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The second St. Petersburg International Film Festival that will be held from July 10 to 15 looks set to thrive on contrasts, if not controversies.
The festival has Alexei German and Alexander Sokurov — two of Russia’s most respected independent filmmakers who have never bowed down to the state — as its founders. It has strong backing from City Hall that comes in the form of both substantial funding and pompous statements from bureaucrats seeking to “restore the reputation of St. Petersburg as an international cultural trendsetter.” It has a “Best of the Best” competition program, showcasing outstanding films that have recently won awards at already established international film forums of the caliber of the Berlin, Cannes and Locarno film festivals. And finally, it has an amateur jury of six people with little connection to the world of cinema who are going to judge that competition.
“We are not trying to overtake Cannes,” said film critic Andrei Plakhov, head of the commission that selected the films for the festival.
Some might judge that to be a sensible sentiment, considering that the festival is only in its second year and its reputation is still being formed. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Musicians from the Drum Time ensemble perform as part of a procession of bikers, dancers and other performers who paraded down Nevsky Prospekt on Saturday to mark City Day. St. Petersburg celebrated its 308th birthday this year. See photo essay, page 24. |
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About 50 people were arrested during a rally for freedom of assembly in St. Petersburg on Tuesday evening. According to the rally’s hotline, more than 50 people were detained and taken to various police precincts.
One woman named as Alexandra Kachko was taken to hospital to be treated for an injured wrist after being detained by police during the rally, its organizers said.
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Controversial Ads
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Controversial outdoor advertisements featuring Russian historical figures alongside United Russia party symbols that were put up for the city’s birthday were dismantled last week.
The United Russia political party said the advertisements were put up legally, but that they had decided to take them down due to complaints from some of the relatives of the people featured in the advertisements. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev pleaded for more Internet freedom at the Group of Eight summit, taking a more liberal line than some G8 counterparts and raising eyebrows among critics who note that Russian authorities have sought to tighten control over the Internet. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian Orthodox Church teamed up with conservative lawmakers Monday to push legislation that would radically restrict abortions in a nation struggling to cope with one of the world’s lowest birthrates. |
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MOSCOW — More than a third of the country’s most powerful police chiefs have been fired after they failed mandatory re-evaluations as part of an ongoing police reform.
The dismissals send a signal that even corrupt senior police officials, whose continued tenures apparently gave their superiors additional leverage over them, will not be immune to a wave of looming job cuts in the country’s police force. |
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MOSCOW — The pro-business Right Cause party, which billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov offered to lead this month, hopes to further strengthen its ranks with the addition of billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, Vedomosti reported Monday. |
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MOSCOW — State-owned NTV television broadcast a prime-time report in which jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky announced that he would seek parole, fueling speculation that the Kremlin might be edging toward a decision to free him.
NTV, which has harshly criticized Khodorkovsky in the past, showed a seemingly unbiased report about the businessman Sunday in an indication that his name was no longer taboo on state-controlled airwaves. |
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MOSCOW — Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov on Monday unleashed a barrage of insults at people who had filmed him cruising in the opposite lane in front of a traffic police officer, just days after he was stripped of his road privileges. |
 MOSCOW — A college student who blogged about State Duma deputies playing cards and surfing the Internet during sessions has lost his Duma internship.
Yevgeny Starshov, a student at the Moscow Institute of Management, Economics and Law, started publishing his observations on his LiveJournal blog last week, and he removed them earlier this week — but not before they were read, cited and copied by thousands of bloggers as well as the news media. |
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MOSCOW — Police arrested more than 30 people trying to hold two unauthorized gay rights demonstrations in central Moscow on Saturday.
Opponents of gay rights scuffled with the demonstrators and with police. |
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 The new Marine Facade sea passenger port was officially handed over to the city government last week after the final construction work was completed.
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was handed a symbolic key to the port on the city’s birthday last Friday. |
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A new system for classifying mini-hotels in the city has caused mixed reactions among hospitality industry professionals.
The Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy Ministry has launched a new system for classifying accommodation, accordingly to which hotels with five to 15 rooms now fall into the category of mini-hotels. |
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The Swedish firm investing in Apraksin Dvor has resorted to appealing to President Dmitry Medvedev via his blog after running into a brick wall in its attempts to develop the inner-city site.
Ruric investment company bought about 18,000 square meters of the historic market complex Apraksin Dvor, located at 28-30 Sadovaya Ulitsa, back in 2004, and was aware then of the risks: Having invested about 350 million dollars into the St. |
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MOSCOW — A labor shortage is forcing companies to find creative ways to attract and keep blue-collar workers. Basic Element is ready to double salaries over the next two years, provide assistance for better housing and even dole out equity packages.
There have been dramatic changes to the Russian labor market, said Viktoria Petrova, deputy general director of Basic Element, or Basel. The crisis is over, markets are growing, and demand for workers is colossal. Basel is primarily facing a deficit of engineers, project managers and highly qualified workers.
“There are few such specialists in the country, and the number is not growing. Every year for every significant business category we review the exact same lists of 100 to 150 names,” Petrova said. |
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 MOSCOW — France will help build $2.84 billion worth of resorts in the North Caucasus, according to an agreement the French and Russian presidents signed Thursday ahead of the official opening of the G8 summit in Deauville. |
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TOMSK — As part of the Tomsk innovation forum Innovus, the Rusnano nanotechnologies corporation launched a new information portal last Thursday that will serve as the first Internet store for nanotechnology products in the country and a source of information on the companies producing them. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is proposing to pass to investigators material from a review of the Moskvich innovation center, whose territory is not being used according to its designation. |
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MOSCOW — Czech used car trader AAA Auto Group has rented four hectares in suburban Moscow and plans to start operations at the end of this summer, the company’s business development manager Roman Schubert told Vedomosti.
This is the first market entry by a leading foreign used car trader. |
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Gazprom chief Alexei Miller discussed new “major” projects with E.On on Friday, after he suggested that the German company could join the South Stream pipeline project that will run from Russia to Europe under the Black Sea. |
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The Russians are coming.
So far, the invaders are both welcome and unexpected. These aren’t the Cold War comrades who aspired to geopolitical domination or the first wave of oligarchs with their treasure chest of natural resources. These Russians propose to conquer the world’s new frontier — the Internet — and they are every bit as cocky as their predecessors.
Russia’s arrival as a would-be technology superpower was announced last week when Yandex, the Internet search company, made its debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange in the biggest U.S. Internet listing since Google went public in 2004.
With characteristic Russian bravado, Ilya Segalovich, the company’s chief technology officer, told my colleagues Alina Selyukh and Megan Davies that Yandex was superior to the behemoth Google. |
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 President Dmitry Medvedev says he is concerned that Russian judges are coming under too much pressure from people who want them to decide cases one way or the other. |
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Something is very wrong in Russia.
It’s just not right when one of the country’s leading rock bands supports gay bashing or any kind of mass beatings.
Take this Sunday. In Moscow, the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender) community attempted to hold a gay pride event — to demand equal rights with other Russians.
They had every right to do so; the right of assembly is guaranteed by the Russian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.
The constitution also says that all citizens are equal. |
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NATASHA RAZINA
ALEXEI MARKOV IS ONE HALF OF ONE OF
THE MOST TALENTED COUPLES ON THE
LOCAL CULTURAL SCENE. |
 Two generations of Russian dissidents met last week when a Soviet underground art collector who was imprisoned for holding nonconformist art exhibitions in the 1980s offered his rooms to host a photo exhibition documenting contemporary political protests.
Previously, a number of St. Petersburg galleries and art cafes declined to hold the exhibition, titled “Strategy 31,” whose subject was the national non-partisan, civic campaign demanding freedom of assembly, a right that is guaranteed by the constitution but frequently violated by the authorities.
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 For almost two months, Petersburg residents have been voting on the Internet to select the 50 most outstanding people in the city. Voting stops on the evening of Sunday, 5 June — the same day that the official awards ceremony takes place in the Mikhailovsky Theater.
The list of nominees was compiled in early April by Sobaka.ru magazine and a panel of experts. There are ten categories: Theater, art, literature, film, music, business, social sciences, media, sport and fashion/lifestyle. |
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 The Museum of the History of St. Petersburg has unearthed more than 100 skeletons while conducting archeological excavations at the Peter and Paul Fortress on the spot where the mass graves of victims of the Red Terror are located. |
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On a lovely morning not long ago, I skipped across my courtyard to my car and discovered a note on the windshield. The note began Óðîä! (Freak!) and continued — with to my mind an excessive use of exclamation points and non-normative lexicon — to impart the writer’s overall poor impression of my mental abilities and moral standards. My crime? I parked my car wrong. Since I parked it like everyone else, not blocking any cars or impeding traffic, I chalked this up to âåñåííåå îáîñòðåíèå (spring freak out), tossed the note and went on my merry way.
But later someone asked me: Why óðîä? Why not another derogatory term? And I realized that what the world really needs is a guide to common Russian insults, nasty names and slangy curses. |
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 A well-traveled opera singer and the founder of an internationally established ballet festival who now comprise one of the most striking artistic couples in St. |
 Last week, officials cruelly invaded the privacy of Russian celebrities. First they stripped epic film director Nikita Mikhalkov of the flashing blue light on his car, forcing him to sit in traffic as if he were an ordinary person. Then they searched the office of doe-eyed Eurovision winner Dima Bilan to check whether he was really declaring all the income from his corporate gigs. |
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Given that Teplichnye Usloviya is located just off Nevsky Prospekt in the heart of St. Petersburg’s historic center, is open daily until the last customer and features an extensive cocktail menu, one might expect to find a late-night party atmosphere upon entering. |
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 As the Russian Federation celebrates Children’s Day on Wednesday, June 1, there is no shortage of heated discussion about education and services provided to children in contemporary Russia.
“Children are our everything” was a widespread slogan during the Soviet Union. Now, in the age of Russian capitalism when parents face lengthy waiting lists to enrol their child in kindergarten and almost always end up paying — whether officially or unofficially — for education, there exists a nostalgia about the Soviet past, when almost every kind of schooling and extracurricular activities were free of charge. |
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 When Pyotr Koval was drafted into the Red Army and sent to the front in 1941, he and his wife, Galina, stopped their watches to show that time stopped for them when they were apart. |
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Issues Archive