|
|
|
|
The St. Petersburg Human Rights Council asked the Federation Council in a telegram Tuesday to postpone voting to elect former St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko as its chair.
The voting in Moscow is scheduled for Wednesday, the same day that court hearings about the controversial “secret” Aug. 21 election in the Krasnenkaya Rechka municipal district — that made Matviyenko an elected deputy — are due to open in St. Petersburg.
By law, the Federation Council’s chairperson must be an elected deputy.
According to Tatyana Dorutina, whose organization, Liga Izbiratelnits (the League of Women Voters), is part of the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council, the court might cancel the results of the election because of multiple violations, thus making her ineligible for the seat.
Matviyenko won an unprecedented 94.5 percent of the vote at the election in the small municipal district in the city’s southwest, with 3,830 residents voting for her, the St. Petersburg Election Commission reported last month.
The lawsuit was submitted by Pavel Yeremeyev, a registered resident of Krasnenkaya Rechka who was one of the observers, but it lists every violation reported by all the observers at the election, Dorutina said Tuesday. |
|
SINGING IN THE RAIN
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Participants in an umbrella festival pose for a photograph at the weekend. The umbrella — hand-painted or otherwise — is this season’s must-have accessory, as the frequent showers seen throughout the past month show no sign of giving way to a dry, crisp October. |
|
Emirates airlines is to launch a daily service connecting St. Petersburg and Dubai from Nov. 1.
The new flight will be the airline’s second gateway into Russia after Moscow, where the company started operating in 2003 and from where it currently offers a twice-daily service. St. Petersburg will become the company’s 115th destination, and the fourth new route to be opened this year, alongside Copenhagen, Basra and Geneva.
|
|
Hotel to Get Facelift
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The facade of the Karelia hotel located in the east of St. Petersburg will be painted to make it look like a giant suitcase, Interfax reported this week.
The administration of the district where the hotel is located hopes the creation of a mammoth briefcase may be the biggest in the world and reach the Guinness Book of World Records. The bid to be included in the book is to be registered by an official commission at the official opening ceremony of the project.
The project is due to be completed in October and unveiled to the public in November.
The 16-story building located on Ulitsa Tukhachevskogo was completed in 1978, and is a plain Soviet-style building. |
|
 It is 7 p.m. on a Thursday evening inside the Erarta museum of contemporary art, and the air is heavy with expectation. Smartly dressed young men and women mill around nervously, as though waiting for something to happen. |
|
This autumn Russian mushroomers are enjoying a bumper crop of the beloved fungi. Happy hunters have been returning from local forests with baskets brimming with ceps, red-cap boletes, birch boletes, and chanterelles. Some say this year Russia is enjoying its best mushroom season of the last 50 years. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
 MOSCOW — After his dramatic resignation from the Right Cause party last week, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has backtracked by saying he is not challenging the country’s leadership but just one of two competing Kremlin camps.
“There was no personal conflict with anyone. |
|
Russian Railways have announced that the high-speed Sapsan route between St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod will be canceled in November primarily due to poor passenger demand, Kommersant reported, citing sources within the company. |
|
MOSCOW — A drunken flight navigator contributed to a June plane crash in Petrozavodsk that killed 47 people, with his authoritative instructions leading a less-experienced pilot to attempt a fatal landing in heavy fog, investigators said Monday.
The navigator, Aman Atayev, would seem the least likely culprit in the incident, having logged more than 13,000 hours — 541 full days — on Tu-134 jets. |
|
SMOLENSK — Smolensk’s city manager was led away in handcuffs by masked officers toting automatic weapons Tuesday after his deputy was caught red-handed accepting a bribe on his behalf, police said. |
 STRASBOURG — The Russian government violated the rights of Yukos, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday, but added that it was not yet ready to decide on a claim for nearly $100 billion in damages.
Russian authorities were unfair in meting out punishment to the company over tax violations and did not give the defunct oil company enough time to prepare its defense, said the court in Strasbourg, France. |
|
MOSCOW — Moscow region police are investigating a road incident in which four Moldovan men were struck and killed by a pair of luxury vehicles, possibly owned by a large bank, news reports said Tuesday. |
|
Authorities have stepped up checks on expatriates using multi-entry business visas to make sure they do not overstay their visits, the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia said Tuesday.
Customs and border officials started to use a database this month that allows them to quickly check the total number of days a foreigner has stayed in the country, AmCham said in an e-mailed statement. |
|
An Ingushetia prosecutor’s assistant was arrested Sunday night on suspicion of forming and supplying weapons to a rebel group, investigators said Monday. |
|
|
|
|
The first two Hilton hotels in St. Petersburg are due to open in a convention center built by Gazprom subsidiaries in the Shushary district.
Hilton’s partnership with the company Expoforum, which is currently building a convention and exhibition center with two hotels in Shushary, was made known to Vedomosti by an employee of a partner company to Expoforum. Two real estate agents confirmed the information.
Anatoly Yerkulov, the general director of Expoforum, confirmed last week that the company has signed a management agreement with Hilton, adding that the two hotels will be opened under the brands of Hilton and Hampton by Hilton, containing 241 rooms and 210 rooms respectively. |
|
SHIP AHOY!
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Visitors to the Neva 2011 shipping exhibition examine models of ships built by the United Shipbuilding Corporation. The exhibition, which opened Tuesday, runs through Friday at Lenexpo. |
|
The hypermarket chain O’Key is scheduled to reopen a store whose roof caved in last winter at the end of this month. The retailer may have lost up to 1.8 billion rubles ($60 million) in earnings because of the temporary closure.
The hypermarket located at 3 Vyborgskoye Shosse will open by the end of September, O’Key’s press service said. On Jan. 25, 462 square meters of the roof collapsed over the sales floor, killing an employee and injuring 15 customers.
|
|
|
|
 The scandal about how Mikhail Prokhorov was first recruited and then cast out of the Right Cause party calls into question whether there is a place for political parties in an authoritarian political system. If there is, can those parties be the initiators and leaders of peaceful or revolutionary democratic change? Does it make sense to vote for Kremlin-approved parties in the December State Duma elections in the hope that they will loosen the power of the current authoritarian regime?
Paradoxically, authoritarian regimes are often multiparty systems, although that pluralism is only nominal. |
|
The origins of the Russian state and its early history help explain the country’s modern political makeup.
According to the Kievan Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1110, Slavic tribes invited Scandinavian prince Rurik to rule over them in the 9th century. |
|
|
|
|
The art group Voina has asked international artists to boycott the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art that opens on Friday, Sept. 23 for exhibiting a work that does not belong to the group under its name.
The work in question is the “Kiss the Cops” stunt, which was staged in Moscow by former Voina members Pyotr Verzilov and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and a number of volunteers earlier this year. During the stunt, female activists forced kisses on policewomen on duty in the Moscow metro.
The video documenting the stunt was uploaded onto YouTube on Feb. 28, four days after Leonid Nikolayev and Oleg Vorotnikov, who did three months in prison, were released on bail — paid by British graffiti artist Banksy — in St. |
|
YURY MOLODKOVETS
British sculptor antony gormley brings his creations to the halls of the hermitage for a new exhibition this weekend. |
 Nina Karlsson, a St. Petersburg singer-songwriter and keyboard player who has generated a cult following through her captivating songs with a touch of soul, funk, jazz and cabaret, inventive English-language lyrics and plenty of charisma, will this week premiere a number of her new songs that she has written in Russian.
“At first I used to tell myself that I’d think carefully about every word, and it was like that for a while, but now I’ve written so many, by my standards, that it became pretty clear to me that I’ve entered some new stage in which I write without giving it much thought, only bare emotion,” Karlsson says.
|
|
Ëåíèí – ãðèá: Lenin is a mushroom
What’s the best thing about a week of pretty much nonstop rain in September? Well, if you’ve held out at the dacha, when the rain lets up, you can go mushroom hunting (õîäèòü ïî ãðèáû) and score a huge, perfect cep (áåëûé ãðèá) right in your own backyard.
It goes like this: Your neighbor comes over and demands: Äàé íîæ! (Give me a knife!), which in other months and circumstances might sound alarming, but on a damp fall day means that he wants to scavenge in your garden for edible fungi. Carrying supermarket bags instead of the traditional êóçîâ (birch bark basket), eyes to the ground and knife at the ready, you and your ãðèáíèêè (mushroom hunters) begin to circle slowly around the yard, nudging shrubs to the side while scolding the excited dogs, who are racing around and potentially trampling dinner. |
|
 At one point in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One,” the hapless hero finds himself alone in the presence of a marble statue of a beautiful nymph. |
 Message To Man, Russia’s only international festival of documentary, animated and short non-documentary films kicks off on Sept. 23 at Avrora cinema with Viktor Kossakovsky’s much-discussed Russian-Spanish documentary “Vivan Las Antipodas” (Long Live the Antipodes!) that was shown at this year’s International Film Festival in Venice.
In search of people and places to feature in his 105-minute film, Kossakovsky embarked on a breathtaking journey that took him to contrasting environments on different continents. |
|
 This month, Channel One has a new show called “Phantom of the Opera,” in which pop singers have to sing operatic arias live. Russian stars have already skated, waltzed and done trapeze acts, but this is maybe the most terrifying reality format — because, after all, pop stars are supposed to be able to sing. |
|
Aiming High
Just a short stroll away from the Peter and Paul Fortress and with the most spectacular views of the Winter Palace right on its doorstep, Le Menu is enviably located. Despite its name, it is not a French restaurant. In fact, it is neither French nor a restaurant, but a cafe with a predominantly Italian menu where you order at the till, canteen-style. |
|
|
|
 Decreased student numbers, an increase in the popularity of part-time MBAs and a focus on forging contacts and gaining practical skills dominate the local business education market, analysts say.
The MBA market in St. Petersburg is still recovering from the crisis. In 2009, the number of students decreased by 60 to 70 percent compared with enrolment in 2007 to 2008, according to data from the city’s Open Business School. |
|
 It’s a sad fact of life that what one loves to do does not always translate into a viable career.
And while it is true that those who are most passionate about their professions are usually better professionals, the realities of the market often narrow the field to the point that it is sometimes more sensible to look for a career that can provide a living wage rather than relying solely on criteria such as job satisfaction. |
|
According to a survey carried out by Career.Ru, a recruitment company helping young professionals to find a job, as many as 44 percent of graduates from Russian universities are unsatisfied with the quality of the education they receive.
Having lost belief in the Russian education system, many parents send their children abroad for an education in the hopes that this might be their ticket to a successful career. |
|
Look at the CV of a Russian jobseeker and any mention of references will be conspicuously absent. That is because up until now, that function was reserved for the labor book, or trudovaya knizhka, a record of an individual’s education, specialization, past employers and the post and duties associated with each job they have held. |
 Gustav Leonhardt, the living legend of baroque music, does not leave anything in his life to chance. Ask this unfailingly elegant, somewhat austere, aristocratic-looking Dutchman in his mid-80s about his car preferences, and he offers a knock-out answer as to why he orders individually-designed cars exclusively from Alfa-Romeo. |
|
|
|
 UNITED NATIONS — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was pressing ahead Tuesday with his diplomatic campaign to gain full UN membership, as the divisive issue of Palestinian statehood takes center stage ahead of the opening of the UN General Assembly session. |
|
ANKARA, Turkey — A car bomb went off near a high school in the Turkish capital on Tuesday, killing three people in a nearby building and wounding 34 others, authorities said. |
|
TOKYO — Japan’s defense chief said Tuesday that the country’s largest arms contractor has suffered a cyber-attack, but that no sensitive information is known to have been lost.
Defense Minister Yasuo Ichikawa urged Mitsubishi Heavy Industry Ltd. to strengthen its data security systems. |
|
WASHINGTON — Drawing clear battle lines for next year’s elections, a combative President Barack Obama on Monday demanded that the richest Americans pay higher taxes to help cut soaring U. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive