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Military contractors misspent more than 25 billion rubles ($822 million) in 2011, or almost 3 percent of the total value of all defense orders for the year, the Federal Service on Defense Contracts said Friday.
More than 870 billion rubles ($28.6 billion) were spent on defense contracts last year, a spokesperson for the service said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — A former senior Russian archive official says he saw a file that could shed light on Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg's fate — challenging the insistence of Russia's KGB successor agency that it has no documents regarding the man who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary before disappearing into the hands of Soviet secret police. |
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Companies and individuals that employ and register illegal migrants should face criminal charges instead of fines, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
Violations for arranging the illegal transit of migrants into Russia are currently punished with "a symbolic fine, and here the migration service is simply powerless," Putin said at a meeting of the Federal Migration Service, Interfax reported. |
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Companies and individuals that employ and register illegal migrants should face criminal charges instead of fines, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday. |
All photos from issue.
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Is it the responsibility of the state to look after former prisoners once they have been released? This question may seem unrelated to the life of the average person, but this is in fact an illusion. According to official statistics, every fourth man in Russia has either already served or is currently serving a term in prison — or will undoubtedly do so later in life.
Unemployment, social isolation, poor health and homelessness top the list of problems that Russia’s former prisoners have to tackle upon leaving jail. Their predictable failure results in every third former inmate going back to jail.
“This is a story as brutal as it is simple: A man is released from prison in the morning, and by the evening he is already hungry — and not everyone has a place in which to sleep or eat,” said Igor Potapenko, head of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Penal Inspectorate.
“Most of the prisoners lose real connections with the outside world — their families, friends and colleagues often do not want to know them anymore, except for, of course, members of criminal gangs. We really ought to start thinking about these people’s futures when they are still in prison, to ensure they have some choices in their lives. |
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BREAK THE ICE
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP
A man lowers himself into the icy Neva River to mark Epiphany on Thursday, with the Church on the Spilled Blood visible in the background. Thousands of Russian Orthodox Christians plunged into icy rivers and ponds to cleanse themselves with water deemed holy for the day. |
 Ex-St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko topped the list of the 100 most influential Russian women released this week.
St. Petersburg natives Svetlana Medvedeva, wife of President Dmitry Medvedev, and Ksenia Sobchak, a TV anchor and the daughter of St. Petersburg’s first mayor Anatoly Sobchak, also made the top 10 of the list, Interfax reported.
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More than 154,000 Siege of Leningrad survivors living in St. Petersburg will celebrate the 68th anniversary of the full liberation of the city on Friday, Jan. 27. Events dedicated to the anniversary will, as usual, be held around the city.
“Our city is unique in this sense: There is no other city in the world that experienced such cruel genocide at the hands of Nazi Germany,” said Irina Skripachyova, head of the city’s Residents of the Siege of Leningrad public organization at a press conference Monday.
Skripachyova said that “women and children were the face of the siege.”
“This is because most of the people who remained in the city were women and children. |
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 Opinion polls conducted in St. Petersburg last year show that people now see Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Vladimir Putin’s main trait as greed (cited by 46 percent of people), unlike in 2007, when the majority of people polled assigned Putin mainly positive qualities, and only 5 percent cited greed as his overwhelming trait. |
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A policeman has been suspended after a teenage boy died in police custody at the weekend.
Nevsky district police inspector Denis Ivanov, 24, acknowledged that on Sunday night he beat up a 15-year-old boy at the police precinct where the teenager had been taken after being detained for attempted robbery. |
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CEO Killed In Crash
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The general director of the Russkii Standart vodka plant, Sergei Andreyev, was killed in a car accident in St. |
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A criminal investigation was opened last week into the death of a three-year-old girl who died after being put under general anesthetic at one of the city’s private dental clinics.
The three-year-old girl underwent dental treatment performed with the use of general anesthesia at one of the city’s private Scandinavia clinics. |
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Dozens of neo-Nazis attacked anti-fascist activists returning from a memorial event for slain anti-fascists Stanislav Markelov and Natalya Baburova, shooting them with pellet guns in Mayakovskaya metro on Thursday, witnesses and activists said. |
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The St. Petersburg organizers of the March for Honest Elections, a national rally calling for open and fair elections, insist they will march on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main street, despite this being banned by City Hall.
On Monday, City Hall refused to authorize the march, citing “repairs and construction” along the proposed route along Nevsky Prospekt and Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. |
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The St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office has investigated a law adopted in 2009 on the preservation and protection of cultural heritage objects in St. Petersburg. |
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 VELIKY NOVGOROD — In this historic city that was once the cradle of Russian democracy, an unprecedented new campaign kicked off over the weekend to install web cameras in every polling station around the country in an effort to prevent voting fraud.
The ambitious program — costing billions of rubles — was ordered by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin following the largest public protests in years in reaction to widespread allegations of ballot box-stuffing and other voting irregularities in December’s State Duma elections. |
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MOSCOW — Russia signed a contract to sell combat jets to Syria, a newspaper reported Monday, in apparent support for President Bashar Assad and open defiance of international condemnation of his regime’s bloody crackdown. |
 MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lashed out Monday at nationalists who call for cutting off government funding to the North Caucasus as well as those who want to create regional separatist parties, saying their positions could lead to the collapse of Russia. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire and presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov — who has presented himself as the candidate for the urban middle class — has unveiled a 15-page presidential platform that closely reflects the demands made by protesters at two massive opposition rallies last month. |
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 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got very angry last Wednesday when he met with the editors-in-chief of Russia’s top media outlets. He complained to Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov about the “complete rubbish” that he heard from two defense analysts on a recent program on the radio station. |
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The Kremlin is trying to present President Dmitry Medvedev’s new bill as a way of bringing back direct gubernatorial elections, but it is more of a Trojan Horse than a political reform. |
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This week’s music sensation has been mixed with politics, namely the protest mood on rise in Russia since the flawed State Duma elections in December.
A new YouTube video made by anarcho-feminist punk band Pussy Riot shows eight women with their faces concealed by colored balaclavas on the strictly guarded Red Square pumping out a punk song called “Putin Zassal.”
During the filmed performance, which took place on Friday, they use a flag with a feminist symbol and a flare.
The title was mistranslated by The Daily Telegraph as “Putin Pissed Himself,” though in reality it means “Putin Got Scared.” The song does, however, use mildly obscene language. |
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 This year, the city’s legendary Stray Dog cafe, which endeavors to maintain the spirit and history of the Silver Age within its walls, celebrates its centenary. |
 The idea of meeting Billy Novik — frontman of the local jazz quartet Billy’s Band and father of “alco-jazz” — in an ordinary café may seem strange to some. After all, the band’s public image has been determined by songs like “Let’s Drink Some Wine” and “200 Cubic Milliliters of Agdam” (Agdam was the producer of a well known fortified wine in Soviet times). Battling stereotypes is not a priority for Novik, according to the musician, but during a concert this weekend at which the quartet will be accompanied by piano and drums, fans will see a different side to the band. |
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 As the mercury finally plummets to more usual St. Petersburg winter temperatures, the city’s museums and galleries have come up with plenty of indoor entertainment. |
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Home on the range
In the world of pain that frequently masquerades as dining out in St. Peterburg, it’s the little things that can often make a disproportionately huge difference. A spontaneous offer of a wine tasting to help make choosing the right bottle easier, friendly advice on which dishes the server recommends, or something as simple as an unaffected smile are all things that are typical of standard service elsewhere, but can never be taken for granted in Russia. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive