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 St. Petersburg law enforcers have filed a new criminal case against award-winning Voina art group for burning down an armored police truck on New Year’s Eve. They also addressed the group, whose activists are in hiding, via news web site Fontanka.ru late last week.
Late on Dec. 31, a Voina activist climbed over a fence surrounding Police Precinct No. 71 on the Petrograd Side and set fire to a massive Ural truck using Molotov cocktails as an art stunt called “Cop’s Auto-Da-Fe, or Fucking Prometheus,” Voina spokesman and chronicler Alexei Plutser-Sarno said on his Livejournal.com blog.
The statement said the armored Ural police truck was targeted because it was a prison-on-wheels used for holding and transporting detainees. |
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A HARD BARGAIN
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Women converse at the Christmas market on Ploshchad Ostrovskogo on Tuesday. The market, which has stalls representing different countries selling souvenirs, food and drink, will run through Jan. 14, when New Year is celebrated according to the Orthodox calendar. |
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Alexander Sizonenko, Russia’s tallest man, who once appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest basketball player in history, died on Jan. 5. He was 52.
The life story of the sportsman, who in the 1980s was ranked one of the U.S.S.R.’s top four central cornermen players, along with Arvidas Sabonis, Alexander Belostenny and Vladimir Tkachenko, is one of the most dramatic in the history of the Russian sport.
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Murder in the Park
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police have detained two teenagers suspected of the murder of a 14-year-old schoolboy who was killed in the city’s Tavrichesky Garden on Jan. 6.
The detained are 14 and 17 years old, respectively. They reportedly knew the murdered boy as they lived in the same area. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — The head of the Russian Orthodox Church weighed in on the ongoing political crisis, urging the Kremlin in a Christmas sermon to cooperate with anti-government protesters who rallied in Moscow in tens of thousands last month.
But Patriarch Kirill, a staunch Kremlin supporter, also echoed the government’s own rhetoric by warning that exerting too much pressure on the authorities can result in a bloody revolution, like in 1917.
Still, the statement appears to be the latest confirmation that the ruling elite is seeking to talk with the protesters rather than suppress them ahead of the presidential vote in March. |
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SLIPPERY BUSINESS
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Young skaters take a spin on the ice rink in front of the Alexandriinsky Theater on Ploshchad Ostrovskogo behind the annual Christmas market on Tuesday afternoon. |
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MOSCOW — The timeline for final ratification of the much-anticipated visa agreement with the United States has been put into doubt by political realities in the State Duma, with the signing likely postponed for months, a senior legislator said.
“We now have another consideration in the parliament, as we have many more Communists and other leftist politicians who are not very close friends of the United States,” said Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Duma’s foreign relations committee.
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MOSCOW — With less than two months to go before the presidential election, contender Mikhail Prokhorov has strengthened his campaign team by tapping editor-in-chief of the Russian GQ for his own media empire.
Nikolai Uskov, a darling of the hipster crowd, will start as the head of the ZhV! media group on Feb. 1, Snob.ru social networking and news web site reported Sunday.
Uskov, 41, will also be editing Snob, one of ZhV!’s most well-known projects, which, however, has failed to turn any profit since its inception in 2008.
ZhV! — a convoluted bilingual play on the Russian verb meaning “to live” — is owned by Prokhorov’s Onexim Group, which also owns RBC media holding. |
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 MOSCOW — It is traditional to give up bad habits at the beginning of the year, and in seasonal spirit, the Interior Ministry has promised that traffic cops will stop asking motorists to produce technical inspection certificates. |
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MOSCOW — Personal computer manufacturer Lenovo has launched a new social network in Russia that focuses on proposing solutions to real-life problems and building communities to help implement them.
Called the Do Network, the project is being rolled out simultaneously in India and Indonesia. |
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DEARBORN, Michigan — The U.S. Energy Department won’t follow through on a planned $730 million loan to the North American arm of one of Russia’s largest steel companies to modernize its Detroit-area plant. |
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MOSCOW — A former Cabinet member close to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called for a rerun of the country’s fraud-tinged parliamentary elections, in an apparent bid to soothe public outrage as Putin seeks to reclaim the presidency.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on his blog on Friday that the government must open a dialogue with the opposition on holding a repeat ballot under revised electoral rules. |
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MOSCOW — The husband of jailed former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been granted political asylum in the Czech Republic following the launch of a criminal investigation against him, her lawyer said. |
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MOSCOW — The son of a high-ranking Tajik official, whose conviction in Russia on drug-smuggling charges in 2010 sparked a spat between the two countries that is believed to have led to politically motivated arrests on both sides, has been cleared of wrongdoing. |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank and the Interior Ministry have calculated the total illegal turnover in the financial sector during 2011 to be 5 trillion rubles ($158 billion), about 10 percent of Russia’s annual gross domestic product. |
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 To many investors, 2011 has been a “year of fear” with markets being hit by a series of shocks ranging from the Japanese tsunami, concerns over the U.S. debt ceiling and sovereign downgrade and mounting fears over a double-dip recession, to name just a few. |
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For all the recent tumult in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is still the most powerful man in the country. The choices he makes now and in the near future will have a significant, even decisive, influence on the fate of the country. |
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 Director Vasily Barkhatov’s fondness for Mariinsky Theater tenor Sergei Semishkur is manifested in two ways. One is that the singer tends to appear in lead roles in most productions Barkhatov stages at the Mariinsky, and the other one is a little more unusual — Semishkur’s characters inevitably have a strong drunken streak. |
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Ñëîâà ãîäà 2011: Words of the Year 2011
Every year since 2007, the Expert Council of the Center for the Development of the Russian Language — a group made up of linguists, writers, philosophers, cultural specialists and other smart folks — vote for ñëîâà ãîäà (words of the year). |
 Markscheider Kunst has managed to keep its sense of humor and have fun at its concerts, while its peers have grown deadly serious, the veteran St. Petersburg band’s singer and guitarist Sergei “Yefr” Yefremenko says.
“Leningrad had a great sense of humor in the beginning, but now it’s somehow gone,” he said, sipping a Heineken in a downtown café. |
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Dining in the dark
How does one begin to describe a restaurant that is virtually invisible to the eye? A restaurant in which there is simply no interior to speak of, where you cannot see the food that you are eating — and where you cannot even be absolutely sure what it is that you are putting in your mouth — a place where you have to be led by hand to your chair and orient yourself by fumbling for your glass with your left hand and for your cutlery with your right. |
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Kremlin PR says that Russia is ruled by sophisticated rock music fans — but the Kremlin’s New Year party revealed once again how lame their music tastes are.
The repertoire sheet that was leaked onto the web features such fabulous acts as the British 1970s pop band Smokie, Italian 1970s pop band Ricchi e Poveri, Italian soft-rock musician Zucchero (which means “sugar”) and French eurodisco duo Ottawan. |
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 MOSCOW — Well-muscled and menacing at first glance, former Soviet soldier Pavel Dukhin might be the last person you’d want to have beat you with tree branches, although that is exactly what his job is.
A resourceful immigrant to Canada, he now works as a manager at a landfill. In his spare time, Pavel bulldozes gravel and chops down trees on his multi-hectare property in Langley, a Vancouver suburb. |
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