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 Recycling practices are taking center stage at the 9th International Ecological Forum, “Ecology in a Megalopolis,” that is being held in the city through March 24. More than 200 companies are sharing their experience treating industrial waste and combating air and water pollution at a vast display at Lenexpo exhibition center. |
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Marina Malafeyeva, the wife of the city’s FC Zenit goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeyev, was buried at St. Petersburg’s Smolenskoye cemetery on Saturday. Malafeyeva, 36, was killed in a car accident last Thursday. |
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Roman Polevoi, the common-law husband of the mother of missing three-year-old Alyona Shchipina, was released on Tuesday, local news agencies reported.
Polevoi had been under investigation in connection with the search for the missing girl, who disappeared on Jan. |
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Ice Stops Production
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Ford Motor Company factory located in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast was forced to stop production for a day last Wednesday due to intermissions in the deliveries of car components by sea, Interfax reported. |
 St. Petersburg residents have organized several events in support of the people of Japan affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami there.
St. Petersburg State University and BOLT, a union of the city’s young poets, have announced a concert in support of victims of the disaster, in which an estimated 18,000 people were killed and thousands of others left homeless. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Rampant alcoholism is a centuries-old problem for Russia, but the younger generation is bucking the trend, as more and more activists team up to urge compatriots to “stop guzzling.”
Nationalists are attempting to spearhead the grass-roots campaign, seeing it as a matter of “survival of the Russian nation,” but the call for a healthy lifestyle reaches beyond the radicals. |
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MOSCOW — A biannual report compiled by the London-based think tank Z/Yen and released Monday suggests that no one should be holding their breath over Moscow’s transformation into an international financial center. |
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MOSCOW — Police will no longer be allowed to collect fines from foreigners with invalid or missing registration papers, according to a bill aimed at easing registration rules that was approved by the Federation Council on Wednesday.
Instead, the party that issued the foreigner’s visa invitation will be held responsible for violations. |
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MOSCOW — Two Uzbeks are suspected of killing French winemaker Thierry Spinelli, his Russian wife and their 3-year-old daughter after quarreling about remodeling work in April 2009, a news report said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Two competing bills are adding to the confusion around regulation of Russia’s burgeoning offshore oil industry, to the frustration of both oil companies and environmentalists.
The rival drafts are a response to calls from industry and environmentalists for clearer legal guidance following the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year.
After consultations with environmentalists and major oil companies, a group of State Duma deputies led by environment committee head Yevgeny Tugolukov have nearly finished drafting a bill based on the U.S. Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
The bill, which is due to be distributed to deputies by the end of March, would oblige Russian oil companies to contribute to a contingency fund to prevent and clean up oil spills at sea. |
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 U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday took a final personal shot at easing Moscow’s worries over a missile defense shield in Europe and to expand a military relationship that has grown dramatically since his Cold War days at the helm of the CIA. |
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A scandal-mired charity for which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sang “Blueberry Hill” has promised to donate $6 million in equipment to three hospitals in an effort to end the controversy.
But Vladimir Kiselyov, a former Kremlin official whose ties with Putin apparently convinced the prime minister to sing at a private party in December, stirred more controversy Friday by making nationalist remarks at a news conference meant to smooth matters over. |
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MOSCOW — An influential United Russia pundit has appealed to President Dmitry Medvedev to create public councils to prevent bias on state television and to raise its overall standards. |
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St. Petersburg’s car lovers can again afford foreign-brand cars, with Nissan overtaking Russian-manufacturer AvtoVAZ, maker of the popular Lada brand, in sales volumes.
In February, 11,519 cars were sold in St. Petersburg, indicating a rise of more than 72 percent on the same month in 2010, according to statistics compiled by Autodealer.ru. In total, in the first two months of the year, the city’s car dealers managed to sell 19,383 vehicles, up 66 percent on last year’s sales.
The market leader in sales volumes in February was Nissan, which overtook the traditional leader on the Russian market — Lada — selling 10,501 cars. Lada remains the overall leader across Russia, having sold 37,528 vehicles in Russia, according to statistics from the European Business Association. |
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 The Economic Trade, Industrial Policy and Trade Committee last week published a draft of its strategy for the social and economic development of St. Petersburg through 2020. |
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 MOSCOW — VTB has raised its share in Bank of Moscow to a controlling stake, and Suleiman Kerimov has joined VTB as a shareholder by buying 3.88 percent of its stock from Goldman Sachs.
VTB intends to take over management of Bank of Moscow soon, sources close to bank shareholders told Vedomosti. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has exposed more of his personality in a recent interview where he spoke about his father, thriftiness and his penchant for travel. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service promised an investigation Monday after a Moscow-based military unit kicked off a tender offering a generous 46 billion rubles ($1.6 billion) to private contractors to maintain its fleet of foreign-built cars and buses. |
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MOSCOW — Sberbank, the country’s biggest lender, is looking to technological innovation to stabilize its declining share of the retail banking market.
The head of Sberbank’s retail banking arm, Alexander Torbakhov, said Wednesday that the bank is pressing ahead with plans to persuade pensioners to swap their traditional sberknizhki, or savings account books, for plastic bank cards. |
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MOSCOW — Privatization of Russia’s electricity grid moved a step further along Friday when MRSK Holding agreed to give French EDF managerial control of its Tomsk Distribution Company.
The deal, which is subject to Russian government approval, sets the conditions for a formal contract between IDGC and EDF subsidiary ERDF that will be signed at the St. |
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 Russia’s vote Thursday in the United Nations Security Council on Libya Resolution 1973 is more evidence of the changing nature of Moscow’s foreign policy. The trend toward an improved relationship with the United States that has been evident since 2009 has reached a new level. |
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The Mikhail Khodorkovsky affair is a classic tragedy — a plot unfolding against the backdrop of modern democratic mass culture. This became clear recently when Ekho Moskvy radio dedicated a full day of coverage to ballerina Anastasia Volochkova’s condemnation of an open letter by 55 signatories. |
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 Televizor, a veteran rock band that was one of the leading forces behind the Russian rock revolution of the 1980s, is planning to highlight its classic “perestroika-rock” album in concert this week.
Called “Otechestvo Illyuzii” (Fatherland of Illusions), the album was released as an underground DIY tape in 1987 and become one of the most iconoclastic and influential recordings of the era, featuring protest anthems such as “Ryba Gniyot S Golovy” (Fish Start Rotting from the Head), “Tvoi Papa — Fashist” (Your Daddy Is a Fascist), “Vyiti Iz Pod Kontrolya” (Get Out of Control) and “Syt Po Gorlo” (Fed Up). |
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 The notion of music genre is slowly but steadily sinking into oblivion. Musicians continue to experiment, and music critics invent new names for the new trends. |
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Íîæêè Áóøà: Bush-era American frozen chicken legs
One of the peculiarities of language acquisition is discovering that you have a pile of words sitting on the Russian shelf in your brain without little strings attaching them to equivalent words on the English shelf. For example, after remodeling my apartment, I have a mental shelf buckling under the weight of Russian construction materials, bottles, cans and tools. Somewhere in the gray attic of my head there might be another dusty shelf with similar junk in English, but the two shelves remain unconnected by translation. Ðåìîíò and repair are totally unrelated.
I’ve also got untranslated mental pantries for Russian and American food. |
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 Rolling back more than 30 years, the Mariinsky Theater has revived Rodion Shchedrin’s 1978 opera “Dead Souls,” inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s legendary eponymous work. |
 This week the tabloids have been discussing former Miss Universe Oksana Fyodorova and the end of her very public love affair with blond crooner Nikolai Baskov.
Fyodorova, a luscious former policewoman, was crowned Miss Universe in 2002, but was officially dethroned for failing to carry out engagements. |
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Most St. Petersburg restaurants that serve European cuisine understandably attempt to create an elegant, “European” atmosphere. Massimo Sicilia — which, as its name suggests, specializes in Italian cooking — tries a little too hard. |
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 There are not many factors that will keep an author away from his own book presentation. The absence of disgraced oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the presentation of his book in St. Petersburg on March 17 was directly linked to the work’s main topic: The author is in prison.
A sense of injustice abounded in the small, overcrowded hall of the Regional Press Institute that hosted the launch, and injustice was a core topic of every speech made at the event. |
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 MOSCOW — At a casual glance, the Savyolovsky market looks like an ordinary sprawling complex of indoor shops, offering a variety of home appliances, videogames and DVDs with anything from the latest Hollywood flicks to trashy erotica. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive