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The European Court of Human Rights will not reconsider its September decision in a case brought by defunct oil company Yukos against the Russian state, Moskovskie Novosti reported Monday.
In September 2011 the court ruled that Yukos did not have sufficiently weighty evidence to prove that their bankruptcy was politically motivated. |
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Former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin said he has no intention to work in the new administration of Vladimir Putin, using Twitter to reaffirm his earlier stated position, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported. |
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Moscow’s bourses jumped in early trading Sunday morning as they caught up with the gains made on international markets during the holiday period.
The apparent success of debt restructuring in Greece and positive industrial data from the United States boosted European- and Asian-traded equities Thursday and Friday while Russians took a break for International Women’s Day celebrations. |
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In Vladimir Putin's third term as president he will focus on the physical and spiritual development of the country, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Saturday. |
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Icon-like signs have appeared in the city of Novosibirsk portraying a masked figure from the all-female punk band Pussy Riot, which has gained notoriety after two of its members were jailed last week for participating in an unsanctioned performance at Christ the Savior Cathedral.
The images were placed in sidewalk billboards and picture a figure in a purple mask and red cloak, garments reminiscent of the bright clothes that are one of the band's trademarks. |
All photos from issue.
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 Hundreds were detained in downtown St. Petersburg on Monday as the authorities clamped down on protests against violations during Vladimir Putin’s presidential election campaign and the March 4 voting. Most of those detained looked likely to spend another night in custody as this paper went to press.
Coupled with more than 200 arrests at an authorized protest in Moscow the same night, some observers say the crackdown shows that the Kremlin has chosen to stop any pretence of liberalism now that its campaign to return Putin to the presidency has been successful.
City Hall did not respond to applications to authorize post-election rallies on St. Isaac’s Square, where the city’s Election Committee is located, despite a law that requires the authorities to contact the applicant within three days if they have any objections. |
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POLICE CHARGE
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP
Police officers in helmets detain opposition activists on St. Isaac’s Square on Monday evening where an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 gathered for an
unauthorized rally in protest of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s win at Sunday’s presidential election. Several hundred protesters were arrested by police. |
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the winner of Sunday’s national presidential elections, officially gathered 58.77 percent of votes in his hometown of St. Petersburg — 5 percent less than his overall rating of 63.6 percent, the Central Election Committee said this week.
In comparison to the 2004 presidential election — the last one in which he stood for president — Putin lost almost 17 percent of votes in his native city.
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Policeman Detained
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police have detained Oleg Prokhorenkov, deputy head of the police department at which a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death earlier this year.
Prokhorenkov was detained last week in connection with the teenager’s death, Interfax reported, citing the city’s Investigation Committee. |
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The historic Yeliseyevsky store, one of St. Petersburg’s oldest food stores, will reopen after undergoing years of renovation work on March 8.
The reconstruction work has restored the original façade of the historical building on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa. |
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Fifty percent of employees in Russia go to work when they are sick, according to research by HeadHunter recruitment website.
HeadHunter also discovered that the main medicines used by Russian employees are “folk remedies” such as garlic and lemons. Pharmaceutical medicine is less popular.
The research indicated that 53 percent of employees go into the workplace when they are sick. The main factor motivating people to go to work during illness is a heavy workload (52 percent) and an unwillingness to visit medical centers and doctors (42 percent).
At least eight percent of respondents confessed that their employers forced them to work when they were sick. |
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 City Hall plans to launch a pilot scheme of park and ride facilities for cyclists by the middle of this year, it was announced at a press conference last week. |
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Men remain attractive longer than women as they reach their peak significantly later in life, a poll conducted by Superjob.ru’s research center reported.
Russian women set the most attractive age for men at between 36 and 40 years old, while men said women were at their most attractive between 26 and 30. |
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St. Petersburg SKA avoided disaster by edging CSKA Moscow out 2-1 in overtime in Moscow on Sunday. They now lead their Kontinental Hockey League conference semi-final play-off series 3-1. |
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Alexander Stubb, the Finnish Minister of European Affairs and Foreign Trade, has invited Russian business representatives to take part in a Finnish Business Forum in St. Petersburg on May 30, 2012.
The purpose of the forum is to bring together businessmen and top managers from both countries.
“Finnish interest in Russia is very high these days,” Stubb said.
“Many Finnish companies have been successful in Russia with the help of Russian partners and employees. There are currently about 400 Finnish companies operating in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast that are looking for investment opportunities and Russian partners,” he said.
The program of the forum, which is to take place at the Sokos Hotel Palace Bridge, will include presentations from various sectors on Finnish expertise and innovation projects. |
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 The plight of the Baltic Sea, in particular the Gulf of Finland on which St. Petersburg stands, was in the spotlight last week at an environmental forum held in the city. |
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Participants of a roundtable discussion held in the State Duma recommend revoking the country’s permanent summertime status, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The participants of the roundtable, which was organized by the Health Committee to examine the effects of the country staying on summertime from October last year, concluded that the time system used in Russia is two hours out of sync with astronomic time and does not correspond to people’s natural biorhythms. |
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Russian ombudsman Vladimir Lukin added his voice to growing domestic and international uproar by denouncing United Russia’s anti-gay bill — which passed in a third and final reading in the Legislative Assembly in St. |
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 MOSCOW — The costly web cameras put in place in Russia’s polling stations to combat fraud served a dual purpose over the weekend, giving viewers an unusual glimpse of the lives of people all over the country — from small Chechen villages to Tyumen nightlife and beyond. |
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MOSCOW — With his final days in office counting down, President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday ordered a review into the conviction of the country’s most famous prisoner, former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose jailing has long been considered politically motivated. |
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MOSCOW — International observers criticized Sunday’s presidential election as seriously flawed Monday but avoided statements about the vote’s legitimacy.
“Conditions for the campaign were clearly skewed in favor of one candidate,” Dutch lawmaker Tiny Kox told reporters, adding that national media coverage had given a clear advantage to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The Central Elections Commission rejected the criticism.
“That’s an inadequate evaluation of the situation,” commission member Tatyana Voronova told Interfax.
Earlier, commission chairman Vladimir Churov said no other country had fairer elections than Russia, and he suggested that foreign observers were increasingly spying. |
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 MOSCOW — Police often turn a blind eye to public intoxication. But under the new rules, they have been instructed to pay more attention.
The rules, published in Rossiiskaya Gazeta last week, require police to ensure the safety and health of people intoxicated in public, including driving them to the hospital if necessary. |
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MOSCOW — U.S. investigators have opened a Russian front in the wide-ranging investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire.
The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp., reported Monday that FBI agents investigating corruption at the New York-based media giant were looking into the possibility that managers at Moscow-based News Outdoor, which specializes in outdoor advertising, paid bribes to local officials to approve the placement of billboards.
News Corp. owned News Outdoor until July 2011, when it sold its 79 percent stake to a consortium of investors including VTB Capital, CTC television station founder Peter Gerwe and Alfa Capital Partners. |
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 MOSCOW — The opposition showed its resilience on Monday night, drawing thousands to a Pushkin Square rally in the freezing cold to protest Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory in the weekend presidential election. |
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MOSCOW — State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin expressed dissatisfaction with the low percentage of female parliamentarians, saying it’s “not right.”
Naryshkin, a deputy from the ruling United Russia party, noted what he called a negative contrast between the prevalence of women in civil service and the low percentage of female Duma deputies. |
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 MOSCOW — Under Russian law, the future president and prime minister should swap their official residences after the March 4 presidential election.
“But we have no assignments for it at this moment,” Office for Presidential Affairs spokesman Viktor Khrekov told The St. |
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MOSCOW — A muted market reaction to the news of Vladimir Putin’s crushing electoral victory over the weekend prompted some members of the investment community to suggest Monday that questions over the regime’s legitimacy would persist. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised that privatizations of state assets will be carried out more properly than those in the 1990s, with the companies’ stakes to be sold “at a real price.”
But having vowed to review the results of “unfair” privatizations in the 1990s as part of measures to increase trust in business, Putin has confessed that he doesn’t know yet how to do it. |
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 As Russians voted for a new president on Sunday, their country was back in fashion with foreign investors.
The ruble has gained 12.2 percent against the dollar-euro basket since this fall and is not far from its post-2008 crisis high. The rebound of stock prices since the beginning of the year has been an impressive 13. |
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s victory in Sunday’s election means he will return to the Kremlin once again, albeit in far less triumphant fashion than he had imagined in September. |
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 Bad Influence call themselves a funeral band: They first reformed to perform at a memorial concert for Eduard Nesterenko, their former guitarist and founder of the band Petlya Nesterova, held at Griboyedov bunker club in December 2008, 40 days after Nesterenko’s death.
Since then they have been asked to perform at memorial concerts for Svinya, the nickname of Andrei Panov, the godfather of Leningrad punk rock who died 1998, and Alex Ogoltely (Alexander Strogachyov), who led the punk band Narodnoye Opolcheniye until his death in 2005.
Bad Influence (Durnoye Vliyaniye in Russian) formed in 1988 under the influence of British post-punk bands such as Bauhaus and Joy Division, at the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the Soviet rock explosion.
Nesterenko, who started out with the local new wave band Kofe, was a friend and played guitar with Bad Influence in 1989.
“In 1991 we split; it’s actually amazing — we have friends who were born in 1992. You ask her, ‘When were you born?’ and she says, ‘in 1992.’ ‘Cool, we hadn’t been playing for a year by then,’” says drummer and cofounder Igor Mosin. |
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ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
CHILDREN’S GAMES, TOYS,
TREATS AND OTHER
MEMORABILIA FROM THE
SOVIET ERA ARE ON SHOW
AT THE PRINTING MUSEUM’S
‘LUKOMORYE’ EXHIBIT. |
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Those who missed the chance to bid farewell to winter at the city’s Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) celebrations shouldn’t despair: There will be another chance this weekend, when Igora Park hosts the Quiksilver New Star snowboarding show.
With a prize fund of about $15,000, Quiksilver claims it is the biggest snowboarding event in Eastern Europe. The entertainment program includes a snowmobile show in which a 200-kilogram machine performs back-flips — not something that can be seen every day.
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 Pioneer uniforms, candy wrappers, board games and other remnants of Soviet childhood are on show at a new exhibit titled “Lukomorye. The World of Soviet Childhood,” which is guaranteed to evoke a feeling of nostalgia among those who grew up under Communism.
In the Soviet Union, childhood was characterized by a limited choice of regular little joys, making the things that children did have all the more precious, the exhibit’s organizers said. |
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 Gastronomy takes center stage at a new project just launched in the city to showcase the cream of the crop of international cuisine to St. Petersburg. Titled Chef’s Discovery, the project features six tours to the city by some of the world’s most dynamic chefs from locations ranging from South Africa to Seychelles during the course of this year. |
 If the sell-out crowd at the St. Petersburg State Jazz Philharmonic on Saturday is anything to go by, American idiomatic music is alive and well and about to take Russia by storm. Part of an ambitious series of musical events curated by the American Folklife Center of the U.S. Library of Congress and now touring Russia, the American Traditional Music Festival kicked off with a blast of bayou warmth Saturday at a rousing concert by two sets of musicians from southwestern Louisiana. |
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 Last week, it girl and media personality Ksenia Sobchak reopened her talk show on politics after it was shelved by MTV Russia. The show, now called “GosDep 2,” or “State Department 2,” came out on the Snob. |
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The art of translation
If you’re looking for a warm welcome, you might want to look somewhere else. While Dvenadtsat prides itself in being an upscale swanky venue, catering to those who can afford it, the staff could use a bit more training when it comes to hospitality and service.
The poor parking attendant, snowsuited up and subject to the brutal minus 20-degree weather, seemed to be the only one prepared for guests. |
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 Breast cancer is not a death sentence; it is curable, and women who overcome it can and should enjoy life as before.
This is the message of a new book by the Russian writer Larisa Zalesova titled “Live As Before” about a woman who survives breast cancer. The book has become a hymn to life and a celebration of the courage of breast cancer patients. |
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Issues Archive