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 The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly will vote Monday on an issue that was decided at the Kremlin some time ago: The identity of the next city governor.
Although, technically speaking, three candidates are standing — Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky; Vadim Tyulpanov, speaker of the city parliament; and Georgy Poltavchenko, the presidential representative in Russia’s Central District — nobody, President Dmitry Medvedev included, is pretending that they do not know the outcome of the vote.
After the United Russia party put forward these three candidates Saturday, Medvedev voiced his preference for Poltavchenko on Tuesday and promptly gave his protege some recommendations as to what problems the victor should tackle first.
“I have to admit that the city has really changed and became more presentable; a number of new important social and industrial objects have emerged; the transport infrastructure is improving and the courtyards are becoming cleaner,” Medvedev said Tuesday. |
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WATER NYMPH
DMITRY LOVETSKY / The Associated Press
A young woman bathes in a lake outside St. Petersburg as the sun sets. Sept. 1 marks the official end of the summer and beginning of the autumn, as well as the first day back at school, university or kindergarten for Russia’s children. Rain is forecast through Sunday. |
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Yulia Minutina, a coordinator for the preservationist organization Living City and an advisor to former city governor Valentina Matviyenko for the past few months, said this week that she was never able to reach Matviyenko to discuss pressing issues.
Speaking at a press conference Monday devoted to summing up the results of the negotiations with Matviyenko and deputy governors, Minutina said that recent telephone calls to Matviyenko had not been put through, and that she received no reply to two letters sent to Matviyenko about the state of the Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt and a controversial renovation program.
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The first reports of attempts to dazzle airplane pilots with lasers in St. Petersburg were received by police last week, Interfax reported, adding to the reports of similar incidents received in several other Russian cities during recent months.
The police received an anonymous phone call last Thursday night in which the caller said that a man near the city’s Pulkovo Airport was using a laser device to direct a green light at planes that were taking off. |
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Police Shoot Thief
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A policeman shot dead a carjacker in St. Petersburg when the man attacked him with a screwdriver last Thursday, Interfax reported. |
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The city’s disabled people are to get vital new training and career opportunities due to the launch of a special training course at the St. Petersburg State University of the Fire-Fighting Service of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry.
According to the ministry’s press service, the new course, which targets disabled people and lasts for 72 academic hours, will allow those who successfully complete the course to work as operators of the Service 112 round-the-clock emergency call center. |
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The political logic behind the decision to replace St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko with Georgy Poltavchenko, presidential envoy to the Central Federal District, is not clear. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday set Dec. 4 as the date for elections to the State Duma, the powerful lower house of parliament that has been dominated by Kremlin loyalists since the last vote.
The Duma is the only chamber of the national legislature that is directly elected. Since the last election in 2007, the United Russia party headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has held 315 of the 450 seats, while opposition parties were squeezed out of the Duma.
The three other parties — the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and the populist A Just Russia — generally offer little opposition and support the Kremlin in most initiatives. |
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NEW TERM, NEW TEAM
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Team members of St. Petersburg’s SKA ice hockey club are given their new uniforms by Gennady Timchenko, the club’s president, at a presentation of the new team line-up at the Taleon Hotel on Saturday, ahead of the new season. |
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MOSCOW — A history teacher, a lathe operator and a potato farmer are the new faces of the revamped United Russia party, which wrapped up its joint primaries with the All-Russia People’s Front late last week.
The party acknowledged numerous violations during the vote, but still touted as a success its effort to compile lists of top 10 State Duma candidates across all 83 regions through public procedures, replacing party bureaucrats with grassroots activists.
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MOSCOW — “Sexism” and “low pay” are the name of the game at the Foreign Ministry, and the country’s middle class is growing but remains devoid of a political conscience, according to new U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
The whistleblowing web site published 133,887 cables over the last week — its biggest single batch yet — in an apparent attempt to reclaim its place in the public spotlight. |
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WARSAW, Poland — Polish authorities have exhumed one of the people killed along with President Lech Kaczynski in a 2010 plane crash in Russia because his family said it didn’t trust the Russian autopsy. |
 MOSCOW — Mikhail Khodorkovsky has a new job — as a magazine columnist.
The jailed former Yukos CEO on Monday published his first regular column in the opposition New Times weekly describing his experience in prison.
The column features the ghastly story of two fellow inmates he says suffered gross mistreatment at the hands of the criminal justice system. |
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MOSCOW — The government will spend a total of 2.4 billion rubles ($82 million) on a targeted program to develop specific nature reserves across the country over the next three years, as part of an ambitious preservation project, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — A luxury car driven by a Moscow district police officer was damaged shortly before midnight Sunday by a bomb, possibly the latest in a string of attacks by militant anarchists.
The bomb went off near a police parking lot in the Vostochnoye Degunino district in the city’s north, damaging the Toyota Land Cruiser Prada of local police deputy chief Eduard Zaitsev, RIA-Novosti said. |
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headway in a plan to set up its own international development agency to finance projects in poorer countries, mostly around its borders.
The effort would bolster the country’s global status as a donor nation and help maintain peace in the often restive area of Central Asia. |
 CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Astronauts may need to take the unprecedented step of temporarily abandoning the International Space Station if last week’s Russian launch accident prevents new crews from flying there this fall.
Until officials figure out what went wrong with Russia’s essential Soyuz rockets, there will be no way to launch any more astronauts before the current residents have to leave in mid-November. |
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MOSCOW — As the Spartak Moscow football club urged fans to avoid a racist rally, the family of an ethnic Russian killed by a Dagestani mixed martial arts champion vowed to seek 1 million euros ($1. |
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 MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov will remain chairman of the country’s biggest company, Gazprom, a Kremlin aide said Monday, in the midst of confusion about the position that sprouted from the Kremlin push to purge state companies of top government officials. |
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MOSCOW — The overall profit of large and midsized companies jumped 40 percent in the first half of this year to reach 4.6 trillion rubles ($158 billion), while the number of loss-making firms increased slightly, the State Statistics Service said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Manufacturers and local distributors of electronic goods sent a letter to the government last week proposing to reduce the list of appliances for which they pay 1 percent of the customs value to compensate copyright holders.
Among the devices they propose to exclude from the 63-item list are cameras, DVD players, radios, projectors and all telephones except for cell phones with memory of more than 1 gigabyte, said Alexander Onishchuk, president of the Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Consumer Electronic and Computer Equipment, or RATEK. |
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MOSCOW — Russian stocks rose sharply Monday in line with a global rally, but market insiders warned that nothing was standing in the way of another tailspin like the one the world witnessed in early August. |
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 Most Russians still have negative feelings about the liberal reforms of the 1990s and are more positively disposed toward the 2000s. But at the same time, acts of aggression and nationalistic sentiment are growing throughout society. There has been a significant increase in the number of people wanting to work abroad temporarily or to leave Russia altogether. |
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On a rainy morning in mid-August, St. Petersburg journalist Konstantin Andrianov, a reporter with the influential national daily Kommersant, was out covering what he described as a brief and rather unexciting assignment. |
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The city’s oldest surviving underground club will celebrate its 17th birthday with a concert and party on Friday, Sept. 2. Fish Fabrique opened at the artists’ squat at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa in the heady 1990s and has become one of the city’s best loved underground venues, where all the best bands have performed.
Fish Fabrique, which opened in September 1994, was modeled after Berlin underground clubs and built with the help of German expats. Founders Oleg “Fish” Labetsky and Pavel Zaporozhtsev had already spent a lot of time in Western Europe and shared a dream of opening a music club in St. Petersburg.
Before Fish Fabrique, the duo hung out at the Russian-German venture Ost-West Cafe, which was closed in 1993 when a patron was arrested for throwing bottles from the club’s balcony.
Fish Fabrique’s alternative interior design (the work of Labetsky and Denis Kuptsov from the ska-punk band Spitfire) and weekly English-language film showings attracted students and ex-pats. |
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FOR SPT
ROMAN POLANSKI’S HIT MUSICAL ‘DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES’ PREMIERES IN THE CITY THIS WEEKEND AT THE MUSICAL COMEDY THEATER. |
.jpg) Ville Leinonen, the Finnish singer and songwriter whose diverse recording career has lasted for 14 years, encompassing everything from romantic schlager songs and folk to bossa nova and daring experiments, comes to the city this weekend to showcase his 13th album, which is a departure from all of his previous works.
Due out on Sept. 9, “Auringonsade / Pommisuoja” is split into two parts: The calm, atmospheric “Auringonsade” (Sun Ray) and the dark, intense “Pommisuoja” (Bomb Shelter).
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 Fearless vampires will invade St. Petersburg’s Musical Comedy Theater this week. Their victims — innocent Russian audiences going to see a celebrated European musical — do not yet have any idea just how dangerous the vampires are. They don’t bite, but they sing and dance, casting a spell on their victims and drawing them into a worldwide network of bloodsucker devotees. |
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Âàø ëèôò íå ñäàí: your elevator hasn’t been certified for service
In an old Soviet joke, a hare runs for his life in the forest. A bear asks him why he’s running, and the hare says that camels are being caught and shoed. |
 From mugham and hogaku to Gregorian chant and baroque violin: The city’s groundbreaking Early Music Festival, now in its 14th year, is willfully expanding its geographic boundaries.
This year’s festival opens at the State Academic Cappella on Friday with a concert by Pratum Integrum, Russia’s only baroque orchestra, who will perform J. S. Bach’s celebrated Brandenburg concertos.
Early music, embracing everything created between the medieval era through to early classicism, long remained a missing link in the repertoires of Russian orchestras. |
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 When it comes to excess, Russians tend to take the biscuit, especially abroad, when there is national honor at stake. This week, a group of Russians walked out of a nightclub in Sardinia forgetting the little matter of the bill: 86,000 euros, including more than 90 bottles of Cristal champagne. |
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A Room With a View
This brand new haven of Georgian cuisine has an enviable location overlooking the Neva River and Palace Bridge, and will undoubtedly draw tourists from the neighboring Peter and Paul Fortress and log cabin of Peter the Great — not to mention the mammoth gift store next door. |
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 YAROSLAVL — Whether they realize it or not, anyone who has spent more than a few hours in Russia has glimpsed some of the sites of Yaroslavl. The luridly turquoise 1,000-ruble bank note features both ancient and modern vistas of the city, with the 17th-century, 15 onion-domed St. John the Baptist Church on one side and new 1990s buildings on the other.
The bank note also features the Yaroslavl crest — on a glowing purple or green background depending on the age of your note — that famously shows a bear on its hind legs with a halberd slung casually over one shoulder. |
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 Filmmakers in today’s Russia are very similar to cargo-handlers: Their relationship with contractors easily fit into the formula “cargo dispatched, cargo accepted. |
 NEW YORK — Libyan troops loyal to Moammar Gadhafi forced civilians to act as human shields, perching children on tanks to deter NATO attacks, human rights investigators said. It was part of a pattern of rapes, slayings, “disappearances” and other war crimes that they said they found. |
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LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-hit News International confirmed Tuesday it is reviewing journalistic standards across the company, a U.K. media empire that includes The Times of London newspaper. |
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KABUL, Afghanistan — A pact aimed at clearing up mistrust and confusion between Washington and Kabul about the future of U.S. troops and aid in Afghanistan has instead sowed more of the same.
Afghan officials worry that the United States is looking for a way to decrease support for Afghanistan after the combat mission ends in 2014, especially in light of U. |
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JOHANNESBURG — Violent protests Tuesday by supporters of South Africa’s firebrand youth leader are the latest political salvo in a power struggle that could determine the future of South Africa’s president and the man who helped catapult him to power, youth league chief Julius Malema. |
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