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 At least 97 ships were stranded in the ice in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland while waiting for help from icebreakers Tuesday, the administration of the St. Petersburg seaport reported.
On Monday, there were 138 ships awaiting help, and two days ago, the line consisted of 160 ships. |
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MOSCOW — A St. Petersburg professor faces up to two years in jail over his ties to the banned National Bolshevik Party, RIA-Novosti reported Monday.
Andrei Pesotsky, who teaches at the St. |
 The world is reeling from the news of the developing tragedies in Japan, which rather puts into perspective the mystery of St. Petersburg’s own minor earth tremors, which has been surfacing in the local media during the last few weeks.
Residents of the city’s northern outskirts first reported the earth moving in the last week of February, with repeated tremors strong enough to dislodge objects from shelves and cupboards, accompanied by something that sounded like distant explosions, according to reports on Fontanka. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Twenty new kindergartens will open in St. Petersburg this year, said Olga Ivanova, chairwoman of the city’s education committee, at a press conference Tuesday, Interfax reported. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Sergei Stadler, rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, said that money allocated two years ago by the government for the reconstruction of the historic building has still not been received by the institution, Interfax reported Tuesday.
“The [government’s] will is there, but the money isn’t. And nobody knows where it is,” Stadler said.
It was previously reported that the government had allocated 3.5 billion rubles ($121 million) for the reconstruction of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which celebrates its 150th anniversary next year.
The conservatory was due to have repaired one room by now, and other rooms remain in poor condition, the rector noted. |
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 The controversial Gazprom business center project, originally planned to be built in the Okhta district close to the center of St. Petersburg and canceled after years of criticism from the public, professionals and international organizations for the damage it was expected to inflict on the city’s historic views, has been moved to another part of the city. |
 Four-year-old Nadezhda Chernoknizhnaya now has only one chance left to survive, and the price of that chance is $198,000 — the cost of the complex surgery urgently required on her brain tumor, which can only be performed in a few hospitals in the world. Both Russian and American doctors have concluded that Chernoknizhnaya needs the surgery within a month. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — United Russia scored an unconvincing victory in Sunday’s regional vote, leaving analysts in doubt about whether it could perform better in the decisive battle for the State Duma in December.
Preliminary results showed that the ruling party swept most of the 3,300 elections held in 74 regions on Sunday but had the support of less than half the population, with an average 46 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results released Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court opened hearings on Thursday into prosecutors’ request to ban the country’s leading ultranationalist group, but asked for more proof of its wrongdoing. |
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MOSCOW — A Master-Bank executive was charged Monday with participating in a money laundering ring that involved state companies and saw a daily turnover of 500 million rubles ($17 million).
Meri Tevanyan, whom investigators identified as a “leading specialist” at Master-Bank, is accused of helping transfer laundered money to the accounts of fake firms and to plastic cards, Interfax reported, citing the Interior Ministry. |
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MINSK — A former Belarussian presidential candidate says he has fled the country to escape its secret police, as Human Rights Watch strongly condemned Belarus’ post-election crackdown. |
 MOSCOW — In his final public appearance in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday chose to ignore a stunning proposal to cancel visas between his country and Russia and instead stressed how rule of law could attract investors.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin voiced the idea of visa-free travel during talks just hours before Biden’s speech at Moscow State University to U. |
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MOSCOW — Russia nearly doubled its number of billionaires this year, producing 101 of the 1,210 world’s wealthiest people, compared with 62 last year, Forbes magazine said in its annual world billionaires ranking. |
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MOSCOW — In an indication that the U.S. White House opposes a third presidential term for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told Russian opposition leaders Thursday that it would be better for Russia if Putin did not run for re-election next year, two participants said.
At a separate meeting with human rights activists, Biden linked Russia’s human rights record to its bid to join the World Trade Organization, one activist said. |
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 The appearance of mobile handsets, smartphones and tablet computers, as well as the supporting technology and affordable good quality Internet access, has brought with it the demand for and the development of a whole range of new software products: Mobile applications. |
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City Hall has broken the law “On the defense of competition” by granting one investor two historic buildings without a tender, according to the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). |
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Overspending of nearly 500 million rubles ($17.45 million), including 200 million rubles ($6.98 million) on road repairs, has been uncovered in the accounts of the government agency responsible for overseeing the construction of St. Petersburg’s ring road.
The Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation announced through its press department last Friday that an audit of the use of federal budget resources assigned during 2008-2010 to the Federal Government Agency “Directorate for the Construction of a Transport Bypass of St. |
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 MOSCOW — Sberbank, the country’s biggest lender and oldest bank, announced Friday the much-anticipated purchase of the private investment banking outfit, Troika Dialog, for $1 billion.
Amid the lurid green lighting and upbeat electronic music in Sberbank’s Moscow headquarters, German Gref, Sberbank’s chief executive officer and former minister of economic development, said the deal was a “logical step forward” and a “symbolic event for the Russian financial market. |
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MOSCOW — The conflict between United Company RusAl and Interros over control of Norilsk Nickel took an unexpected turn on Monday, as billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s Metalloinvest announced plans to increase its stake in the nickel producer and help develop the company jointly with RusAl. |
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MOSCOW — Nineteen foreigners will become members of a committee of 27 advising President Dmitry Medvedev on how to turn Moscow into a center of international finance.
The lineup features top names from Wall Street and the City of London including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, Bloomberg reported. |
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MOSCOW — Credit ratings fell for Russian businesses during the financial crisis but corporate governance remained stable, industry experts said last Friday at a round-table discussion on corporate governance hosted by the Association of Managers. |
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 While President Dmitry Medvedev drivels on about “freedom being better than no freedom” and the world tries to understand why long-standing Arab dictatorships collapsed overnight, Russia’s corrupt autocracy continues to do what it does best: manipulating and falsifying elections. |
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Artist Oleg Vorotnikov was recently released after spending several months in custody. In September he and other members of the non-conformist art group Voina, or War, overturned several police cars in a highly visible protest in St. |
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 Lyapis Trubetskoy, Belarus’ premier rock band, has found itself blacklisted in its homeland as part of a crackdown by President Alexander Lukashenko in the wake of his December 19 re-election.
This week saw the cancellation of two sold-out concerts in the capital Minsk due on April 1 and 2. |
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The controversy over the money reportedly missing from a charity event headlined by Vladimir Putin, who made his debut as a singer performing “Blueberry Hill” and featuring Western celebrities such as Paul Anka, Sharon Stone and Mickey Rourke continues to grow. |
 The tradition of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day spread far beyond Ireland’s borders long ago. Along with the U.K., the U.S. and some provinces of Canada, Saint Patrick is also honored as a national saint in Nigeria.
In Russia, the tradition of celebrating the patron saint of Ireland dates back to 1992, when the first parade took place in Moscow. The celebration usually continues in pubs, although pubs in Ireland used to close for the holiday. |
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 Finnish veterans who survived the two wars between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939-1944 have been given a voice via the exhibition “Veterans — What Was War Like?” that opened at the Anna Akhmatova museum earlier this month. |
 The Mariinsky Theater appears to have invented a new genre: Lounge opera, in which the staging has the aesthetic ambience of a wealthy person’s sitting room.
Audiences received a taste of the genre during a new production of Richard Strauss’s 1912 work “Ariadne auf Naxos,” which premiered at the Mariinsky Concert Hall on Tuesday, March 8, directed by Michael Sturminger of Austria.
Strauss’s “Ariadne” thrives on contrasts: Heroic opera and light commedia dell’arte, tragedy and nonsense, melancholy and frivolity. |
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 Last week Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was outraged and demeaned at the idea of a nightclub party with semi-naked girls shouting his name. But luckily, democratic freedoms mean that it took place without any last minute discoveries of fire safety violations. |
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With its promise of hearty Jamaican food, cheap beer and live reggae, Happy Bob, a recently opened cafe-club on 7aya Sovietskaya Ulitsa, seemed like an excellent place to start an evening out on the way to a nearby house party. Unfortunately, upon arrival just before 8 p.m. last Saturday, the place was closed for a wedding reception. |
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 MOSCOW — Building the momentum in repairing ties with Japan, President Dmitry Medvedev scrambled to send energy supplies to the devastated country, three planes were dispatched with humanitarian aid, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid flowers at the Japanese Embassy.
As a second explosion rocked a Japanese nuclear power plant just 800 kilometers southeast of Vladivostok, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin played down fears of a global nuclear disaster and insisted that Rosatom would press ahead with plans to build dozens of nuclear power stations. |
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 There are two things with which Russian society traditionally has a problem: One is that many people, including politicians at the highest level, do not seem to be willing to learn from the past, and another is that the majority of the population, including those very close to the powers that be, have difficulty looking at their governors critically. |
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Issues Archive