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 Prosecutors have forced a local club to cancel a pop concert because of the band’s name, St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s Office said on its web site Monday.
A concert by the popular Moscow-based rappers Narkotiki (drugs) scheduled for Sunday was canceled two days beforehand when prosecutors warned the director of the club Zal Ozhidaniya that it would violate three Russian laws, including the law on drugs and the law on advertising, if the concert went ahead.
Narkotiki intended the show to be the band’s “final concert of the spring season,” during which it was planning to showcase its new music video.
According to the prosecutors’ statement, the Admiralteisky District Prosecutor’s Office “found that the band’s name [. |
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FOUNDING FATHER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A man dressed as Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg, takes part in Museum Night festivities on the Peter and Paul Fortress on Saturday night. Museums all over the city opened their doors to nocturnal visitors for the event. |
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A jury at St. Petersburg City Court last week found guilty 12 of 14 members of a nationalist gang charged with about 20 hate crimes, including the murders of African students and local ethnographer Nikolai Girenko.
The organizer of the Borovikov-Voyevodin gang Alexei Voyevodin, nicknamed SVR (the Russian initials of the phrase Made In Russia), was found guilty by the majority of the jury of 20 crimes, including gangsterism, murder, inciting national hatred and illegal weapons distribution, and may face a life sentence, Kommersant daily reported.
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 The third Aurora Fashion Week kicked off in the city Monday, heralding the start of a week packed with shows, seminars and exhibitions devoted to the art of fashion.
The program of Aurora Fashion Week comprises both elements for professionals of the fashion industry as well as a wide range of events for the general public. |
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The Alternative Hair Show Visionary Award 2011, the culmination of the International Alternative Hair show in Russia aimed at supporting children suffering from leukemia, will be held in St. |
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Women’s Work
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The majority of housework is done by women in the average Russian family, according to recent research carried out by the VTsIOM polling agency.
Three quarters (74 percent) of Russian women are in charge of washing and ironing, 65 percent of them do the cooking, 60 percent clean the house, 57 percent wash the dishes and 44 percent of women pay the bills. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Four liberal opposition politicians asked the Justice Ministry on Monday to register a new political party that would seek to revert the presidential term to four years, free jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and, perhaps unsurprisingly, ease the rules for registering parties. |
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MINSK — Two former Belarusian presidential candidates were handed suspended sentences Friday on charges of organizing riots after last year’s disputed election. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow’s City Hall plans to introduce mandatory polygraph testing for all employees, legally requiring all Moscow government staff to follow members of its state tender commissions who take the tests on a voluntary basis.
Some 70 percent of tender commission staff have taken the polygraph test recently, and the city plans to amend its legislation to make the rest of its officials follow suit, department head Gennady Degtyov said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov promised Saturday to turn Right Cause into Russia’s second-largest party in the country with a pro-business platform that would change the country’s landscape over the next decade. |
 MOSCOW — Billionaire Alexander Lebedev announced Friday that he would give up his banking business because of harassment from the Federal Security Service and team up with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front.
The outspoken Lebedev would be the first Kremlin critic to join the front, which has been widely derided as a stunt to revitalize Putin-led United Russia before December’s State Duma elections. |
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MOSCOW — The country’s most popular search engine Yandex raised $1.3 billion in a U.S. initial public offering Tuesday, pricing its shares above the sale’s marketed range. |
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MOSCOW — Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin has called for the government to acknowledge that 22,000 Poles executed in Katyn forest and elsewhere by Josef Stalin’s henchmen in 1940 were victims of political purges — if relatives don’t sue.
“We’ve got to put an end to it through complete transparency and the refusal of material claims,” Lukin said Friday, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — State Duma Deputy Ashot Yegiazaryan, who is living in California, has been placed on Interpol’s wanted list in connection with fraud charges in Moscow. |
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 President Dmitry Medvedev said Friday that he has signed a decree ordering the Justice Ministry to monitor law enforcement and the execution of court decisions and to provide annual progress reports, making a direct link between the quality of the legal environment and Moscow’s ambition to become a global financial center. |
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Parking in the city center may cease to be free of charge by the end of this year.
The Municipal Services Commission of the Legislative Assembly last week approved amendments to the bill “On the introduction of changes to St. |
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The deadline for the submission of bids in the auction of the Astoria Hotel building passed on Monday. The starting price for the building, which has an area of 17,000 square meters and covers 0.3 hectares, was set at 2.18 billion rubles ($77 million). The auction will not take place, however, due to a shortage of bids, two sources involved in the auction process informed Vedomosti. A decision on the fate of the building is expected in the next few days, one of them added.
The press service of the City Property Management Committee (KUGI) and the Property Fund declined to comment, stating that an official announcement would be made in the near future. |
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 Pipeline monopoly Transneft said Friday that it would fight the court ruling mandating it to release minutes from its board meetings, accusing whistleblowing anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny of conspiring against Russia and using the minutes for commercial interests. |
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Russian companies that export commodities to China or import Chinese-made shoes and clothes are the best candidates to float their shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Hong Kong-based investor Sergio Men said Monday.
“It would be absolutely irrational for companies whose business is totally unrelated to China or Southeast Asia to move toward the Hong Kong stock exchange,” Men, who is managing partner at Eurasia Capital Partners, told reporters. |
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The quality of third-generation, or 3G, mobile Internet services in Moscow varies greatly among the big three carriers, according to recent analysis by Telecomdaily, with MegaFon showing the best results for areas outside the city limits. |
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Russia spent more than $80 million in 2010 to improve health care in developing countries, according to a report the Finance Ministry released Friday.
The report highlights how the country is meeting its G8 commitments ahead of the upcoming summit in Deauville, France.
“Health has become for Russia quite a traditional area for contributing to international development,” said Andrei Bokarev, head of the Finance Ministry’s international financial relations department. |
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 Relations between Cold War-era foes Moscow and Washington have long been distrustful, hypocritical, peppered with mutual insinuations and patched together with the most tenuous of threads. But now, on the eve of State Duma and presidential elections, an inevitable crisis in relations is nearing that threatens to tear them apart at the seams. |
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Instead of campaigning, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have stepped up their political maneuvering in the run-up to State Duma and presidential elections, releasing major statements within two weeks of each other. |
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 MOSCOW — When Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, the millionaire founder of petrochemical giant Union Carbide, took his prize-winning trotters on a goodwill tour of Eastern Europe in 1909, he brought along horse-racing journalist Murray Howe to chronicle the trip in weekly dispatches to The Horse Review magazine.
In addition to being an able and witty journalist — his wry trotting classics “Stable Conversation” and “The Trotting Horse Excuse Book” are still read in trotting circles — Howe was also an amateur photographer.
Howe snapped more than 400 photographs in Moscow and St. Petersburg with his handheld Graflex camera, a state-of-the-art device that allowed its user to shoot without a tripod. |
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A music system made out of a soviet transformer is one of the items
on display at prolom. |
 As soon as the last of the snow melts, dedicated cyclists across Russia wheel out their iron horses and take to the road. Although bikes are an increasingly popular means of transport and perfect for a city often paralyzed by traffic jams, there aren’t many people who would consider attempting to cover a distance of around 3,000 miles on something with only two wheels.
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As I watched President Dmitry Medvedev’s news conference and then pored over the transcript, looking for linguistic signs of his future and the future of the country, I found it hard to keep my pseudo-Kremlinologist hat on. I kept turning into a mother hen, muttering: Must you always sound so tentative? Do you know that you said ÿ ñ÷èòàþ (I think) 37 times?
It was all pretty bland. No sensational revelations of rifts in the tandem, no announcement of candidacy and a lot of platitudes like this: Áîëüøèå öåëè çàêëþ÷àþòñÿ â òîì, ÷òîáû èçìåíèòü æèçíü, èçìåíèòü íàøó æèçíü ê ëó÷øåìó, ÷òîáû ëþäè ñåáÿ ëó÷øå ÷óâñòâîâàëè, ÷òîáû óðîâåíü äîõîäîâ ïîäíèìàëñÿ, ÷òîáû ñîöèàëüíûå ïðîãðàììû âûïîëíÿëèñü (Our major goals consist of improving life, changing life for the better, so that people feel better, their incomes rise and social programs are carried out). |
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 How is it possible to give objects that appear to have served their natural working life a new and even better existence? The organizers of the Prolom industrial exhibition at Loft Project Etazhi may hold the key to this secret. |
 Last week, Russia’s Alexei Vorobyov only came in 16th place in the Eurovision song contest, prompting grumpy comments that Russia was represented by a “gopnik,” or yob, who swore live on television.
Vorobyov was picked by Channel One as a safe pair of hands for the contest, instead of putting it up to public vote, in a clear sign that Russia just wanted to put in a respectable presence rather than have to repaint Olimpiisky again. |
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Barbaresco is another addition to the streak of trendy new bar-cum-restaurants in what used to be the imperial stables on Konnyushennaya Ploshchad. Peckish passersby may find selecting a dining spot somewhat of a dilemma: Barbaresco is land-locked by two structurally identical restaurants that each have as many ostentatious vehicles parked outside them as each other. |
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 Have fun, test your courage and overcome your fears: That is the motto of the Orekh Norwegian rope park that opened last weekend in Orekhovo, a settlement in the Priozersk district 60 kilometers north of St. Petersburg.
The adventure park is situated in an ecologically clean pine forest on the shores of Bolshoye Borkovo Lake. The trees in the park range from two to 20 meters in height and are connected in a variety of ways such as by rope-and-wooden bridges, rope lines, suspension bridges, suspended logs, rope ladders and zip-lines — the latter being the most popular way to get from tree to tree, but also the most daunting. |
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 IRKUTSK — The first thing a visitor recently saw when entering the museum of exiled Prince Sergei Volkonsky in Irkutsk was a drowsy, gray-haired attendant sitting behind a table with a calendar adorned with the Yukos logo, a forest-green triangle with a yellow tip. |
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