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When Yevgenia Gurova, a 21-year-old student of the Northwest Institute of Publishing, reached the nearest metro station on June 16 to travel back home after taking an exam — Gurova is in the middle of her end-of-year exams — she discovered she was banned from using the metro. For Gurova is disabled, and moves around the city in a wheelchair — something that suddenly became a concern for the local metro management, which issued an order banning all wheelchair-bound people from the metro because “its elevators are not equipped for wheelchairs and are therefore potentially dangerous.”
For Gurova, the officials’ concerns are nonsensical.
“I find the metro the only accessible means of transportation: You get in, you get on the elevator and put on the brakes on your wheelchair, and then get off safely,” Gurova wrote in her blog at http://jenianm. |
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WHITE NIGHTS, RED DAWN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A festive ship sails along the River Neva during a pyrotechnics display as part of the Alye Parusa (Scarlet Sails) school leavers’ celebration on Saturday night. An estimated 3 million gathered to watch the festivities, necessitating an army of street cleaners to clear up afterward. |
 St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko has appealed to Russian Interior Affairs Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev regarding the Nizhny Novgorod riot police’s alleged tasering of one of St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit players.
Matviyenko asked Nurgaliyev to investigate the incident.
“We need to do everything possible to make our players and fans feel safe,” the governor was quoted as saying by Interfax.
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Traffic Cop In Accident
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A 17-year-old girl died and her pregnant mother was injuried when a local traffic policeman lost control of his car on the city’s ring road. The officer hit the woman’s Ford Mondeo car, which was stationary in one of the lanes due to problems with one of its wheels, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — A prominent journalist has been censored out of a family show he co-hosted on Rossia One television, months after he lost another job with the channel’s owner for comparing St. |
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In an apparent clampdown on political opposition during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, the authorities made what looked like mass preventive arrests, following and harassing opposition activists. The police also seized 5,000 copies of the investigative report “Putin. |
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Biker Fest in City
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg’s first Harley-Davidson festival will be held from June 24 to 26. Owners of Harley-Davidson motorcycles in St. |
All photos from issue.
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 A Russian airliner crashed in heavy fog and burst into flames just short of a runway in northwestern Russia, killing 44 people, officials said. Eight people survived, dragged from the burning wreckage by locals.
The RusAir Tu-134 plane had taken off from Moscow and was moments from landing at the Petrozavodsk airport when it slammed into a nearby highway just before midnight Monday, Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Oksana Semyonova told The Associated Press.
Russia’s top investigative agency said bad weather, human error or a technical malfunction might have contributed to the crash. |
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PRIDE AND JOY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Emotions run high at a graduation ceremony for cadets from the city’s military academies held Saturday on Palace Square. |
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MOSCOW — Confusion over Abkhazia’s ties with Vanuatu reached new heights Monday when reports from the Pacific island nation said a new government had withdrawn an earlier recognition of the breakaway Georgian republic’s independence.
Edward Natapei, who was declared Vanuatu’s acting prime minister last week, issued a statement saying Abkhazia was an “autonomous province of the republic of Georgia,” the Vanuatu Daily Post reported Monday.
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 KHIMKI, Moscow Region — Not even the organizers could really explain what the four-day Anti-Seliger camp was all about. But something was in the air, with even Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger whose political star is rising, dropping by for a presentation. |
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MOSCOW — Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov said political parties and other nonprofit organizations should not be required to register with his ministry, only notify it of their existence. |
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MOSCOW — Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky will fix toilets and repair windows at the Karelian prison where he was sent last week, RIA-Novosti reported Monday.
Khodorkovsky has been assigned to a maintenance squad, comprised of fellow inmates, the report said, citing a source at the prison service. |
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The new terminal due to be built at Pulkovo Airport at a cost of 1.2 billion rubles ($43 million) will only appear in three years, and the airport’s management company has begun to change the rental agreements for retail tenants at the airport in order to gain maximum income from the existing terminals. |
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TPV Technology opened an LCD television and screens plant at an estimated value of $30 million in the Shushary district outside St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
This year, the plant plans to produce about 500,000 Philips television sets, Interfax reported. |
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The region’s automobile plants need to find 3,000 new employees during the next three years, and this recent addition to St. Petersburg’s economic sector is close to exhausting its personnel reserves. |
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 A bullish Dmitry Medvedev left investors so enthusiastic at last weekend’s St. Petersburg forum that even his biggest shortcoming could not spoil the mood: He refused to say whether he would address the forum as president again next year.
After the St. |
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Russia signed a contract worth more than 1 billion euros ($1.43 billion) Friday to buy two French warships — the largest military deal between a NATO country and Moscow to date that will likely worry some of Russia’s neighbors. |
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MOSCOW — A European Commission delegation, headed by health and consumer policy commissioner John Dalli, will visit Moscow in the coming days to negotiate the lifting of Russia’s ban on EU vegetables, spokesman for the European Union delegation to Moscow Denis Daniilidis said. |
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin’s envoy to the restive North Caucasus oversaw the signing of a $1.8 billion French deal at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum as he tried to persuade business leaders to back a $16 billion plan to build a chain of ski resorts in the Caucasus mountains, Reuters reported. |
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 Some commentators were quick to claim that President Dmitry Medvedev’s speech Friday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was his most important since he was elected president in 2008.
In the speech, Medvedev tried to position himself as a leader, but he spoke more in the future tense than the present. |
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Parents of disabled children have become the targets of a new bureaucratic rule that is advertised as an anti-corruption tool but looks more like a torture device. |
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This weekend is perhaps the hottest from the point of view of major music events. Although more concerts have been scheduled for the rest of the summer, attendance will inevitably start to drop as people leave the city to take advantage of the good weather.
Stereoleto, the summer’s main outdoor music event, is marking its 10th anniversary this year. During its history, it has brought a number of great acts — perhaps most notably Sparks, who came while touring in support of the band’s surprisingly awesome 2006 album “Hello Young Lovers. |
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ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
PHOTOS OF NICOLE KIDMAN AND OTHER STARS ARE ON DISPLAY AT THE HERMITAGE AS PART OF AN EXHIBITION OF WORK BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ . |
 Chinawoman is Michelle, an elusive Canada-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter with Russian roots.
Not much is known about her, except for a few scarce facts disclosed by the singer since her first album, “Party Girl,” was released in 2007.
Her mother danced with the Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet in the 1970s, a fact reflected in Chinawoman’s song “Russian Ballerina,” which was intended as her gift to her mother.
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 Sitting in the apartments of Tsar Alexander I in the State Hermitage Museum, Annie Leibovitz is a generous presence in an otherwise daunting enfilade of staterooms. At 62, she is possibly the world’s most famous photographer, and during the past four decades has trained her lens on the great and the good — and on a fair share of monsters too. |
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Òûë: home front, back, support system
One of the guilty pleasures of translating is hooting over fabulous flubs — those dreadful translation gaffes that distort meaning or introduce a double entendre. |
 A minimalist and deeply philosophical show is perhaps not quite what most people would expect from a production of Verdi’s “Aida” directed by a man who has made an international career producing shows for a circus. Yet this is exactly what Swiss-born director Daniele Finzi Pasca offered audiences at the opera’s premiere at the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall on June 11 and 14.
Most productions of “Aida,” regardless of where they are staged, thrive on opulence and ethnic chic. |
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 Last week, porn actress and former reality show contestant Yelena Berkova was convicted of drug possession in a sad comedown for the voluptuous star who once — almost — ran for mayor of Sochi. |
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Pan-Asian restaurants are still a rare species in St. Petersburg, although the trend is booming and blooming across the globe. The most popular ethnic cuisine locally has long been Italian — if you discard the myriads of faceless sushi bars where just about everything tastes like paper — and the trend does not look likely to change any time soon. |
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 BOSTON — Yelena Bonner, a rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said Sunday. She was 88.
Bonner died of heart failure Saturday afternoon in Boston, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, Yankelevich said.
Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities. |
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 Matt Taibbi, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, is known in the United States for his coverage of the financial crisis — he once memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” — but in Russia, he is remembered for his time as editor of the satirical newspaper The eXile and by some at this paper for his brief period as a journalist at The Moscow Times. |
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Issues Archive