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Georgy Poltavchenko, a former KGB officer and staunch ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, emerged Monday as the prime pick for the St. Petersburg governor’s seat, which was vacated by Federation Council-bound Valentina Matviyenko.
Poltavchenko said he considered his appointment to the position of acting governor of St. Petersburg as “a great responsibility and good opportunity to do something for his native city.”
“It is a great honor and responsibility for me to seek the position of governor,” Poltavchenko told reporters in St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
Matviyenko, 62, resigned Monday after sweeping the vote in two local district by-elections a day earlier. The victory made her eligible for the upper chamber, where the ruling United Russia party has promised to make her speaker. (See story, this page.)
The Kremlin kept silent on her successor until Monday, when Poltavchenko, 58, the presidential envoy to the Central Federal District, was appointed acting governor.
Poltavchenko moved to Leningrad as a first-grade school pupil and lived in the city for 40 years, he said.
The first priority of the acting governor will be “to prepare the city for the upcoming winter and fulfill all necessary social obligations,” Poltavchenko said. |
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NEW AGE
MAXIM STULOV / Vedomosti
Georgy Poltavchenko was appointed acting governor of St. Petersburg on Monday, and political analysts expect him to be given the full-time position. Poltavchenko, who moved to the city as a young child, said his first priority would be to prepare Petersburg for the upcoming winter. |
 The opposition has denounced as a farce the municipal by-elections won by former-Governor Valentina Matviyenko at the weekend.
United Russia was triumphant over the results, calling them “record-breaking” and “overwhelming,” but the opposition, which had criticized the elections for not being announced in advance as required by the law, refused to recognize them.
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Former St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko, who officially left her position on Tuesday, said she was “leaving the city with a feeling that she had performed her duty.”
“We’ve done everything we could during the time we had,” Matviyenko said at her final press conference on Tuesday. |
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Dispelling myths and breaking down vicious stereotypes surrounding the taboo subject of the commercial sexual exploitation of children is the goal of a new exhibition titled “Lightning. |
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Petersburgers can now pay for public transport with a new kind of transport card that combines a regular international bankcard and a transport pass.
The new transport payment system was introduced on Aug. 1 to supplement the existing options of paying by cash for each journey or buying a monthly transport pass, the press service of the city’s Transport Committee said. |
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The vice principal of St. Petersburg State University (SPbGU) is to pay for the studies of a university student from his own pocket to make up for a mistake he made at work. |
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A private investor from New Zealand is to build a racetrack in the Leningrad Oblast after the original project was frozen during the financial crisis.
David Phillips, who specializes in equestrian sport projects, plans to build a hippodrome for 25,000 visitors, a straight rack track of about two kilometers, stables and a hotel complex, the press service of the Leningrad Oblast administration said last week. |
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St. Petersburg police detained at least three men last week suspected of sexually abusing children, while a fourth managed to escape.
One of the detained men was 46-year-old singing teacher Igor Lysenkov, who is also head of the city’s Primorsky Culture Center club. |
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Kenyan Man Attacked
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A Kenyan man was hospitalized in a critical condition after he was attacked in St. Petersburg last week.
The man suffered wounds to his head and body, Interfax reported.
A day later, police detained a 39-year-old suspect, who allegedly attacked the Kenyan citizen in order to help the owner of a store reclaim debts owed to him by the Kenyan man. |
All photos from issue.
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 Military officers flew to North Korea for talks about renewing military ties on Monday as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s armored train rolled through the resource-rich Far East on his secretive journey to a summit with President Dmitry Medvedev.
Kim is to meet Medvedev later this week near Lake Baikal during his first visit to his country’s Cold War ally in nine years. North Korea is increasingly showing signs it is prepared to restart six-nation disarmament talks in exchange for aid. |
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 MOSCOW — A gunman killed the mayor of Sergiyev Posad, a popular tourist destination just north of Moscow, outside his private house Monday in a gangland-style killing reminiscent of the 1990s. |
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MOSCOW — The Finance Ministry on Tuesday expressed satisfaction about federal budget revenue so far this year, saying that it collected more funds than it expected.
Revenues in excess of the plan for the first half of this year came mostly from customs duties as imports soared, the Finance Ministry said in a statement posted on the Cabinet’s web site. |
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MOSCOW — The number of plane accidents has doubled compared with last year, and the number of deaths has quadrupled, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Tuesday in a report criticizing small airlines. |
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MOSCOW — LUKoil said Monday that its request to extract oil off Norway’s coast stemmed partly from the pact the two countries signed to settle their maritime border in the Barents Sea, where rich reserves could come to light.
In the company’s first comments on the proposal, which Norway approved last week, LUKoil said last year’s border agreement between Moscow and Oslo is what helped spark its interest in the project. |
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MOSCOW — Twenty years after the Soviet collapse, Russians are among the most unhappy people in Europe because of a high level of economic uncertainty, according to a new study. |
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MOSCOW — Russia quietly marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the attempted coup that led to the Soviet collapse, with only about 100 people gathering Friday evening at the spot where tens of thousands of protesters rallied in 1991.
Neither President Dmitry Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin mentioned the coup anniversary in their public appearances Friday, reflecting the deep ambivalence of many Russians about the events that plunged them into both anxiety and exhilaration. |
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 There is an old saying about the Soviet army: After every victory, the slackers are rewarded and the heroes are punished. This expression came to mind in connection with the 20th anniversary of the 1991 coup attempt. Analysts on television and the radio talk about the standard heroes: the Muscovites who set up blockades and threw themselves at the tanks and Boris Yeltsin, then-president of the Soviet Russian Republic, who led the movement against the coup plotters. |
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It is difficult to imagine a greater joy than visiting Georgia.
Amazingly, the blood spilled in the Russia-Georgia war three years ago has not cooled the warm feelings that Georgians feel toward Russians, and that is the result of several centuries of living together in one nation. |
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 A little more than a month ago, New Holland Island was opened to the public for the first time in the history of St. Petersburg. Since then, it has become the hippest summer hangout for both locals and tourists.
“The first thing I did after arriving in St. Petersburg was to rush to New Holland Island,” writes one Muscovite on an Internet forum devoted to the island. “I’ve read a lot about the potential of this island, so I wanted to see it for myself,” she wrote.
“It’s a great idea to breathe new life into an old historic and cultural object,” writes another visitor from the capital. “Moscow has already witnessed similar projects… Now St. |
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KENNETH O’HALLORAN
THE MOST STRIKING IMAGES OF 2010 CAN BE SEEN AT THE WORLD PRESS PHOTO EXHIBITION AT LOFT PROJECT ETAZHI FROM THIS WEEKEND. |
 The Mariinsky dancers haven’t had much of a summer holiday after their well received three-week London tour ended on Aug. 13. The company kicked off a two-week tour to Brazil last week, starting in Sao Paolo. The Brazil tour will also include Rio de Janeiro, and will be followed by an Asian tour to Singapore and Bangkok from Sept.16.
“Swan Lake,” the only ballet that is being performed on the Brazil tour, was also the production that opened the Mariinsky season at Covent Garden.
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 Two hundred winning shots from the annual World Press Photo photojournalism award are on display at Loft Project Etazhi this weekend, depicting the most important events of the previous year — ranging from the humorous to the haunting and downright harrowing. |
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One of the problems of being a translator is that your workload is pretty much feast or famine. Half the time you get a job offer every time you pick up the phone, and the other half you’re playing computer solitaire and wondering if everyone has abandoned cross-cultural communication. |
 Couch Surfing, the global network that connects travelers looking to save on accommodation expenses and get a first hand experience of local culture, has seen its popularity across the world soar during the last few years — and St. Petersburg is no exception.
The Couch Surfing web site describes its aim as “to create inspiring experiences: Cross-cultural encounters that are fun, engaging and illuminating. |
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 This week was the first episode of reality show “Russian Dolls” on the U.S. Lifetime channel, which could not have been more hotly anticipated, at least by me. |
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Gallic Gourmandize
The romantic Parisian style of the Volkonsky chain of cafe-confectioners is evident before you even enter the cute and cozy cafe, as a selection of the 40 homemade breads available is on display in the window to tempt you in. Inside, the cream walls are decorated with kitschy photo frames, candlesticks and jars of macaroons, among other things, and the window seats offer a lovely view onto the fountain opposite. |
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 Many foreign travelers to Yekaterinburg expect to learn more about the last days of Russia’s last monarch, Nicholas II, his German-born wife Alexandra and their children, executed here by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
What they often don’t expect — after reading some Western books on the subject — is to see a bustling modern city with a skyline punctured by high-rise towers of hotels, business centers and apartment buildings. |
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 Smoke breaks in stairwells, between cars on commuter trains and just about everywhere else are a common sight all over Russia, which has more smokers per capita than any other country on the planet. |
_1.jpg) TALLINN — Seventy thousand people flocked to the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the restoration of Estonian independence Saturday, while on Sunday the people of Estonia paid homage to Iceland, the first country to recognize the Baltic republic in 1991, with an Iceland Day festival.
Sinead O’Connor and Kerli, Estonia’s best-known international pop singer, were among 16 acts from both Estonia and abroad who participated in the six-hour Song of Freedom concert on the site where many events of the Singing Revolution, as Estonia’s struggle for liberation in the late 1980s and early 1990s is called, took place. |
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 NEW YORK — Early in the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, prosecutors held his accuser as their strongest weapon. Her account was “compelling and unwavering,” complete with “very powerful details” and corroborated by a medical exam, they said. |
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TRIPOLI, Libya — Fresh fighting erupted in Tripoli on Tuesday hours after Moammar Gadhafi’s son turned up free to thwart Libyan rebel claims he had been captured, a move that seems to have energized forces still loyal to the embattled regime.
The rebel leadership seemed stunned that Seif al-Islam was free. |
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BEIRUT — Syrian security forces killed at least seven people following a visit by members of a UN humanitarian team, activists said Tuesday.
The United Nation’s top human rights body, meanwhile, voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to demand that Syria end its bloody crackdown and cooperate with an international probe into possible crimes against humanity. |
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — NASA’s humanoid robot has finally awakened in space.
Ground controllers turned Robonaut on Monday for the first time since it was delivered to the International Space Station in February. The test involved sending power to all of Robonaut’s systems. The robot was not commanded to move; that will happen next week. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
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