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One of the largest cinema projects in Russia — a partnership between billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema and St. Petersburg’s venerable film studio Lenfilm — could fall apart due to complaints by filmmakers.
The Culture Minister recalled a package of documents on creating a public-private partnership between Lenfilm and Sistema that had already been agreed upon with all relevant government agencies, two officials familiar with the details of the project told Vedomosti. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the documents had been retracted.
The option submitted to the government proposes that the company RWS — part of Sistema Mass Media, which belongs to Sistema — in exchange for its own assets would receive 75 percent of Lenfilm’s shares. |
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ON THE CATWALK
FOR SPT
Models rehearse for a show at the city’s Manezh Central Exhibition Hall during the Aurora Fashion Week earlier this year. The fourth Aurora Fashion Week got underway Monday and will run through Sunday, comprising a series of events around the city. |
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Employees at Baltiisky Zavod, one of the city’s biggest shipyards, dropped their plans to hold a preventive strike planned for Wednesday after their demands were met Tuesday.
“Today, after a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, the trade union committee took the decision that all the questions that we had disagreed on were solved, and that there was no longer any need for a strike,” Vyacheslav Firyulin, head of the shipyard’s trade union, was quoted by Interfax as saying Tuesday.
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St. Petersburg suffered several power cuts at the weekend, leaving hundreds of residents without electricity, water or central heating.
Angry callers to Ekho Moskvy radio station complained Monday of having to walk up 16 flights of stairs because lifts weren’t working, and of having to feed their children cold porridge because there was no electricity with which to cook food.
On Saturday, residents in part of the Primorsky district were left without power for much of the day, and on Sunday a similar problem hit parts of the Kupchino and Murino districts. Inhabitants of Murino village outside St. Petersburg were the worst affected, losing their water supply too, local news web site Fontanka. |
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 A local journalist is suing the former head of a district administration for defamation, seeking more than 3 million rubles for legal expenses and damages, as well as a public apology. |
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Road Reports via SMS
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s car owners may be able to receive text messages in the near future containing information about roads that are closed for repair work, Fontanka reported.
The current information system about problems on the roads, introduced via the web site of the State Automobile Inspection, is not effective enough, representatives of City Hall said. |
All photos from issue.
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 KIEV, Ukraine — Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was found guilty of abuse of office Tuesday and sentenced to seven years in jail, in a trial widely condemned in the West as politically motivated.
Judge Rodion Kireyev also barred Tymoshenko, now the country’s top opposition leader, from occupying government posts for three years after the completion of her prison term and fined her 1. |
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MOSCOW — Russian investigators marked the 5th anniversary of journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s killing on Friday by filing new charges against suspects involved in the slaying, but they have remained silent about who might have ordered her murder. |
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MOSCOW — A scientific conference featuring a boxing legend and U.S. Bigfoot believers has claimed that it found “95 percent evidence” for the existence of a Yeti-like hominoid in southern Siberia, however, an opposition politician ridiculed the findings on Monday as pure pre-election publicity for United Russia. |
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MOSCOW — Lake Baikal, the Franz Josef Archipelago and Wrangel Island will be the first nature reserves to benefit from a 20-billion ruble ($620 million) environmental cleanup program, Natural Resources and Environment Minister Yury Trutnev said. |
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MOSCOW — An alarmingly high suicide rate in Russia has cost the country the equivalent in population of a large metropolis since the Soviet collapse, a leading expert on the matter said Monday.
“About 800,000 people took their own lives from 1990 to 2010,” Boris Polozhy, a director at the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow said at a news conference marking World Mental Health Day.
“That’s nearly a million people — or a city — that we’ve lost,” he said, Interfax reported.
Russia’s suicide rate ranks second in the world after only Lithuania, according to data compiled by the World Health Organization.
The average age of a Russian who commits suicide is 45 for men and 52 for women, Polozhy said. |
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 BEIJING — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese leaders opened two days of meetings Tuesday aimed at boosting relations amid strains over declining military sales and stalled energy deal talks. |
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MOSCOW — An Azeri national was put on an international wanted list Sunday over the killing of a football fan, a day after 100 people were detained near the Kremlin while planning to hold a nationalist rally over the death.
Andrei Uryupin, an 18-year-old CSKA football fan, was stabbed to death during a fight in the Moscow region town of Podolsk on Saturday, while a 19-year-old friend was injured. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday attempted to reassure investors dismayed by swelling social and military spending and promised a slate of major high-tech projects and more liberal rules for buying into strategic resource companies.
He also addressed fears of political stagnation that could accompany his likely return to the Kremlin after the presidential election in March, saying there would be gradual changes.
Fiscal discipline will remain a “cornerstone” for the government after the upcoming election, Putin said during his first appearance before investors after announcing the Kremlin bid.
“We have made careful calculations and believe that revenues will be enough … for those large and complex issues in the area of education, health care and defense,” he said, fielding questions after his keynote speech at an investment conference. |
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 KARMASKALINSKY DISTRICT, Bashkortostan — Artur Nurgaliyev pointed to a group of black-and-white spotted cows feeding out of a trough on his farm near Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan. |
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MOSCOW — Iran has ousted Gazprom Neft from a project to produce oil in the country, Iranian media reported.
Ahmad Qalebani, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company, was quoted as saying the decision was final, Interfax reported.
Gazprom Neft did not respond to a request for comment when contacted Monday. |
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 For Russia’s liberals, 2011 has become the Year of Dashed Hopes. These mostly young professionals grew up after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and are avid Internet users. They also understood very well that “freedom is better than no freedom” long before President Dmitry Medvedev told them so. |
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During the United Russia convention on Sept. 24, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave President Dmitry Medvedev the top spot on the party list. Now Medvedev is faced with a daunting goal — to lead United Russia to victory in the State Duma elections, a top priority for the Kremlin. |
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A great Finnish band will perform in the city as part of the Helsinki Days in St. Petersburg, even though the band is based in Tampere, about two hours from the Finnish capital.
Called Jaakko & Jay, the folk-punk duo’s music was described as “Punked up, acoustic songs with gusto” by Kerrang! and “Ferocious and impassioned and funny” by Distorted Magazine.
According to the band’s bio on its label Fullsteam Records, it “throws a high-latitude spin on classic punk themes like drinking, revolution, drinking, making music, drinking, acute social commentary, drinking and drinking. |
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FOR SPT
ICONIC CREATIONS FROM
DESIGN CAPITAL FINLAND
WILL BE SHOWN IN THE CITY
THIS WEEK AS PART OF THE
HELSINKI DAYS FESTIVAL. |
 Local musician Yevgeny Fyodorov, frontman of the band Tequilajazzz, formed in 1993 and disbanded in 2010, is creating a musical revolution with his new band Zorge’s eponymous debut album. Released as an Internet download last week, it has been almost entirely financed by fan donations, which, according to Fyodorov is “a small revolution in the record industry.
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 Alittle piece of Helsinki is visiting St. Petersburg for the third time this week, promoting a healthy relationship between the two cities.
Once every two years, Russia and neighboring Finland take it in turns to organize a cultural exchange, bringing different programs, events, shows and sometimes simply ideas across the border in order to unite people and familiarize each other with their culture. |
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Ïåøêà: pawn
Ever since the Great Russian Political Announcement two weeks ago, I’ve been unhappy. Well, yeah, about that, but also about how to best translate the most commonly used Russian word to describe what was happening: ðîêèðîâêà. |
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The fourth Aurora Fashion Week kicked off Monday with a press conference hosted by Jenny Lombardo, guest speaker and world fashion and design director of W hotels. That same evening, the Fashion Next cocktail party was the first in a series of social events taking place in St Petersburg, ringing in the new season.
This time around, Aurora Fashion Week’s organizers say one of the highlights of the festival will be a catwalk show of the Louis Vuitton collection. The fashion show will present two different outfits for each pair of shoes, comprising one day outfit and one evening outfit.
“The Louis Vuitton fashion show is one of the major events of the week, demonstrating the loyalty and high interest of the leading fashion houses to Aurora Fashion Week,” said the event’s organizers. |
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 On Wednesday night, Rossia television treated viewers to more than an hour of a “live” concert in Grozny to celebrate the 35th birthday of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. |
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New York City’s Carnegie Hall inaugurated its 120th season with a month-long festival dedicated to the work of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on Oct. 5.
Commemorating the composer’s 19th-century American debut on the concert hall’s opening night, “Tchaikovsky in St. |
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Home comforts
Gosti is an establishment that does not take its name lightly. Literally translated as “Guests” and also forming part of a Russian expression meaning “to go to someone’s house,” Gosti does indeed do everything possible to make visitors feel as though they are visiting a friend’s house, rather than a commercial eatery. |
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 VOLGOGRAD — Volgograd is a proud city, and justifiably so. Famed for its dogged resistance against Hitler’s invading forces under its former name, Stalingrad, it bore the brunt of the German onslaught between August 1942 and February 1943 and was awarded the title “Hero City” accordingly.
Aside from its military significance, Volgograd has also served as an important industrial center and transport hub for more than a century. |
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 MOSCOW — Irina Lernochinskaya, a veteran leader of Moscow’s Red Cross, proudly shows off pictures of herself together with Dutch Princess Margriet and former first lady Naina Yeltsin. |
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 BANGKOK — Thailand is counting the multibillion dollar cost of nationwide flooding that has killed nearly 270 people and may yet cause more havoc as waters threaten to engulf the country’s capital.
Bank of Thailand Governor Prasarn Trairatvorakul said a preliminary estimate by the central bank shows economic losses from flooding that began in late July range from baht 60 billion to baht 80 billion ($1. |
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YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar’s newly elected civilian government announced Tuesday it will release more than 6,300 prisoners in an amnesty that could help patch up the country’s human rights record and normalize relations with Western nations. |
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BERLIN — An attempted arson attack on a railway link in Germany’s capital with three separate explosives devices was thwarted Tuesday, police said. It was the third in two days targeting railway operations in and around Germany’s capital.
A railway employee found the explosive devices placed on cables along a railway track in eastern Berlin on Tuesday morning and alerted security, police spokesman Ivo Habedank said. |
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MARATHON, Florida — Eight relatives had set out to fish in less-than-ideal conditions off the Florida Keys. It was raining, seas topped 7 feet and winds were whipping up to 38 miles per hour. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive