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 The newly opened EU Center in St. Petersburg is due to receive nearly half a million euros for its projects in the next three years. The center, which started operating this month, is the first of its kind in Russia and the 27th outside the EU.
Michael Webb, deputy head of the Delegation of the European Union to Russia, said a further 100,000 euros of funding will come from the city’s European University — the school’s Center for European Studies serves as a base for the new organization — and its partners. |
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A man walked into a police station in northern St. Petersburg last Thursday with the news that there was a bomb under an elite apartment building a few steps from Pionerskaya metro station. |
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after suffering exposure to extreme cold in the line outside the departure terminal at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport on Friday.
Long lines have been a regular feature at Pulkovo since the recent introduction of increased security measures, and the tourist had to spend considerable time outside the terminal entrance in temperatures between –18 and –20 degrees Celsius. |
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Allegro, the new St. Petersburg-Helsinki high-speed train, broke down again Saturday at the station of Vainikkala on the Finnish border.
Passengers spent three hours in icy wagons with no electricity and no heating. |
 Estonia’s St. John’s Church in St. Petersburg, one of the symbols of the country’s struggle for independence, was reopened Sunday after years of neglect and decay under the Soviets. The re-consecration ceremony, conducted by Andres Poder, Archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Estonia, was attended by the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — A turf war between law enforcement agencies, the likes of which has not been seen for many years, flared up last week after the newly independent Investigative Committee launched an attack on its former patron, the Prosecutor General’s Office.
A case against an illegal gambling network in the Moscow region has served as the pretext, with investigators claiming the owners had ties to local officials, while prosecutors tried to close the case. |
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 MOSCOW — About 13 billion rubles ($440 million) illegally obtained from the Bank of Moscow was discovered in the personal account of Yelena Baturina, the billionaire wife of ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, investigators said last Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — The United Russia party nominated incumbent Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for a second four-year term at the helm of the once war-ravaged North Caucasus republic — along with two other candidates.
Grozny Mayor Muslim Khuchiyev and Shaid Zhamaldayev, head of the region surrounding the Chechen capital, were also tapped as possible republican leaders by the party, which submitted the list to President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Trapped for 28 hours in Sheremetyevo Airport at New Year, and frustrated by the lack of information, lawyer Sergei Litvintsev decided to get even with Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. |
 MOSCOW — After twin attacks by female suicide bombers killed 40 people in the Moscow metro last March, media reports warned that women sporting a Muslim headdress in public may face verbal or even physical attacks.
The warnings were far from baseless, as several hate-related incidents took place hours after the bombing. |
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MOSCOW — A longstanding myth about Russia has been debunked by the World Health Organization, which ranked the country only fourth in the world by alcohol consumption — though the first for alcohol-related deaths. |
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MOSCOW — New registration rules for expatriates are intended to reduce bureaucracy, and the government is working on more reforms to bring conditions for foreign employees in the country in line with Europe, the Federal Migration Service said Thursday.
“We are working on a whole set of laws that will make the whole registration system obsolete,” the service’s spokesman Konstantin Poltoranin told The St. |
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MOSCOW — Russia may introduce criminal punishment for legal entities, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin said last Thursday, claiming that the move is needed to lure foreign investors — though experts believe it will have the opposite effect.
The move appears to be Bastrykin’s attempt to expand authority of his newly independent agency and will produce another harassment tool to be used against businesses, analysts said. |
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 LONDON — A short walk from Harrods, one of London’s most prestigious department stores, and buried deep in the plush backstreets of Kensington and Chelsea, is Britain’s oldest Orthodox cathedral.
Converted from an Anglican church in the 1950s, the Cathedral of the Dormition and All Saints has an icon screen salvaged from the chapel of the imperial Russian Embassy in London in 1918. |
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Sollers and Ford Motor said Friday that they tentatively agreed to combine their Russian plants into a joint venture to produce Ford cars, vans and pickup trucks in a plan that could boost sales to at least 300,000 by 2015. |
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It is necessary to decrease the number of foreign workers in St. Petersburg, Governor Valentina Matviyenko told a session of the city government last week.
“There’s no need to bring in just anybody, and then deal with illegal immigrants, crime, and living conditions,” said the governor, explaining her position. |
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German company Eberspaecher will open a factory producing automobile exhaust systems later this year, said Dmitry Osipov, general director of the company’s Russian offices. |
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 It should surprise no one that many in Latvia view the sale by France of fully equipped assault warships to Russia with grave concern. Other European Union member states seem to be looking increasingly toward Russia as a potential purchaser of military equipment. |
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Using a mobile phone is forbidden, as is walking outside. Showers are once a week for 10 minutes. People are routinely sworn at, and it’s not unheard of for them to be tied to their beds. |
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Local punk band PTVP packed Shum club Friday, pumping out their songs about sex, drugs and revolution for nearly two hours. Singer and songwriter Alexei Nikonov dedicated one song with the chorus “It Rains in California, it Snows in Magadan” to political prisoners, “whom they say don’t exist in Russia,” and urged the audience to show their solidarity. Introducing his anti-Kremlin anthem “God Save Putin,” Nikonov advised fans not to cooperate with the authorities and “not to sign any official papers,” and called for anarchists and left-wingers to stop fighting and unite in the face of the bleak current situation, dedicating “Morning of the Workers” to the German left-wing militant Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction (RAF). |
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.jpg) Finnish hardcore punk/metal legends Kumikameli perform loud guitar music now, but they deliberately avoided guitars and performed what were described as “children’s songs” when they started out 25 years and ten albums ago in Joensuu, a North Karelian city 80 kilometers from the Finnish-Russian border. |
 JFC Jazz Club is preparing to host the 16th Guitar Jazz festival, which this year is dedicated to the centenary of Django Reinhardt, the legendary father of gypsy jazz, or manouche.
The composer of jazz hits such as “Djangology,” “Minor Swing” and “Nuages,” Reinhardt left an indelible imprint on the development of jazz.
One of the few jazz styles to originate outside of America, manouche was born on the streets of Paris out of classical music, and is influenced by jazz and gypsy folk melodies. |
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 This week, ballerina Anastasia Volochkova was once again the subject of earnest political commentary, as she alleged in her blog that the shadowy Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov personally ordered Channel One to take off the air a trashy talk show about her birthday. |
 They adapt inviolable classical jewels such as Chopin’s nocturnes and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” for a quartet of Russian folk instruments. They mix J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor with Russian folk tunes. They make their audiences’ jaws drop — and the applause from the stunned audience is deafening. |
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the morning run in the park. Their one-word explanation for their hangovers: Êîðïîðàòèâ! It wasn’t hard to figure out that this word meant “office party,” especially when the sufferers regaled us with stories of the spread (lavish), the booze (abundant) and their co-workers’ behavior (deliciously scandalous). |
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It may seem like a fairly unlikely marketing decision to name a restaurant after a writer who famously starved himself to death. But the management behind the new restaurant Gogol clearly decided that the legacy of the writer, who set some of his most famous works in St. Petersburg, eclipsed the unsettling nature of his death. |
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 British scientists have proved that happy employees have a positive influence on the production and profit of their company. According to research by Professor Andrew Oswald titled “Happiness and Productivity,” happy employees work 12 percent more efficiently compared to average employees, while unhappy ones have 10-percent lower productivity. |
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The training market in Russia appeared at the same time as capitalism in the country: At the beginning of the 1990s. But even in the Soviet Union, there was a school that offered training programs for the heads of Soviet construction and other organizations. |
 While some of the city’s HR experts express cautious optimism about the revival of St. Petersburg’s labor market, other specialists still consider it to be sluggish. All local HR gurus are, however, agreed that new post-crisis trends have appeared on the market.
“The labor market has definitely become more active recently. Depending on the sphere of business, demand has grown by 25 to 35 percent,” said Yelena Kolkova, director of the local branch of Staffwell recruitment agency. |
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 Fifty-two percent of Russian companies employ expats, according to the St. Petersburg branch of HeadHunter web site — 30 percent more than a year ago.
In spite of the bureaucratic headaches involved in employing foreigners, employers see a number of advantages in expats over their Russian counterparts. |
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Issues Archive