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St. Petersburg residents are to have their state-controlled central heating turned on slightly earlier this year than in previous years, with the heating being turned on periodically from last Thursday.
Last year, the central heating season began on Oct. 1, while in 2009, apartment buildings began being heated on Sept. 29.
The first buildings to have their heating turned on are, as usual, kindergartens and other educational establishments, hospitals and other social care establishments.
Initially, residential buildings are being heated for several hours per day. The heating will be left on when the city sees average temperatures of no higher than 8 degrees for five days in a row, in keeping with the city’s policy on central heating.
According to Sergei Tomashevsky, deputy head of City Hall’s Housing Committee, there are 22,375 buildings that required maintenance work to prepare them for the winter. The local district administrations have carried out the necessary repair work on 22,304 buildings, of which 21,779 had been inspected by a technical commission by Sept. 22, according to a report presented by Vladimir Zyabko, head of the state housing inspectorate, at a meeting of an inter-departmental commission devoted to preparations for the winter. |
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AUTUMN MELANCHOLY
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A garland of leaves decorates the feet of the best known statue in the grounds of the former imperial estate in St. Petersburg’s satellite
Autumn Melancholy town of Pushkin. The sculpture, ‘Girl with a Pitcher,’ inspired a poem by Alexander Pushkin, after whom the town is now named. |
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The trial of former police officer Vadim Boiko, who was captured on video hitting a man in the face with a truncheon during a peaceful rally last year, took a surprise turn Monday when — during the 16th hearing of the case — the court ordered Boiko to undergo a psychiatric examination.
Boiko is charged with exceeding authority with the use of police equipment while dispersing a rally in defense of the freedom of assembly near Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt on July 31, 2010.
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Businessman Shot Dead
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The general director of the city’s City Wholesale Market, Sergei Sosnovtsev, was shot dead by unknown assailants in St. Petersburg on Monday night.
The attackers, who drove a Mercedes, shot at Sosnovtsev 20 times with a Kalashnikov gun while he was driving his Porsche Cayenne. |
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City Hall is considering the construction of automated underground parking lots.
According to a plan developed by the city’s Transport Infrastructure Committee, officials hope to solve the lack of parking space in the city center through the construction of underground parking lots, Fontanka reported. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — One of two ground services trade unions at the city’s Pulkovo Airport plans to hold a meeting on Oct. 3 to demand the improvement of working conditions, Interfax reported last week.
The Sotsprof trade union intends to demand a raise in salaries for its members. |
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Anti-Icing Issues
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko has expressed concern over the composition of anti-icing mixtures used on the city’s streets. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — It was the hug that sealed the deal.
President Dmitry Medvedev left the stage to thunderous applause after announcing Saturday at a United Russia convention that he endorsed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s return as president.
More than 11,000 United Russia delegates and supporters, clearly delighted with the news, stood and clapped as Medvedev walked back to his seat next to Putin in the middle of the sixth row. |
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MOSCOW — The drunken sailors who accidentally rammed a nuclear submarine in a fishing trawler off the coast of Kamchatka last week tried to flee the scene, Navy officials said Monday, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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MOSCOW — Two left-leaning parliamentary parties, A Just Russia and the Communists, held their pre-election conventions on Saturday, approving relatively tame electoral lists in the shadow of United Russia’s political show at Luzhniki.
A Just Russia, which met in a congress hall in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, picked its founder Sergei Mironov and party bosses Nikolai Levichev and Oksana Dmitriyeva to top its 600-member list of candidates for the State Duma vote on Dec. |
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MOSCOW — An Aeroflot plane with 128 people on board nearly crashed while landing in Barnaul last week after a 15-year-old boy directed a laser pointer at the cockpit, news reports said last Friday. |
 MOSCOW — In answer to President Dmitry Medvedev’s angry call for his resignation in front of television cameras and his Cabinet colleagues, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin couldn’t help but invoke the name of Vladimir Putin.
In a second snub to Medvedev in three days, Kudrin made it clear that he would have to consult with Prime Minister Putin — who has admitted to affectionately referring to his long-serving finance minister as “Lyosha” — before he would resign. |
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MOSCOW — The airline operating the Yak-42 jet that crashed earlier this month, killing most of the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team, lost its license last week. |
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MOSCOW — The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu became the sixth state to recognize Abkhazia and the fifth to recognize South Ossetia, the two Georgian breakaway regions said Friday.
Tuvalu’s prime minister, Willy Telavi, signed declarations establishing diplomatic ties with representatives of both regions during a visit to Abkhazia and South Ossetia earlier in the week, according to statements on both regions’ web sites. |
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MOSCOW — In the second high-profile murder in the Moscow region in a month, the official who oversaw the finances of the city of Podolsk — the region’s third-biggest municipality — was gunned down in her home on Monday. |
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 Workers at the local General Motors car manufacturing plant are unhappy about the introduction of a new working schedule at the plant, the Interregional Trade Union of Carmakers said last week.
From Oct. 2, assembly line operators are to work in two shifts: A daytime shift of ten-and-a-half hours, and a nighttime shift of nine-and-a-half hours, Pyotr Letkeman, chairman of the Interregional Trade Union of Carmakers, said Monday. |
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 After two months of preparations and negotiations with the city’s authorities, Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) opened a department in St. |
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 United Russia’s “Triumph of the Will” convention on Saturday caused quite a sensation. Obviously, I am not referring to the decision by President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to switch places in 2012. Perhaps the only people who were surprised by Putin’s decision to return to the presidency were analysts at the Institute of Contemporary Development and other members of “Medvedev’s Party” — a group to which, as Putin himself confirmed during his speech at the convention, even Medvedev himself never belonged. |
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After months of foot-dragging and speculation, President Dmitry Medvedev announced at the United Russia convention that he is ready to swap his post with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in March. |
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American singer-songwriter Jason Webley might be a frequent sight in St. Petersburg, but this time he is up to something different. His upcoming concert in the city will see him sharing the stage with local all-woman folk-punk band Iva Nova.
According to Iva Nova drummer Katya Fyodorova, Webley, who plays accordion and guitar, is expected to perform some Iva Nova songs with the band, while Iva Nova have rehearsed their own versions of Webley’s songs.
“He sent us four songs to rehearse and we sent him some of ours,” Fyodorova said this week, adding that a joint rehearsal will be held when Webley arrives in the city on the morning of the day of the concert, Friday, Sept. 30.
The idea for the planned collaboration came about over beers after Webley’s concert at the now-defunct A2 club a couple of years ago, and became more real when the band and Webley exchanged emails a while ago.
Webley and Iva Nova will perform at J. Walker, a recently-launched club/pub/restaurant with a stage, known so far mostly for jazz performances. |
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OLYA MINULINA
WORK BY LOCAL ARTIST
OLYA MANULINA IS ON
SHOW AT ZOOM CAFE AS
PART OF THE ANNUAL
BOOMFEST COMIC ART
FESTIVAL. |
 Taisia Osipova’s requests to see her five-year-old daughter have been repeatedly turned down.
Vladimir Telegin, a local photographer best known for his black-and-white photographs of the punk band PTVP and art group Voina, and Maxim Gromov, founder of the rights group Prisoners Union, have come up with a new series of photographs depicting DDT frontman Yury Shevchuk with the five-year-old daughter of an imprisoned political activist.
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 This month, for the fifth year in a row, St. Petersburg is host to the international comic arts festival Boomfest, which features exhibitions and events all over the center of the city. Boomfest is the brainchild of St. Petersburg local Dmitry Yakovlev, who is also the festival’s current director. |
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Àó: Helloo! Where are you? Anybody home?
This year, áàáüå ëåòî (what Americans call Indian summer) seems to have lasted a total of just one day, but all the same dacha life continues to have its pleasures. |
 Belarus, Lithuania and Estonia share more than geographical proximity. They were all once part of a larger state — the Soviet Union — but since its collapse in 1991, they have continued their independent trajectories with very different political agendas. The effect of these different perspectives on society, and the way that Russia’s closest western neighbors see themselves, are the two main focal points of a modular exhibition representing the results of three national press photo competitions that goes on show at Loft Project Etazhi this weekend. |
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 Last week, pop diva Alla Pugachyova was on everyone’s lips after she stood up, hands in pockets, and bluntly expressed her support for “Misha” Prokhorov and dressed down spin doctor Vladislav Surkov for “going crazy. |
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Ain't No Sunshine
Although centrally situated, located just off Nevsky Prospekt, there is something decidedly isolated about Olivetto, the Mediterranean restaurant of the new Crowne Plaza hotel. It is reached by walking through the hotel lobby and up some stairs, with no one on hand to greet diners and show them to their seats (admittedly it is not complicated, but it is still possible to get lost). |
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 In the course of her career, Marja-Liisa Jarvenpaa, the new general director of Sokos Hotels in St. Petersburg, has experienced just about every aspect of the hospitality industry. Having started in housekeeping, she has worked her way from invisibility to the glare of the public gaze, stopping off in the kitchen on her way to the restaurant, before finally arriving at the front desk.
Jarvenpaa’s vast experience has given her a unique opportunity to learn firsthand about all the segments of the field, understand the peculiarities of each job in the business, and discover the opportunities for continuous development within the industry. |
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 ARKHANGELSK — With a name that means “Archangel” in English, the Arctic city of Arkhangelsk is sometimes dubbed “Russia’s Los Angeles.” But in fact they are poles apart. |
 Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews before vanishing into Soviet captivity, may have been alive after the official 1947 date of his death — but only for a few days, says the chief archivist of Russia’s counterintelligence service.
The disappearance of the 32-year-old Swedish diplomat is an abiding mystery of World War II. |
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 BERLIN — Greece will receive its next batch of bailout loans in time to avoid a disastrous default, the finance minister said Tuesday, as stock markets rallied on hopes that the prime minister would discuss new ways of solving the crisis with Germany’s leader later in the day. |
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WASHINGTON — A bitterly divided and poll-battered Congress has nearly worked its way out of a nasty fight over disaster aid, but only by abruptly abandoning efforts to immediately refill almost empty federal disaster relief accounts. |
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WASHINGTON — A man accused of running an illegal contractor spy ring in Afghanistan has resigned from the U.S. Air Force, still maintaining his innocence, and still facing possible criminal charges.
Two investigations continue in a case that has tested the definition of what contractors are allowed to do in war zones. |
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PERUGIA, Italy — A defense lawyer told an Italian court Tuesday that Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of killing her roommate, isn’t a manipulating, sex-obsessed “femme fatale” as her accusers charge, but is rather like Jessica Rabbit — just drawn that way. |
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Issues Archive