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 Admiralteiskiye Verfi launched a non-nuclear B-237 submarine called Rostov-on-Don, a project for the Russian Navy in St. Petersburg on Monday.
Alexander Buzakov, acting general director of Admiralteiskiye Verfi, said on Sept. 5 that the Russian Defense Ministry had signed a contract with the United Shipbuilding Corporation agreeing to build five similar submarines with Admiralteiskiye Verfi, Interfax reported.
All five submarines will be built by the end of 2016. They all will be used for work with the Russian Black Sea Navy.
The diesel electric submarine belongs to the third generation of Varshavyanka class submarines, or “Kilo” according to NATO classification. Such submarines were developed to fight other submarines and ships, as well as to defend naval bases, for coastal and sea communication and intelligence and patrol activities. |
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ON THIN ICE
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A municipal worker pours water onto Pionerskaya Ploshchad in front of the Theater of the Young Spectator on Sunday to create an open-air ice rink on the square. As Christmas trees go up around the city, the weather is forecast to be unseasonably mild through the end of this week. |
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With more than 370 people having been killed on the roads of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast during the past six months, drivers’ qualifications are being scrutinized as a reason for the staggering numbers of casualties.
It is no secret that a driving license can be illegally purchased in Russia, and is something of a bargain at about 200 euros.
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A new Belgian-Russian project aimed at training Russian doctors to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and obtain reliable statistics on the spread of the illness in Russia was launched in St. Petersburg on Friday.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 64 million people around the world suffer from this disease. |
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Fishermen vs the Law
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — About 300 men who fish for sport held a meeting in St. Petersburg on Sunday to protest the amendment of a law on fishing. |
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“There’s a certain picture of Russia abroad,” says Taisia Ivanova, the manager of the Russian stall at this year’s upcoming annual Winter Bazaar. “It might be nice to make the picture bigger and show something else. Not simply matryoshkas, which are known all over the world.
The Winter Bazaar is a charity fund-raising event hosted by the St. Petersburg International Woman’s Club (IWC). Founded in 1986, the St. Petersburg IWC is primarily a social club for expatriate women. Many English-speaking Russian women, such as Ivanova, are members as well.
This year’s bazaar will have a grand raffle, a cultural entertainment program and a playroom for children. |
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 The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly is encountering increased criticism from within Russia and abroad as it gets ready to pass United Russia’s anti-gay law in a second reading. |
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“It’s quite an expensive mission, I pay for it every day,” said Maria Rolnikaite, a Holocaust survivor in her eighties, when discussing her life-long dedication to speaking publically about her experiences.
Rolnikaite is the author of “I Must Tell You,” a memoir chronicling her experiences in both ghettos and a concentration camp. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Pro-Kremlin officials scrambled Monday to explain away an embarrassing chorus of boos Prime Minister Vladimir Putin faced from a crowd of 20,000 mixed martial arts fans in what was likely the worst public reception of his political career.
Some Putin supporters insisted that the thunderous catcalls were actually meant as praise, while others offered the head-scratching explanation that the crowd simply wanted to go to the toilet. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will hold his annual live televised call-in show before the end of the year, but only after the Dec. 4 State Duma elections are held, his spokesman said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — A long-awaited visa agreement between Russia and the United States will hopefully be ratified before the New Year’s holiday, although it will have to wait until after a State Duma is voted into office, U.S. Embassy officials said Monday.
“We hope for a fairly speedy ratification with mid-December as a goal,” a senior consular official said in a telephone interview. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and its customs union partners, Belarus and Kazakhstan, on Friday signed a declaration seeking to reinstate even more of the bonds — possibly even a common currency — that snapped with the Soviet collapse. |
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BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The U.S. Peace Corps will pull out of the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, a move that follows reports from volunteers about a spate of sexual assaults and Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks on the program’s workers.
Peace Corps has been in Kazakhstan since shortly after the former Soviet nation gained independence in 1991 and currently boasts around 120 volunteers working in the fields of education and health. |
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MOSCOW — Russian officials on Tuesday acknowledged that the chances of fixing a space probe bound for a moon of Mars that got stuck in Earth’s orbit are close to zero, Russian news agencies reported. |
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MOSCOW — A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts back from the International Space Station touched down safely in the snow-covered steppes of Kazakhstan early Tuesday morning.
NASA astronaut Michael Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa of Japan’s JAXA space agency landed at the break of dawn some 90 kilometers north of the town of Arkalyk at 8:26 a. |
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MOSCOW — Russia will seek tougher punishment for an American couple convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of a 7-year-old boy they adopted from Chelyabinsk, authorities said Saturday. |
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 The St. Petersburg city court confirmed a statement from the city’s public prosecutor’s office annulling the Committee for the State Control, Use and Preservation of Monuments’ (KGIOP) 2004 edict to amend the list of culture and heritage sites, which removed 31 monuments from the list, the prosecutor’s office reported Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Russian Railways is seeking to enter into new projects in the Middle East, despite the losses it has faced in restive Libya, Vladimir Yakunin, chief executive of the state-run monopoly, said Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — On top of paying relocation fees and higher salaries, companies could face paying insurance fees for foreign workers starting next year.
A bill that has passed its first reading in the State Duma proposes to lower the insurance fee from 34 to 30 percent, but add a 10 percent fee for those who earn more than 512,000 rubles ($16,600) per year. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is to spend up to $60 million on a six-year advertising campaign to bolster its image as a tourist destination, the Federal Tourism Agency said Monday. |
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 The Novgorod region has beautiful churches, but otherwise it’s nothing to write home about. It’s a very typical Russian region, and that’s why Novgorod is so important politically. Analysts discovered that the election results in Novgorod come very close to the results of the national vote. |
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The smart money says that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be president from 2012 to 2024. He will be 72 in 2024 and probably will not be up for “castling” with some amiable stooge until he is 78 and eligible to be president yet again. |
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 The repertoires of St. Petersburg drama theaters inevitably include works by a number of American playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. But it is 50 years or more since their plays were written.
This week, the St. Petersburg Theater Academy will attempt to refresh the city’s theater repertoires with the help of modern American playwrights and dramaturges, as the city hosts a theater conference titled “Modern American Plays and Discoveries.”
The academy has also organized a conference in order to introduce new American plays and playwrights to the Russian public, at the initiative of Professor Irina Tsimbal. |
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FOR SPT
EWAN MCGREGOR STARS
IN DAVID MACKENZIE’S FILM
‘PERFECT SENSE,’ WHICH IS
SHOWING IN THE CITY THIS
WEEK AS PART OF THE NEW
BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL. |
 Carl Faberge, described by the BBC as “the most famous jeweler of all time,” is to be paid tribute to by the State Hermitage Museum in 2014 when it plans to open a Carl Faberge Museum to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Hermitage.
According to the plans, the new museum will occupy three rooms in the East Wing of the General Staff Building.
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 British cinema has always stood out in world cinematography for its way of depicting the problems of an entire generation — and sometimes of all of mankind — through an individual story.
This is probably the main common characteristic of the films chosen for screening at the New British Film Festival that kicks off in the city Wednesday, as the majority of the stories to be screened go deep into history to show the reality of modern society. |
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 There’s an old Soviet joke: A factory worker puts a down payment on a Zaporozhets, a ramshackle Ukrainian Fiat knockoff with an engine in the rear, a removable floor panel for ice fishing, and a tendency to go up in smoke at the first sign of breaking 80 kilometers an hour. |
 Aristocratic balls just before the Bolshevik Revolution, Silver Age art exhibitions, military parades in the Stalin era, peasants working hard in the fields and the first trains arriving at provincial stations can all be seen at the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum as part of a photo biennale that explores the history of photography.
The new exhibit explores the history of photography as a technological process, and showcases a number of techniques used throughout the history of this art from the middle of the 19th century. |
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 Last week, blonde pop singer Valeria became an unlikely dissident, as her husband and producer, Iosif Prigozhin, complained in an interview with Radio Liberty that United Russia had hijacked one of her concerts to electioneer from the stage. |
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Use your noodle
Stepping into YamiYami, the now six-month-old noodle bar on the bustling Moskovsky Prospekt just behind Sennaya Ploshchad, is not unlike stepping into a trendy eatery in the hip Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Apart from its onomatopoeic name, which conjures up the image of a satisfying food establishment, the restaurant’s image is revealed through an impressive, original window display: An ecosystem of animals, fish and plants, all painted in green on the glass, fits right into the European trend for eco-consciousness. |
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 KALININGRAD — Although St. Petersburg is traditionally known as Russia’s “window to Europe,” today’s Kaliningrad is more deserving of the moniker.
The city is the capital of Russia’s westernmost province of the same name, an exclave on the Baltic Sea that is separated from the rest of the country by Lithuania and Latvia. Locals take pride in the region’s German history — the region was historically part of Prussia — and its status as an “island,” separate from what they often call “greater Russia. |
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 MOSCOW — Father of three Alexei Ostayev is trying to prove that he was fired from his job in circumstances that should be protected under the country’s labor laws. |
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MOSCOW — It’s a hard time for opposition voters in Russia.
With the State Duma elections just two weeks away, it would seem that voters unhappy with United Russia will soon have the chance to register their discontent.
But with victory by the ruling party considered a foregone conclusion and electoral rules manipulated to prevent independent groups from even getting on the ballot, expressing dissatisfaction at the polls is a tricky task. |
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 CAIRO — A swelling crowd of tens of thousands filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square Tuesday, answering the call for a million people to turn out and intensify pressure on Egypt’s military leaders to hand over power to a civilian government. The ruling military council held crisis talks with political parties across the spectrum to try to defuse growing cries for a “second revolution. |
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Pakistani Taliban have declared a cease-fire to encourage nascent peace talks with the government, a senior commander said, a move that appears to show the deadly group’s willingness to strike a deal. |
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s ruling party forced a long-stalled free trade deal with the United States through parliament Tuesday, enraging opposition lawmakers who blasted their political rivals with tear gas.
South Korean lawmakers voted 151 to 7 in favor of ratifying the trade agreement in a surprise legislative session called by the ruling Grand National Party, officials said. |
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BUCHAREST, Romania — Romanian lawmakers voted Tuesday to make it legal to euthanize the thousands of stray dogs that roam the country’s streets, angering animal rights activists who have lobbied for months to stop the measure. |
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Issues Archive