on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — A company linked to a friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is saying it is confident to win any tenders to build a citywide traffic control system for Moscow. Representatives of Tolltec told reporters Wednesday that their firm offers an integrated solution unrivaled by competitors. “We are a Russian firm and therefore we believe that our chances for winning future tenders are the best,” the firm’s business development director, Alexei Grishechkin, told The St. |
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 Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there will certainly be plenty of analyses about what that meant and where the country stands two decades later. But one of the most important results became apparent in 2010: Russia made a psychological break with its past and its former status as an empire. |
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There are two reasons for the outbreak of ultranationalist violence in Russia. The first is Caucasus fascism, which is a serious problem for Russia in the same way that Islamic fascism is for the West. |
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 The heartbreaking powers of Leos Janacek’s “Katya Kabanova” rival those of Jacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” and the Mikhailovsky Theater Symphony Orchestra reached the heights of those powers on Dec. 16, the opening night of the premiere of this masterpiece of expressiveness and melody. The company has made a bold move with the premiere of “Katya Kabanova,” stepping onto Janacek’s territory, not an easy field for any opera company. Besides, the company’s great rival, the Mariinsky Theater has already established itself on that territory, with the premiere of “The Makropulos Affair” earlier this fall and a rendition of “Jenufa” in 2007. |
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Vadim Shesterikov / For The St. Petersburg Times
Guitarist and singer Leonid Fyodorov (r) and keyboard player Dmitry Ozersky of the respected local art-rock band Auktsyon will perform as a duo at Tantsy at 9 p.m. on Sunday. |
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A memory that may remain painfully seared into the interior of our craniums from the year 2010 is the sight and sound of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin performing “Blueberry Hill” on television earlier the month. Russia’s corruption rate soared ever higher, freedom of the press plunged ever lower, with ever more journalists beaten or investigated and the Wikileaks’ memos described the country as a “virtual mafia state.
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 Drawings by the St. Petersburg poet Joseph Brodsky, who was famously expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for “social parasitism,” are on display at the Russian National Library to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his birth. In addition to the poet’s drawings, “The Hourglass” comprises a selection of the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate’s letters, manuscripts, diaries and photos assembled from private collections, archives and trusts. |
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The location for this new eatery from the Ginza restaurant group is truly spectacular, and recent developments at City Hall may soon be putting it in the news. |
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 The disruptions of earthly existence came from some unlikely places in 2010: ash from an Icelandic volcano; the contents of an airline passenger’s underwear; a website called WikiLeaks spilling the secret cables of international diplomacy onto front pages across the world. More than ever, for good and or bad, history became an experience shared worldwide, from the horror of Haiti’s earthquake at the start of 2010 to the thrill that coursed across the continents in October as Chilean miners trapped underground for 10 weeks were winched to safety. |
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Issues Archive