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The opposition has slammed Governor Valentina Matviyenko for running in “secret” elections which City Hall has concealed from the public for more than a month.
City Hall said on Sunday that Matviyenko would run in the elections for municipal deputies in the Krasnenkaya Rechka and Petrovsky districts, making the announcement four days after the registration of the candidates had ended. The elections are due on August 21.
Previously, local opposition leaders and activists said they would run at the same elections as Matviyenko and registered in the municipal district of Lomonosov, where four United Russia and Just Russia deputies had resigned simultaneously in what was seen as an attempt to clear the way for Matviyenko’s election. |
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HELLO SAILORS!
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Artists from the Mitki arts group take part in the celebrations of Navy Day in central St. Petersburg on Sunday. The artists dressed the monument to Peter the Great on the Neva embankment by the Admiralty in a “telnyashka” — the traditional striped shirt of Russian sailors. |
 Around 70 were detained as the police shut down a peaceful rally in defense of the right of assembly on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main street, on Sunday, the organizers said. The police admitted to “around 50” arrests during the demo which drew from 500 to 700 people.
The detained were charged with violation of the regulations on holding public events and failure to obey police officers’ orders.
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MOSCOW — An overloaded motorboat, apparently carrying a group of partyers, rammed into a moored barge near Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium early Sunday, sinking on the spot and killing nine people.
The Moscow River accident is the second of its kind in less than a month after the Bulgaria riverboat sank in the Volga River, killing 122. |
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MOSCOW — Dark storm clouds are collecting over the much-heralded “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations, with both sides working to blacklist the other’s officials, new tensions over U. |
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MOSCOW — An Arkhangelsk regional court late Wednesday rejected a parole plea by former Yukos co-owner Platon Lebedev, saying he was not eligible because of two breaches of prison rules, including the loss of a pair of trousers.
His lawyers promised to appeal, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — A former contestant of the kitschy television reality show “Dom-2” may compete against St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko in an early election meant to pave the way for Matviyenko to become the speaker of the Federation Council, news reports said Thursday. |
 MOSCOW — Soviet women washed dishes with soda and salt for decades, while men had never heard of deodorant and teens scrubbed their pimples with soap and water.
Not anymore.
Western consumer goods companies have flooded what remains in many aspects a virgin market, spending tens of millions of dollars to research consumer habits and conduct increasingly elaborate marketing campaigns aimed at selling products that many Russians never imagined needing. |
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WARSAW — Russian air traffic controllers gave incorrect and confusing landing instructions to pilots of a plane that crashed, killing Poland’s president and 95 other people, a Polish report said Friday — a finding that could further strain ties between the countries. |
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In a rare public outburst, a senior United Russia deputy offered on Thursday to personally pay an Arkhangelsk region prison for a missing pair of trousers that cost former Yukos co-owner Platon Lebedev his appeal for parole this week.
Lyubov Sliska, who serves as a deputy State Duma speaker, criticized the two-day parole hearing as “irritating performance” that discredits the country’s law enforcement system, Interfax reported. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A British businessman who is being held in a Moscow detention center has fallen so severely ill that his lawyer says he could die at any moment.
Darren Keane, 43, CEO of the Storm International gambling holding, is accused of letting two of the company’s casinos operate in the city even after gambling was banned in July 2009.
He was arrested by Federal Security Service agents June 22, charged with illegal business activities, and sent to a pretrial detention center, Vedomosti reported Friday, citing an unidentified city police source.
Keane has since unsuccessfully tried to have his arrest overturned by the city’s Tverskoi District Court, which originally sanctioned it, his lawyer told the news site Rosbalt. |
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 MOSCOW — Hundreds of holidaymakers spent the weekend stranded at airports on the Black Sea coast and in the Amur region after the mysterious collapse of Continent airlines on Friday. |
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MOSCOW — The investment climate in Russia is changing for the better, President Dmitry Medvedev said at a meeting with state court justices Tuesday.
“It’s true I said it’s not very good, but that climate is changing,” Medvedev said, according to the Kremlin web site.
The Tuesday meeting was the first time the president discussed directly with judges the role of courts in making the investment environment better. |
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 The Yukos Oil Company was forced into bankruptcy by the Moscow Arbitration Court five years ago on Monday. Its assets were seized by the state,and its top managers imprisoned or chased from the country. Its legacy of progressive corporate governance and transparency was decimated in favor of shadowy state control. |
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Earlier this year, I argued on these pages that the continued uncertainty from the ruling tandem over which member was going to run for president was undermining the political stability that the tandem justifiably viewed as their key achievement and hampering long-term economic growth. |
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Áûäëî: sheep, lemmings, cretins, rabble
I have a tattered and dog-eared mental manila folder called “Intriguing and Possibly Highly Indicative Fun Facts about Russian and English” where I put grammatical, syntactical and lexical differences between the two languages that reveal fundamental differences in worldview. I keep pulling it out to scribble something and then shoving it back in exasperation because there are too many exceptions and too little evidence.
But I can’t help hauling it out to ponder because the differences reflected in language usually cause havoc for the translator. Take the ëè÷íîñòü-íàðîä distinction in Russian. The collective noun íàðîä (people, nation) describes a kind of undifferentiated mass of humanity. |
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 Hollywood diva Nastassja Kinski spoke to The St. Petersburg Times during her visit to the Second St. Petersburg International Kinoforum.
When asking Kinski about her most important achievement in life, you might expect that this fine-boned aristocratic-looking actress would go straight to her roles in the films of Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders and Andrei Konchalovsky. |
 MOSCOW — “You got seven minutes,” warns a stressed-out promoter as we walk into a Soviet-style dressing room to meet the king of gypsy punk: Eugene Hutz.
Hutz is the frontman of Gogol Bordello, a group as famous for the raucous, energetic concerts that have given it a reputation as one of the best live bands in the world as the eight albums it has released since 1999.
The band’s music is a difficult-to-pin-down mix of gypsy folk music and punk that comes along with a mix of diverse influences ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Manu Chao. |
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 This week, rock star Courtney Love sang at Kolomenskoye with her band Hole and treated the audience — and several hapless journalists — to some choice phrases. |
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A Home From Home
This centrally-located restaurant is the place to come if you want an authentic Russian dining experience unmarred by excessive Soviet paraphernalia. The very welcoming Dachniki (cottagers) offers a decent selection of very decent Russian Cuisine at very reasonable prices and in a very Russian setting. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
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