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 MOSCOW (AP) — A suicide bomber set off an explosion that ripped through the international arrivals terminal of Moscow's busiest airport on Monday. The attack killed at least 31 people and wounded nearly 170, Russian officials said. Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said the bombing was most likely carried out by a suicide bomber and "attempts were being made to identify him." The Interfax news agency, citing law enforcement sources, said the head of the suspected bomber had been found. |
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 The death last week of a six-year-old boy, killed by falling ice, has caused wide resonance in St. Petersburg and provoked intense criticism of City Hall regarding the clearing of snow and ice, with some holding St. |
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Falling ice and its tragic consequences dominated the headlines in St. Petersburg this week (see article above), but a quick flick past the front pages revealed that it was only one in an almost apocalyptic cocktail of risks facing the city’s residents. While many residents scurry along the streets with a nervous eye on the rooftops for falling ice, snow, or migrant workers, it’s as well to remember what lies beneath — in this case, the city’s rickety hot water supply. |
All photos from issue.
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 Film director Alexander Sokurov wrote an open letter to St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko on Tuesday protesting the ongoing demolition of the historic Literary House on Nevsky Prospekt, calling for a halt to the demolition, while Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum, expressed concern about the building during a press conference on the same day. |
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Finnish Visa Center ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Finnish Consulate is to open a new visa center in St. Petersburg on February 11. The new center will enable Russians to apply for Finnish visas without standing in long lines, according to the General Consulate of Finland. |
 MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court on Monday approved the arrest of retired colonel and ultranationalist icon Vladimir Kvachkov, 62, held on suspicion of preparing an armed coup with crossbows. Kvachkov’s lawyer Andrei Pershin said by telephone that he believed that the arrest of his client was revenge from Rusnano chief Anatoly Chubais, whom Kvachkov was twice acquitted of trying to kill. |
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MOSCOW — EU diplomats have poured cold water on an offer by the Foreign Ministry to ease visa rules for Europeans if the liberal visa practices of some European countries are expanded throughout the Schengen zone. |
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MINSK — Newspapers linked to Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko’s administration have accused Poland and Germany of trying to overthrow the authoritarian leader. Both countries denied the claim, and Germany’s human rights commissioner said Saturday that Belarus must repeat its presidential election if it is to avoid political sanctions from the European Union over last month’s contentious vote that saw Lukashenko stay in power. |
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MOSCOW — The federal government will trim its staff by 5 percent to 1,453 by late March to abide by presidential orders, a spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told reporters Friday. |
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MOSCOW — The state highway company Avtodor received 39.5 billion additional rubles ($1.3 billion) for construction and redevelopment of four federal highways, up from 17.3 billion rubes ($402 million) originally allocated in the 2010 budget, Kommersant reported last week. |
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MOSCOW — The number of crimes in the country has grown drastically over the past decade, new research shows, debunking optimistic but unconvincing reports to the contrary favored by law enforcement agencies. |
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Speaking at a conference aimed at fighting corruption in December, a senior official in charge of St. Petersburg’s anti-corruption strategy voiced a confession that his European counterparts would most likely regard as utterly embarrassing. “The president has ordered us to cooperate with non-governmental groups,” he said. |
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$50 Million Heist MOSCOW (SPT) — Assailants stole as much as $50 million of luxury goods from businessman Alexander Tarantsev’s home during a nighttime raid on his compound near Moscow, his holding company, Russian Gold, said Friday, Bloomberg reported. |
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MOSCOW — The Economic Development Ministry is proposing property inspections to increase tax collection rates, ministry department head Andrei Ivakin told Vedomosti. The proposal was stimulated by a request from President Dmitry Medvedev to address causes of municipal budget deficits. |
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MOSCOW — Russian environmentalists will appeal to BP and Rosneft shareholders to thwart the companies’ plans to drill for oil in a remote part of the Arctic, amid concerns that a spill in the icebound sea could be unreachable for up to nine months. |
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Solaris Launched ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus has begun production of the Hyundai Solaris at its plant in St. Petersburg. The sale of the new model produced at the plant is to begin in January, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Being invited to a bank board member’s barbecue is a better indicator of whether his institution will give you a mortgage than your actual credit history, according to a report released Monday by Penny Lane real estate agency. |
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MOSCOW — The Economic Development Ministry is proposing property inspections to increase tax collection rates, ministry department head Andrei Ivakin told Vedomosti. The proposal was stimulated by a request from President Dmitry Medvedev to address causes of municipal budget deficits. |
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MOSCOW — Shalva Chigirinsky, the real estate and oil tycoon whose plans to build the tallest tower in Europe vanished with the 2008 crisis, wants to construct a building about half the size in the Moskva-City business district, officials said Monday. |
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Local recruitment experts are among those trying to bring about an amendment to a contested bill banning temporary contract work in Russia. This model of labor is popular with many foreign and Russian companies because it allows them to use a number of people without taking them on as permanent staff. “For instance, an ice-cream company needs to increase its output volume in a short space of time in the summer,” said Yekaterina Gorokhova, vice president and general manager of Kelly Services CIS. “There is no need for such a large staff in the winter. The company goes to a recruitment agency, which provides it with seasonal workers.” Major recruitment agencies represented in St. |
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 The St. Petersburg budget could lose about 20 billion rubles in taxes from Gazprom Neft if the company selects a site for its office complex in another region of Russia after the controversial Okhta Center skyscraper plan was scrapped. |
 MOSCOW — Positive experience gathered by BP in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil leak in U.S. history, contributed to Rosneft’s decision to strike an $8 billion share-swap and wide-ranging cooperation agreement with the international oil giant Friday night. |
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MOSCOW — Internet users — not Internet companies — should be held legally accountable for uploading pirated content on web sites, Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev said. |
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In all the years that I have been writing this column, I’ve never seen a year more lacking in economic developments than 2010. While growth was slow in comparison with other BRIC countries, high oil prices and the lack of state debt meant that the authorities didn’t have to worry too much over current budgetary problems. The government did not implement a single economic reform during the past 12 months, and all the hype over modernization remained empty words. Tacitly underscoring the poor state of affairs, Central Bank officials made fewer official statements than usual about their strategies and goals. The utterances they did make, however, might lead listeners to conclude that they had forgotten that the primary cause of inflation is the government’s monetary policy. |
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 First came Sidanco. Then TNK-BP rose its head. Now we have Rosneft. BP’s surprise deal to hand over a 5-percent stake worth $8 billion to Rosneft in exchange for 9. |
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An old, typically fatalistic Russian saying advises, “Never say you won’t go broke or go to prison.” For 15 St. Petersburg lawyers who went public in December with an astonishing statement of protest, that saying has become more than just a wry comment on the vagaries of life. The lawyers are between them handling more than 10 cases in which their clients are accused of economic crimes. |
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 A new opera created by a contemporary French composer and loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s classic drama “The Cherry Orchard” invokes the sense of sadness felt by the Russian intelligentsia of today about the younger generation seemingly sacrificing soulfulness for pragmatism and materialism. “Russia’s intelligentsia is dying out,” says Alexei Parin, a prominent Moscow poet and novelist who created the libretto for Philippe Fenelon’s opera “The Cherry Orchard,” which saw its local premiere on Dec. 22 in the Shostakovich Hall of the Philharmonic, when a concert performance of the opera was given by soloists from Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Italian conductor Tito Ceccherini. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Local favorites Markscheider Kunst will play at Kosmonavt on Friday, Jan. 21 at 8 p.m. |
 Glamorous opera diva Anna Netrebko comes to her alma mater this week for two performances in the role of Adina in a new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’amore” on Jan. 24 and 27. Netrebko, who has already sung Adina to great international acclaim and even recorded a DVD of the opera, partnered by the popular Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon, will be making her debut in the role on home soil.
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Áðàê: defective product, reject Welcome back from vacation! A few of you put on some weight, it seems. Nothing like 10 days of nonstop eating and drinking to ruin the waistline. But a few of you look well-rested. Oh right, you were at the dacha with no electricity for two weeks. I also see some bandaged hands. Fireworks are a bit tricky after a liter of vodka, huh? Well, let’s get down to work, shall we? We’ll start the year with a one-question pop quiz — and no moaning! This is a fun one: What do marriage and defective products have in common? Oddly enough, they share the same Russian word: áðàê. But before you race to a divorce lawyer claiming that your sacred bond is a factory reject, you ought to know that the words are etymologically unrelated. |
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 Gioachino Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” (The Barber of Seville) is enjoying a new staging at the Mikhailovsky Theater that premieres on Jan. 21 and 23. |
 On New Year’s Day, one of Russia’s oldest pop groups, Na-Na, was preparing to fly back to Moscow in a creaky old plane after giving a concert in the oil town of Surgut in West Siberia. It was not the most auspicious start to the year, and things went from bad to worse. |
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We ended last year with a review of Ginza Project’s panoramic restaurant on the top floor of the swanky Quattro Corti business center, and we begin 2011 by assessing the same restaurant group’s panoramic restaurant on the top floor of the new Stockmann Nevsky Center mall. |
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 MOSCOW — The auto market grew by 30 percent last year to 1.91 million units, rebounding after an initial slump and leaving it poised to reach pre-crisis sales levels by 2012. Earlier gloomy forecasts for 2010 foresaw sales of only 1.5 million units, said the Association of European Businesses’ Automobile Manufacturers Committee at its annual news conference on Jan. 13. “The recovery has been driven by general consumer confidence, a stable currency and availability of credit as the year went forward,” said Volvo Russia president and committee chairman David Thomas. |
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 MOSCOW — “Let me speak from my heart in English,” begged sports minister Vitaly Mutko at the December ceremony where Russia won the right to host the 2018 World Cup. |
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 TUNIS, Tunisia — Tunisia’s day-old government was shaken by the resignation of four ministers on Tuesday, undermining its hopes of quelling simmering unrest by sharing power with members of the opposition to the old regime. All four who resigned were opponents of deposed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s iron-fisted 23-year rule, and protesters demanded that the new cabinet be purged of the old guard that served Ben Ali. |
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LONDON — Britain’s former top legal official says Tony Blair insisted the U.K. could join the 2003 invasion of Iraq without additional backing from the United Nations, despite specific advice which told him that was untrue. |
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BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of police recruits on Tuesday, killing at least 45 people and undercutting Iraqi security efforts as the nation struggles to show it can protect itself without foreign help. The death toll was still rising more than three hours after police said the bomber joined a crowd of more than 100 recruits and detonated his explosives-packed vest outside the police station in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, some 130 kilometers north of Baghdad. |
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MELBOURNE, Australia — Authorities with megaphones urged residents of more towns in southern Australia to flee Tuesday as swollen rivers carried deadly floodwaters deeper into another state and worsened a natural disaster the government says may be its costliest ever. |
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