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 St. Petersburg State University, the city’s top higher educational institution, has refused to provide prosecutors with information about its students’ political activities amid controversy and protests, although earlier several faculties had started to collect the information following orders from Nikolai Kaledin, Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs. Critics said that such actions were illegal, contradicting both the constitution and the federal privacy law. |
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 Regular readers of this newspaper will be aware that St. Petersburg has a small but extremely active protest movement, ready to take to the streets in all kinds of weather and brave rotten treatment by the authorities in order to make themselves heard. |
 Russia’s “second capital” has made the grade. For the first time in many years, St. Petersburg finds itself ahead of Moscow, and in a rating that is not for “criminal capital” or “most polluted city” status (the fields in which the city, fairly or not, has reigned for a number of years). |
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A classical music concert will be held in March to draw attention to the plight of another endangered historic building in the city center known as the Abaza Mansion, after Alexander Abaza (1821-1895), a statesman and one-time minister of finance who lived there from the 1840s until the 1917 revolution. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — A snowboarding leopard backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been selected as one of three official mascots for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, trouncing a popular blue frog that made organizers shudder and a cartoon saw favored by bloggers as a symbol of Olympic corruption. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has fired two regional leaders in a surprise move that hints of a Kremlin housecleaning aimed at ditching underperformers before December’s State Duma elections. |
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MOSCOW — A new police law coming into force Tuesday will give officers the right to take down web sites without a court order, media reported — although industry representatives said police can already do that under existing legislation.
The police’s right is mentioned in a report on intellectual piracy submitted last Tuesday by the Economic Development Ministry to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is preparing its own annual piracy survey, Vedomosti reported Monday on its web site. |
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MOSCOW — A talk show host who lost his job on state radio after likening St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler stood by his on-air comments Monday, telling The St. |
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MOSCOW — Imagine a piece of plastic that gets you a doctor’s appointment, pays your bills, allows you to rent a car or buy a plane ticket and even get Moscow registration faster than the sham ads in the Moscow metro.
President Dmitry Medvedev promised Monday that three years from now all Russians will have this magic card. |
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MOSCOW — The Justice Ministry, notorious for refusing registration to anti-Kremlin groups, has promised clearer registration rules for nongovernmental organizations and called for increased public control over prisons. |
 MOSCOW — Prices are rising quickly and, in February, every second person (49 percent) was dissatisfied and ready to participate in a protest, according to a Public Opinion Foundation survey of 3,000 people from 204 towns on Feb. 19-20.
As recently as December, that figure was only a third (32 percent). |
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 St. Petersburg’s Property Fund on Friday sold the Palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich located at 8 Admiralteiskaya embankment at a starting price of 520 million rubles ($18 million).
There were two bids in the auction, and the successful buyer was a company named Palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich. |
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Foreign investment in St. Petersburg’s economy has fallen for the third year running. The construction industry has suffered most, while food manufacturing has seen growth of 11. |
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Northern Capital Gateway, the consortium managing Pulkovo airport, has chosen an operator for the hotel at the airport, and is now negotiating the conditions of the management agreement, according to Andrei Fedorov, head of the company’s external communications department. |
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St. Petersburg’s Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture has produced new rules for Nevsky Prospekt and the surrounding area that will forbid rooftop advertising. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the president of the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, on Thursday clashed over EU plans to stop suppliers of oil or gas from directly managing pipelines — a move that threatens to hit Gazprom.
Putin said the plans could hurt his country’s enterprises and likened them to “property confiscation.”
But the EC president said the new energy framework was in line with World Trade Organization rules and would affect foreign and domestic companies alike.
Barroso said the so-called third energy package was “nondiscriminatory” and he ruled out any changes. For Europe, “this is now approved legislation,” Barroso said at a news conference. |
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 MOSCOW — Entrepreneurs worry that small business faces a dismal future after an increase in taxes and utilities at the start of this year.
“It’s a sad situation,” Russian Association of Small and Medium Enterprises president Alexander Ioffe said at the National Institute of Systematic Research of Enterprise Problems’ fifth annual forum. |
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MOSCOW — Aeroflot is ready to settle 50 compensation claims from passengers left stranded by the transport collapse at Sheremetyevo Airport in December, a lawyer for claimants said Monday.
Aeroflot’s offer of vouchers in exchange for missed and delayed flights to all passengers has been criticized for not equaling the full value of a ticket, and for creating a tax liability for the recipient. |
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MOSCOW — Small and medium-sized companies may be overlooking potential business risks from using unlicensed software, which may add up to as much as $40,000 in damages a year, the latest study done for Microsoft by the International Data Corporation, or IDC, suggests. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has given state development bank Vneshekonombank until May to set up a fund that would finance investment in the remote Far East region, saying that potential projects are worth $3 billion.
The fund, first mentioned by Putin in December, marks the government’s determination to focus VEB efforts on some of the country’s most depressed regions. |
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 Recent events in the Arab world have sparked renewed optimism with online social networks. Many in the West are now convinced that Internet technology can create something previously impossible under authoritarian states — a strong opposition that can seize power through either elections or street demonstrations. |
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President Dmitry Medvedev is the driving force behind a new scheme to crack down on corruption. According to a statement from the Kremlin, it goes like this:
“Russia’s criminal code will set the fine for commercial bribery, the giving and taking of bribes, or the facilitating of bribes, at up to 100 times the size of the bribe. |
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 Russian rapper Noize MC, who has been in the limelight during the past year for his songs protesting the impunity of top officials and police lawlessness, and for the ten-day prison sentence he served in a Volgograd detention center, was rewarded for his efforts last week. |
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The ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have spawned, unsurprisingly, some powerful and inspiring music.
Singer/songwriter Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens and currently recording simply as Yusuf, recorded “My People,” a song inspired by protests in Egypt, in a Berlin studio last week. |
 St. Petersburg has always had a special relationship with both theater and architecture. In a city where every second building in the center is an architectural masterpiece, the theater, which has always been a popular field of interest and activity among the aristocracy and thinking elite, is an integral aspect of the cultural capital. |
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Ñêâåðíûé: nasty, ill-tempered, foul, filthy, grim
What do these five words have in common: ñêâåðíûé, ñêàðåäíûé, ñêóïîé, ñêóäíûé and ñêóäîóìíûé? They are all adjectives, all begin with “ñê,” and all describe something nasty or meager. |
 In the wake of the bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport that killed 36 people, Chris Morris’ film “Four Lions,” a comedy about Yorkshire suicide bombings, might seem to be the last film you would want to open in Russian cinemas.
Yet three Moscow cinemas went ahead with screenings of the film within days of the bombing last month, with 35MM cinema showing the premiere just hours after the tragedy, and the film is now showing at Dom Kino in St. |
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 An unprecedented itinerant exhibition from Madrid’s Prado Museum opened at the State Hermitage Museum last week, marking the year of Spain in Russia and of Russia in Spain. |
 In MTV Russia’s new reality show, “I’m Having a Baby,” four teenage girls are expecting their first babies, with varying degrees of support from parents, boyfriends and husbands.
The girls, aged 17 and 18, vary from a few months pregnant to being on the verge of giving birth. |
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Dom Byta has been wildly popular with the city’s movers and shakers since it opened late last year. Opened by the same brains as those behind the floating bar Lastochka, which lived its ephemeral life in the summer of 2009, it was an instant hit with the all-night-bar-loving crowd of well-off tusovshchiki who so faithfully partied away that summer on Lastochka. |
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 Every night during the colder months of the year, more than 100 homeless people appear at the doorway of a local charity seeking an overnight refuge.
The charity, Nochlezhka, can host only half of that number, and two heated tents to shelter the city’s homeless people can each accommodate another couple of dozen guests. |
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MOSCOW — Approaching his 80th birthday, Mikhail Gorbachev jokes about his age but frowns when he speaks of Russia sliding back into Soviet authoritarian ways he thought he defeated. |
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