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 It is a common myth among Russians that all foreigners believe that in Russia, everyone drinks vodka and bears walk the streets. While the former stereotype was damaged recently by the news that Russians are only fourth on the list of worldwide alcohol consumption per capita, the latter got a small boost this week when a woman was attacked by a brown bear in the village of Staro-Panovo in the Krasnoselsky district of St. |
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 A charity gala concert featuring Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and a string of Hollywood stars including Sharon Stone and Mickey Rourke that was advertized as a fundraising campaign aimed at benefitting sick children has turned into an embarrassment: Three months after the concert took place in St. |
 In contrast to the Soviet era, when even being seen outside the synagogue could have meant losing your job or being denied the chance to travel abroad, St. Petersburg’s Jewish population today — both ordinary people and high-profile figures — proudly celebrates its most important holidays, and is now welcoming city residents, regardless of their religion, politics or social status. |
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The “extremism” criminal case launched by prosecutors in November against opposition activists has been revived and expanded, with five more members of The Other Russia named as suspects and charges expected to be brought later this month. |
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This year, Channel One has exercised its right to choose Russia’s representative at the Eurovision-2011 song contest, which will be held this May in Dusseldorf, without a qualifying round, Interfax reported.
“Russia will be represented by the song ‘Get You’ performed by Alexei Vorobyov,” Channel One’s public relations director announced on Saturday, according to Interfax. |
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Ingeborga Dapkunaite was due to star in director Michael Sturminger’s new production of Richard Strauss’s opera “Ariadne auf Naxos” on Tuesday at the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall, Interfax reported, citing the theater’s web site. |
All photos from issue.
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GOLD DUST
Alexander Zemlianichenko
Restorers work in the main hall of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow last week. The historic building of the theater is set to reopen in the fall after a long reconstruction. |
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MOSCOW — Maybe Russia really is keeping abreast with state-of-the-art technology, as the Kremlin proposes — at least when it comes to flirting.
“How expensive is the underwear you have on at the moment?” reads a playful message at a dating community on Vkontakte.ru. “I don’t understand girls who like wearing underwear,” runs the coquettish reply.
This is a perfectly typical exchange, to be found everywhere on the pages and in the chatrooms of Russian social networking sites — whose audience numbers in the tens of millions and counting.
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ALMATY, Kazakhstan — When Kazakhstan’s long-serving President Nursultan Nazarbayev bids for re-election next month, he will do it safe in the knowledge that his country is unlikely to be roiled by the kind of unrest now spreading across the Middle East. |
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MOSCOW — An Armenian-born Moscow police officer was shot and wounded in an attack possibly staged by ultranationalists who had him on their “firing squad lists,” news reports said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — A former city prefect wanted on suspicion of swindling the billionaire wife of the former Moscow mayor said he was granted political asylum in Lithuania.
Yury Khardikov — accused of swindling Yelena Baturina of 1 billion rubles ($35 million) in a shady land deal — said prosecution against him in Russia prompted Lithuanian authorities to grant the asylum, Rosbalt news agency reported late Thursday. |
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NEW YORK — The conspiracy trial of a former Soviet military officer charged with trying to sell weapons to a terrorist group was delayed until October after his new lawyers asked for additional time to prepare their case last week. |
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MOSCOW — Despite stepped-up government efforts, Russia remains a major consumer of dangerous drugs and a favorite place for laundering drug-trafficking profits, a U.S. government report has found.
“Russia is a major destination country for heroin from Afghanistan and is a user market for opium, hashish, marijuana, synthetics and other dangerous illegal substances,” said the annual report, which was published on the State Department’s web site Thursday.
Among the country’s risk factors are porous borders, its location as a geographic gateway between Europe and Asia, chronic underfunding and a lack of capacity of regulatory and law enforcement agencies, the report said. |
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 MOSCOW — If you’ve ever felt like picking up a seaside palace for a song, now might be the time.
At least, that’s what reclusive oligarch Alexander Ponomarenko claims to have done. |
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MOSCOW — A German court has given a one-year suspended prison sentence to an Austrian soldier who admitted to spying for Russia, marking the end of a 2007 espionage scandal that strained relations between Vienna and Moscow.
Harald Sodnikar, a helicopter technician in Austria’s armed forces, accepted Tuesday’s ruling but maintained that he did not divulge any military secrets, local media reported Thursday. |
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St. Petersburg’s economy grew by more than 5 percent last year, faster than the Russian economy overall. However, the growth was prompted by the low base effect — during the financial crisis, the manufacturing and retail sectors had massively reduced turnover.
Yevgeny Yelin, chairman of St. Petersburg’s Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade announced last week that the city’s Gross Regional Product (GRP) grew in nominal terms (factoring in inflation) by 5.5 percent in 2010 to 1,662.3 billion rubles ($59 billion). GDP in Russia grew 4 percent last year to 44.49 trillion rubles ($1.58 trillion). In 2009 GRP fell by 5. |
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 While St. Petersburg’s City Hall plans to bring the contribution of tourism to the Gross Regional Product of the city up to 20 percent, travel professionals are developing strategies to increase the incoming flow of travelers to the city. |
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St. Petersburg’s Property Fund has put up for auction the ruins of the malt-house of the Novaya Bavariya (“New Bavaria”) brewery on Petrovsky Island. The starting price for the monument of regional significance — which has a floor area of 1,600 square meters and 0.4 hectares of adjoining territory — stands at 130 million rubles ($4. |
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MOSCOW — Microsoft gave a $100,000 grant to the anti-piracy startup Pirate Pay last Friday, making it the first company to receive seed funding as a result of cooperation between the IT company and the Skolkovo Foundation, the organization behind the innovation hub near Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — The four biggest telecommunications operators and Scartel, which operates under the Yota brand, signed an agreement to build the next generation of mobile networks at a meeting last Thursday hosted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev. |
 MOSCOW — Direct sales, also known as multi-level marketing, is a $3-billion business in Russia and growing fast, with companies like Amway, Avon, and Herbalife showing record sales results in 2010 and solid growth potential this year.
Amway, an American company that sells beauty, health and home-care products and has recruited an army of 930,000 individuals working as sales distributors, achieved sales of 15. |
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 MOSCOW — Gazprom outbid another government-controlled contender last week for the right to develop the huge Kovykta field near China’s border, ending years of uncertainty about the prize natural gas asset formerly co-owned by BP. |
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MOSCOW — McDonald’s, one of the biggest franchisers in the world, will continue to directly own all of its Russian restaurants for the near future, Khamzat Khasbulatov, the corporation’s president in Russia and Eastern Europe, said last week.
“We have a successful operation, we don’t have the motivation to franchise,” Khasbulatov said. |
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MOSCOW — Coal mining companies might have to set aside as much as a third of their combined profit from last year to increase safety spending, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Russia may cancel visas for foreigners, a senior Federal Border Service official said Tuesday, adding that the move would not harm security and might attract more European tourists.
The number of people traveling to Russia from the European Union has been steadily decreasing in recent years, the official, Vyacheslav Dorokhin, said at a news conference in Moscow.
“It’s hard to explain why it is happening,” Dorokhin said, adding that ever more Russians are traveling to the EU, Interfax reported.
“I think the cancellation of the visa regime would help boost the number of people looking to visit our country,” he said, according to RIA-Novosti. |
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 MOSCOW — The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation elected Sergei Katyrin as its new president Friday.
Katyrin, 56, who served as the chamber’s vice president since 1992, replaces long-serving Yevgeny Primakov, who refused to run for the post again. |
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 It seems that everyone is an expert on the Middle East nowadays. Political scientists, bloggers, radical opposition and media are commenting, seeking parallels, admiring the battle spirit of the Arabs and cursing the corrupt regimes. Russia is certainly not an exception. |
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Last month marked four years since the once little-known Anatoly Serdyukov was unexpectedly named defense minister. At the time, most observers assumed that the former tax official’s main mission would be to put the military’s financial affairs in order. |
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 Musician and artist Vasily Shumov, whose group Center was one of the leading bands of the 1980s Russian rock revolution, remains innovative and subversive at a time when many of his peers appear to have become tired and lost touch.
Although he spent almost two decades away from Russia, returning for an occasional visit to showcase albums, his work has remained closely connected to what is happening in Russia and touches on issues that some prefer to avoid. |
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Rock musicians are among those who protest the trial of imprisoned businessman and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was given another prison sentence in December, as politically motivated and orchestrated by the Kremlin. |
 Dressed in black tights, Natalya, 26, dances in front of a jury. Her dancing is important, but just as vital are her vital statistics.
A children’s choreographer from Minsk, she was trying last week to become a dancer in the Crazy Horse cabaret, a Parisian-based dance show that has combined striptease and burlesque for the last 60 years. |
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Ïîëèöåéñêèé: police officer
Ïðèøëà âåñíà è íàðîä ãóëÿåò! (Spring is here, and folks are having fun!) Or: Åù¸ íå ïðèøëà âåñíà è íàðîä ñ óìà ñõîäèò! (Spring still isn’t here and folks are going nuts!) In any case, ðåáðåíäèíã (rebranding) of ìèëèöèÿ (militia) into ïîëèöèÿ (police) has been íàðîäíîå òâîð÷åñòâî (public creativity) of the best kind. |
.jpg) Being a radical artist, even an internationally famous one, is pretty risky these days. The members of art group Voina, two of whom were released on bail late last month after spending more than three months in prison, were attacked along with a couple of their friends in the center of St. Petersburg after appearing at a press conference last week by men who the artists allege are officers from Center E, an “anti-extremism” task-force. |
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 Last week, a group of female anarchists grabbed policewomen in the Moscow metro and forcibly kissed them on the lips, in an artistic happening apparently claimed by Voina, or War, the group that painted a giant penis on Liteiny Bridge in St. |
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After marching for almost fifteen minutes through the slush, the eclectic mix of colorful Moroccan floor tiles looked especially inviting upon arrival at 22.13, a new restaurant overlooking Konyushennaya Ploshchad next to the Church on the Spilled Blood.
“Oh, everything here revolves around the travel theme,” the cloakroom assistant replied in response to a question about the origin of the tiles. |
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 NEW YORK — She was young and smart and claimed she was in love, and when Judith Coplon was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1949 she became a sensation.
A 28-year-old Justice Department employee, Coplon had been caught with secret U.S. documents at a meeting with a Russian agent on a Manhattan street. She claimed she was meeting him only because she loved him, but she was found guilty at two trials. |
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 VIENNA — One is in the pay of Kazakhstan’s autocrat. Another endorsed elections held by the man dubbed Europe’s last dictator. A third contradicted his own president by declaring that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak should stay in power. |
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Issues Archive