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Alexandra Kachko, who is attempting to get a policeman whom she says fractured her wrist at a protest rally on May 31 identified and punished, said Thursday she was being pressured by an investigator to withdraw her complaint and testify that the fracture resulted from an “accident.”
The 25-year-old architect said the investigator told her she would “ruin the man’s life” and that she “didn’t know who it was anyway” when she was summoned for a second interview on Wednesday.
When Kachko refused to withdraw her complaint, the investigator said that he knew her boyfriend was a military officer with the Russian Space Forces, and that she had been fined for drinking champagne outdoors in 2005, she said.
“He probably wanted to intimidate me so that I would withdraw my complaint without making a fuss,” she said. “He also tried to pressure me to testify that it was an accident. |
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Igor Tabakov / The St. Petersburg Times
The headquarters of Izvestia newspaper in downtown Moscow are pictured beside a monument to Alexander Pushkin. Journalists at Izvestia fear for their jobs after the newspaper’s publisher announced a shakeup aimed at making the publication more profitable. |
 The Investigative Committee will investigate the actions of an unidentified policeman who allegedly fractured the wrist of an activist during the Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right of assembly last week, its spokesman told Interfax on Friday.
Architect Alexandra Kachko, 25, known for her dissident street art, has filed a complaint about the actions of the policeman who she says fractured her left wrist while she was in a police bus with other detainees.
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Wedding tourism, yachts and camping are among the focal areas of a set of measures aimed at boosting tourism to St. Petersburg to eight million people a year during the next five years, up from about five million tourists last year.
The main strategies of the tourism development program for 2011-2016 that was passed Tuesday are to increase the average stay in St. |
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Murder in the Metro
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A metro train operator shot his colleague dead in the St. Petersburg subway on Saturday.
Engine operator Kirill Maslov, 25, shot his colleague in the chest with a rubber pellet gun, fatally injuring him, on the platform of Volkovskaya metro station. |
 The 12 most outstanding St. Petersburg residents were selected Sunday night on the stage of the city’s Mikhailovsky Theater.
The official awards ceremony was preceded by two months of voting on the Internet for St. Petersburg inhabitants who have made a breakthrough in ten categories: Theater, art, literature, film, music, business, social sciences, media, sport and fashion/lifestyle. The list of 50 nominees was compiled by Sobaka. |
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 The 2011 National Bestseller (NatsBest) Award was given to author Dmitry Bykov on Sunday for his novel “Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” set in Leningrad, as Petersburg was formerly known. |
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A group of Dutch pediatricians visited the city this week to share knowledge and techniques with their Russian counterparts.
Five pediatricians from St. Petersburg and four from Murmansk met with a group of four specialists from the Dutch city of Groningen headed by Professor Pieter Sauer for a conference held Monday and Tuesday. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — A fire, possibly sparked by a discarded cigarette, engulfed a Urals arms depot over the weekend, injuring at least 95 people and prompting 2,000 others to seek psychological help, officials said.
The military said no one was killed in the blaze, which started late Thursday and was extinguished late Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — The Communist and Just Russia parties are creating organizations to counter Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front ahead of State Duma elections. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is falling behind other BRIC economies in global competitiveness and growth, according to The Russia Competitiveness Report 2011, released Monday by the World Economic Forum.
The country ranked 63rd out of 139 countries based on the report’s 12 pillars of competitiveness. |
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MOSCOW — A human rights worker was hospitalized after being beaten up in his apartment building, an attack his employer said was linked to his work, Reuters reported. |
 MOSCOW — The publisher of Izvestia, once known as Russia’s New York Times, signaled Monday that two-thirds of the newspaper’s journalists might face dismissal as he seeks to turn the publication into something “cooler” than Kommersant and Vedomosti.
Some Izvestia journalists said they understood that Izvestia would adopt a conservative, pro-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stance ahead of the State Duma elections in December and the presidential vote next spring. |
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MOSCOW — EU and Russian officials expressed hope Monday that a dispute over Russia’s decision to ban European vegetables amid an E. coli outbreak in Germany would be resolved before a EU-Russia summit at the end of the week. |
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MOSCOW — A new visa agreement between Russia and Europe’s Schengen zone could significantly reduce red tape and travel restrictions by next year — but only for professionals, not tourists, a European diplomat said Thursday.
The deal could cover lawmakers, businessmen, journalists, members of central and regional governments — along with their families — and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, said Denis Daniilidis, spokesman for the EU delegation to Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — State-controlled NTV television has aired a lengthy report on the luxury lifestyles of officials implicated in the case of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — two months after the story was first broken by Magnitsky’s supporters. |
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 LONDON — Vasily Vereshchagin’s painting “The Taj Mahal, Evening” set a new record for the painter at Sotheby’s auction house on Sunday night when it was sold for $3,749,919.
The picture was sold to an anonymous buyer on the telephone, far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $410,000 to $739,000. |
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MOSCOW — St. Petersburg realtor Alex Romanenko has been elected president of the International Real Estate Federation, which unites 100 national real estate associations worldwide. |
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Gazprom Neft is seeking approval to build a skyscraper on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reported.
The move comes after the original plan to build the skyscraper in the city center was blocked by protests.
The project may be 15 percent to 25 percent higher or lower than the original design, Gazprom’s Okhta Center project said in a statement late last week. |
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MOSCOW — The best university in the country remains Moscow State University, or MGU, but it’s not necessary to come to the capital to get one of the country’s best classical educations: Universities in Tomsk and Novosibirsk ranked in the top five of the latest published rating. |
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MOSCOW — Viable legislation for lowering the social tax burden on companies, a key part of President Medvedev’s modernization agenda, has not been put forward by the government, prompting suggestions of a schism between the White House and the Kremlin.
The June 1 deadline for an official suggestion on how to lower the 34 percent tax on payroll for companies — imposed by Medvedev during a landmark March speech in Magnitogorsk — has passed without a constructive proposal from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s government.
In an effort to resolve the impasse, presidential economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich suggested that the corporate income tax rate be raised to its pre-crisis level of 24 percent, Vedomosti reported Monday, offsetting the budget losses that would be entailed by dropping the tax on payroll, covering insurance and pensions, eight percentage points to its 2010 level of 26 percent. |
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 SOCHI — Vladimir Yakunin seemed irked.
“No cherries, no tea?” he said. “Honestly, I can’t work like this.”
But Yakunin, president of Russian Railways, wasn’t really upset. |
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ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Turkish President Abdullah Gul met with his counterpart in Turkmenistan last week for urgent talks thought to be related to $1 billion in outstanding bills owed to Turkish construction companies that have revamped the capital city.
Turkish companies have played a leading role in transforming this old sleepy post-Soviet backwater into a city of soaring marble-clad government offices and apartment blocks. |
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 Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, is the psychological syndrome when a woman is convinced she is pregnant after experiencing similar symptoms that are associated with pregnancy.
Russia’s military hawks, who constantly warn that U.S. missile defense will undermine Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence, are experiencing a similar hallucination. |
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There is nothing very new about recruiting prominent cultural figures to take part in political advertising. It’s a tactic that was adopted long ago by United Russia, the powerful pro-Kremlin party. |
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 Avant Fest, the music festival showcasing Russian and international indie rock held in Moscow since 2004, returns to St. Petersburg this year for one night only — called Avant Piter and headlined by British Sea Power — at Kosmonavt on Saturday, June 11.
Launched by the Moscow-based promoter Maxim Silva-Vega in 2004, the festival featured St. Petersburg events in 2004 and 2005 at the now-defunct Red Club and the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, respectively. In 2005, Avant Piter was headlined by the British post-rock band Hood. |
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AVANT
British sea power will headline the avant piter music festival this weekend. |
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A concert in support of Moscow music journalist and promoter Artyom Troitsky, now on trial for critical remarks made about a musician, had to switch venues from the Moscow House of Artists, where it had been scheduled to be held on Friday, June 10.
Eventually, another venue, a music club called Hleb, was found and, if it does not face similar problems, the concert will be held there.
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 With only 20 percent of Russians ever traveling abroad, notions of other cultures and peoples are often limited to impressions gained from television, books and magazines. The Magic Table project that opened Monday at the Pro Arte center in the Peter and Paul Fortress aims to kill three birds with one stone: Improve visitors’ knowledge of geography, reveal interesting aspects of American life, and broaden spectators’ horizons. |
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Russian insults, îòìîðîçîê is Zeus — the king of the bad guys. Like Zeus, îòìîðîçîê is brutish and inhuman. But sometimes îòìîðîçîê is like Zeus on drugs — weird, wacky and out of it. |
 Love it or hate it, public art has been a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape in cites around the world for decades. And despite a period in the 1980s and ’90s when it came to be seen as overly decorative, or as a de facto stamp of approval for corporate culture, respected contemporary artists have used it to humanize often alienating spaces, addressing important cultural issues along the way.
Not so, St. |
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 Last weekend’s attempt to hold a gay pride event in Moscow was the usual truncated affair with protesters running the gauntlet of riot police, icon-brandishing fundamentalists and the fists of some very unpleasant bullet-headed types. |
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The light-filled dining room of Italy, on the fourth floor of an upscale shopping center, provides an object lesson in the possibilities of mall cuisine. Restaurants in Petersburg’s older buildings can be cozy and atmospheric, but for high ceilings, open floor plans, and an expansive view, head to one of the Putin era’s glass-fronted behemoths. |
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 Guiseppe Verdi’s “Aida” that premieres at the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall on June 11 and 14, Swiss-born director Daniele Finzi Pasca aims to do far more than offer a striking stage experiment. He wants his production to be a new word in human anatomy.
“The main component of a human body is not water; it is gasoline,” says Finzi Pasca, the man behind “Corteo,” the hugely popular show he created for Cirque du Soleil. |
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 Located in the very center of Europe, the city of Vienna is attracting more and more Russian students of business education programs every year.
As an additional incentive to prospective business students, the WU Executive Academy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) is offering scholarships to citizens of Central and Eastern Europe for its Professional MBA program. |
 PSKOV —Perched on Russia’s western fringes, yet one of the country’s most ancient cities, Pskov may lack industry but it combines a unique concentration of crumbling Orthodox churches with echoes of its proximity to Europe.
On the outskirts of the city, an unremarkable, modern white building embodies one of those echoes. |
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