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Visitors to a gay club in the center of St. Petersburg were allegedly attacked by plainclothes policemen at the weekend.
Three of the victims have reported the incident to the police, while a fourth is in the process of doing so, according to one of the victims.
Three men entered the Golubaya Ustritsa club, located at 1 Ulitsa Lomonosova, in the early hours of Sunday morning, reportedly presenting police ID to the club’s security, and proceeded to attack visitors to the club who were dancing on the dancefloor and standing near the bar.
The club’s management later passed surveillance camera videos and photographs to the media.
“It looked as though it’s simply a form of leisure for these three people who came to the club —fighting with whomever they can,” one of the victims, Ignat Fialkovsky, said to The St. |
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A ROYAL WELCOME
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
The Dannebrog yacht of the Danish royal family stands moored near the Blagoveshchensky Bridge on Tuesday. Queen Margrethe II, her husband Prince Henrik and their son Crown Prince Frederik will stay on the yacht during their trip to the city later this week. |
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The St. Petersburg City Court is due to start hearing what is going to become one of the most resonant treason and espionage cases in the city since the 1996-1999 saga of the environmentalist Alexander Nikitin, a researcher for the Norwegian ecological organization Bellona who was accused of passing classified information to Norway’s secret service.
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Konstantin Zheludkov, head of the city’s Petrogradsky district, has become the first government official to leave his position since the new St. Petersburg governor Georgy Poltavchenko took office.
Zheludkov, who was known as the city district head most open to interacting with the media, regularly communicating with both journalists and local residents via his Twitter account, left his post unexpectedly on Sept. |
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Seven dogs were killed and three wounded in what appears to be one of the most shocking cases of violence against animals in the region in recent years. |
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Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II and other members of the Danish royal family will visit St. Petersburg and Moscow this week.
The queen will make her first official visit to Russia in the company of her French-born husband Prince Henrik and their eldest son Crown Prince Frederik, City Hall’s press service said. |
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St. Petersburg will mark the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad on Thursday with a range of events.
From 11.35 a.m. through 11. |
 Many of the more than 60 activists detained in St. Petersburg last week are awaiting trial charged with participating in an unauthorized rally and failure to follow a policeman’s orders in the aftermath of the Aug. 31 pro-constitution sit-in demo, while three activists were released on Saturday and Sunday after serving brief terms in custody. |
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German Found Dead
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A German citizen was found dead near the Rostral Columns in St. Petersburg on Monday night.
The 53-year-old man had arrived in the city from Germany on a tourist visa on Sept. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Troubles were piling up for former Tula Governor Vyacheslav Dudka on Monday as he was charged with accepting a bribe and placed under house arrest.
Cases against officials of his caliber, acting or former, are rare. An analyst said Dudka was a scapegoat in an anti-corruption campaign, and that any of Russia’s other 82 regional leaders could have ended up under arrest.
Dudka was summoned Monday to the Investigative Committee’s Moscow office, where he was formally charged with accepting a bribe of 40 million rubles ($1.3 million), Interfax said. The charge carries a maximum punishment of 12 years in prison. |
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
VLADIMIR FILONOV / SPT
A girl poses by a distorting mirror set up Sunday in central Moscow as part of an art fair. With a
budget of $7.6 million, Moscow’s 864th birthday party was the costliest in the capital’s history. |
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MOSCOW — A key witness-turned-suspect in the 2006 killing of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya has struck a plea bargain with investigators and identified the murder’s mastermind, Kommersant reported Saturday, citing unidentified sources.
The sources did not name the mastermind but said he is living abroad.
As part of the plea bargain, Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who was detained in connection with the killing last week, has admitted involvement but said he was only a middleman, not the organizer of the crime, the newspaper said.
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TRIPOLI, Libya — Armed rebels detained 19 Ukrainian cooks and oil workers for several days on unsupported claims that they were really snipers for Moammar Gadhafi.
They are among thousands of foreigners caught in a web of suspicion as rebel fighters pursue the remnants of Gadhafi’s forces. |
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MOSCOW — A new school year always brings change, but flight schools are observing a landmark moment: Student pilots will fly less and graduate faster under a new state-backed program. |
 MOSCOW — The upcoming presidential race took a distinctly eccentric twist Monday, when a movie star and ex-priest who moonlights as a creative director for mobile phone retail chain Yevroset announced his decision to run.
“It’s true. I am dead serious,” Ivan Okhlobystin, 45, said at a news conference in Moscow.
“I want to give the fatherland a certain philosophical and ideological strategy that it is lacking — that which we lack to become a nation,” he said, Interfax reported. |
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 MOSCOW — In a sign of growing discord in the run-up to parliamentary elections, State Duma Deputy Alexei Lebed left United Russia on Friday and accused the party of crushing dissent among members. |
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MOSCOW — Estonian farmers betrayed the father of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the Nazis during World War II — and this is what is fueling tensions between Moscow and Tallinn 60 years on, according to new U.S. cables leaked by WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks released last week the final portion of an archive of U. |
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MOSCOW — Ukraine’s Prime Minister Mykola Azarov has sought to allay fears that the increasingly tense discourse on gas trade between Moscow and Kiev will lead to yet another breakdown in supplies across Europe.
Ukraine will honor the existing contract to buy what it describes as overly expensive Russian gas until the countries sign a new deal, he said in comments that became widely known Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The high level of related-party lending engaged in by Russian and CIS banks is indicative of poor corporate governance and lax underwriting standards — and is a structural weakness of the entire banking sector, according to a report released by Moody’s credit rating agency. |
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The Audit Chamber estimates that Gazprom managed to lose 28 billion rubles (nearly $1 billion) of funds and property — about 4 percent of total funds spent — through its subsidiaries’ implementation of the gas giant’s 2009 capital expenditure program.
The company is trying to combat such losses, the auditors say, but anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny says the estimate is actually low. |
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 The trial of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is approaching its final stages in Kiev. Amazingly, just 18 months ago, Tymoshenko was only a few percentage points away from winning the presidential election, and today the leader of Ukraine’s largest opposition party, Fatherland, is sitting behind bars in pretrial detention. |
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Soviet communism was ultimately buried by two of its most prominent native sons — Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Moscow Communist Party chief Boris Yeltsin. |
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 Things do not generally start happening on the local music club scene after the sleepy summer until Fish Fabrique celebrates its birthday, which falls on Sept. 2.
This year, Fish Fabrique’s management said it chose to celebrate the occasion in a modest way, reserving a large-scale celebration for its coming of age next year, when it turns 18.
Until last year, the annual parties celebrated the birthday of both the club and of the group Tequilajazzz, which played its first concert at TaMtAm in September 1993, but the band split last year.
Performing instead was Jenia Lubich, the up-and-coming local indie-pop singer who spent a stint as a vocalist with the French band Nouvelle Vague, known for transforming rock and punk hits into bossa nova and pop songs sung by silken female voices.
Despite the absence of frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov, the spirit of Tequilajazzz was still somehow present. |
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WIM WENDERS’ 3D FILM
ABOUT THE ICONIC CHOREOGRAPHER PINA BAUSCH AND HER LEGACY IS NOW SHOWING IN THE CITY. |
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Local favorites Pep-See will perform their first big concert in the city in a while this week, with new songs, a new lineup and a new VJ.
Fronted by three flamboyant singers — Anna Kipyatkova, Inessa Mikhailova and Maria Volkova — the band now features Denis Medvedev, 2 Samaliota’s bass player, who is also known as DJ Re-Disco.
“We have plenty of new songs, which are no less brilliant than [the band’s early hits] ‘Vovochka’ and ‘Lyzhniki’ (Skiers),” Kipyatkova said by phone Tuesday.
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A new branch of the chain of cheerful Jean-Jacques Rousseau bistros has opened at 166 Nevsky Prospekt to liven up the dining scene around the Alexander Nevsky monastery area. Jean-Jacques is a pleasant hybrid of a wine bar and a café, designed in a traditional Parisian style, though the service can be distinctly Russian. The new Jean-Jacques, which can seat up to 50 people, is the third branch in St. Petersburg, following in the footsteps of the cafes on the Petrograd Side and Ulitsa Marata. Its owners say the wine list has expanded with the opening of the new venue.
Greek cosmetics brand Korres, which has gained global fame for its skincare products, has opened its first boutique in Russia. |
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 Of the many things that have gradually made going to the cinema a proposition of diminishing returns — multiplexing, cell phones and plain bad manners foremost among them — possibly nothing is as disagreeable as being required to don a pair of filthy, greasy 3D goggles lately pulled from the head of a stranger. |
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Close to the top of my list of Russian words I wish we had in English is ìîë÷àòü, which conveys so succinctly in two little syllables what we need a dozen for in English: to not say anything, to be silent. I don’t begrudge adopting sputnik or perestroika, but why can’t we borrow ìîë÷àòü as well?
Russian has two ways of expressing silence: òèøèíà, which more or less describes the silence of things, and ìîë÷àíèå, which more or less describes the silence of living creatures. But the key here is “more or less.” In poetic and colloquial language alike, these two words happily cross over from animate to inanimate and convey a plethora of meanings beyond silence. |
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 Mikhail Messerer is one of the world’s most celebrated ballet teachers. Born into a eminent ballet family, he danced with the Bolshoi Theater, defecting in 1980 while on tour in Japan. |
 Last week, “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker went to Moscow and dodged a kiss from a Bolshoi Theater security guard, who was overwhelmed by the chance to get close to his idol.
Oleg Dontsov, a guard at the Bolshoi construction site, got the chance to lunge at Parker as she had a personal tour with her people, Lifenews. |
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The Dark Side
This cosmopolitan establishment located near the griffin-adorned Bankovsky Bridge over the Griboyedov Canal houses a cafe on the first floor and a club-restaurant upstairs, the latter offering nightly concerts (mainly of the jazz and blues genre). |
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 VOLOGDA — Last weekend’s lavish celebrations to mark Moscow’s 864th birthday left no doubt where Russia’s capital is located. But 460 kilometers away, another city also recently celebrated 864 years — and its residents remembered that instead of St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square, the trademarks of Russia’s capital could have been a tub of butter and a wooden house with a carved fence.
A favorite of Ivan the Terrible, Vologda had all the makings to become the Russian capital. |
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 Russian patter in the tube. Cyrillic characters on street corner cafes. Russian newspapers advertising “Russian Yoga” in Hyde Park. It is not hard to see (or hear) why London merits the nickname “Londongrad. |
 The North Caucasus region is a new multibillon-dollar frontier in the development of tourism and real estate.
Driving down the well-paved highway from Mineralniye Vody Airport to the mountains of the Arkhyz valley, cattle and horses are a more common sight than rest stops.
Mountains stretch for hundreds of kilometers, interrupted every so often by blue rivers and smatterings of village houses. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
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