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Former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov said Thursday that he has received a job offer from long-time friend and AFK Sistema head Vladimir Yevtushkenov, Interfax reported.
Luzhkov, 74, said he would give his answer to the offer in the near future.
"I have received an offer from Vladimir Yevtushenkov, and it seems interesting to me," the former mayor told Interfax. |
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Former Novaya Gazeta columnist Victoria Ivleva was deported from Uzbekistan in an incident the journalist says is connected with her professional activities. |
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Russian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Kirill had harsh comments Saturday as he spoke for the first time about the all-female punk group that created a scandal with an impromptu performance at a Moscow cathedral last month.
"There are people who justify this abomination, who minimize it, who try to imagine it as some kind of a funny joke, and sadly, bitterly, it breaks my heart that among these people, there are those who call themselves Orthodox," the Patriarch said in a speech posted on his website. |
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The black market for heroin in Russia, fueled by large-scale production in Afghanistan, is worth $6 billion dollars, said Federal Drug Control Service head Viktor Ivanov on Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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Are you willing to spend ten minutes to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has almost lost the ability to see? This was the question faced by lawmakers from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, March 14, when volunteers from the local non-governmental organization Society Against Blindness greeted the parliamentarians before the start of their morning session. To guarantee the exact sensation experienced by the “nearly blind” condition, members of the NGO presented deputies with special glasses tailored specifically to create such an effect.
Wearing the glasses feels like swimming through murky water with your eyes open.
The campaign outside the city parliament was a cry for help to represent the needs of more than 10,000 local residents who suffer from the wet form of macular degeneration, an age-related eye disease which, if untreated, can lead to blindness within a year or two. If treatment is started during the early stages of the illness, normal eyesight can be restored, but even treatment during the late stages can work not only to prevent complete blindness but to recover a good level of eyesight, doctors say. |
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FOLLOW ME
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Vyacheslav Rudakov crosses the street with his guide dog Utan. There are 18 guide dogs in the city, and four of them are currently being trained to help their owners travel by subway after the metro authorities decided to allow working dogs in the subway last year. |
 Students from three of the city’s regular primary and middle schools took part in sports competitions together with students from three schools for disabled and visually impaired children on March 14.
The event was part of a joint Russian-British project titled Paralympic Values that was launched in September and runs through April.
The project, organized by the British Consulate General in St.
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Protests against the flawed presidential election will continue in St. Petersburg this weekend. City Hall has authorized a march due on Saturday and a stationary rally due on Sunday.
The Yabloko Democratic Party, The Other Russia party, the Solidarity democratic movement, the Party of People’s Freedom (Parnas) and National Democrats party will spearhead the march — officially titled “For Citizen’s Rights and Freedoms” — starting near Gorkovskaya metro station at 2 p.m. Saturday. The protesters will cross the Neva River and walk to the Field of Mars, where they will hold a stationary rally.
According to Andrei Pivovarov, the local leader of Parnas, the protesters’ main demand is the annulment of the elections results on the basis of widespread violations conducted by the state and state-controlled bodies in favor of Vladimir Putin throughout the election campaign and the March 4 vote. |
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 Russia presented a new-look stand at the ITB Berlin travel trade show on March 7, where ITB head David Ruetz offered some advice to Russia and St. Petersburg as to how to successfully market themselves as international travel destinations. |
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SKA Skates to Victory
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — SKA St. Petersburg took a 3-1 lead in the KHL Western Conference semi-finals Monday night with a crushing 5-1 win over Atlant Moscow Oblast at the Mytishchi arena in the Moscow region.
SKA dominated game 4, jumping to an early lead with goals from Dmitry Kalinin and Alexander Kucheryavenko in the first period. |
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 MOSCOW — Dozens of people were detained over the weekend in a series of Moscow protests fueled by a pro-Kremlin documentary on state-run NTV television that suggested protesters have been paid to take part in opposition rallies.
Hundreds of angry people rallied outside Moscow’s Ostankino television tower on Sunday, with police detaining about 100. |
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MOSCOW — A United Russia Duma deputy accused the United States of “fighting our country,” after the Obama administration said it would boost funding for civil society and democracy in Russia. |
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MOSCOW — Opposition leaders are bracing themselves for a new law that many expect will lead to a mushrooming of political parties in the country.
On Friday, the State Duma’s public organizations committee decided to send the bill to the floor for a second reading Tuesday without changing its key ingredient: lowering the membership threshold for a party from 40,000 to 500.
Committee chairman Alexei Ostrovsky told Interfax that the draft, announced by President Dmitry Medvedev in December, might well become law before Vladimir Putin’s inauguration as president, which is planned for May 7.
A third reading could be completed Friday. Based on that time frame, the Federation Council could approve the bill as soon as March 28. |
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 MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Monday hosted controversial Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko for talks about deeper economic integration amid growing calls for tougher sanctions against Belarus for the execution of two convicted bombers. |
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MOSCOW — A Defense Ministry official took a swipe at the U.S. practice of treating soldiers with anti-depressants, noting that the Russian military, in contrast, does not use medication to treat psychological health issues.
The comments come in the wake of an incident in which an American soldier who may have been suffering from mental health issues killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan.
“The fact that Americans have big moral and psychological problems is written about widely. And then they treat them (soldiers) with anti-depressants. In fact, of course, they don’t reach desired outcomes by doing this,” Defense Ministry medical official Anatoly Kalmykov said during an interview, RIA-Novosti reported. |
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 ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An endangered western Pacific gray whale tracked from Russia to Alaska and along the West Coast to Baja Mexico is on the move again, apparently preparing to cross the Pacific Ocean again. |
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MOSCOW — Tatarstan’s top court has sentenced a former stripper to five years in prison for hiring a hit man to kill her husband and his mother for their property, investigators said.
But the husband and his mother told the Supreme Court that they forgave her and begged that she receive the lightest-possible punishment. |
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MOSCOW — The Agriculture Ministry has begun a dairy crackdown in an effort to wipe out unfair competition in the industry led by America’s PepsiCo and France’s Danone.
Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik urged regional governors in a recent letter to do away with sales of substandard milk, she said Monday. |
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MOSCOW — An independent group of advisers, tasked by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to recommend policies that the government should follow for the next eight years, revealed its findings on Friday, proposing social and economic programs targeting the emerging middle class as a driver for the country’s development. |
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 During the March 4 presidential election, I along with the observers for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitored more than 1,000 polling stations. This is a considerable number, but in the whole country there were nearly 100,000. |
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Politics in Russia are like the weather in that they are both full of wild fluctuations. The country is now in a political light frost, but that will hopefully soon be followed by much warmer temperatures. |
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 Russia’s pioneering punk rocker Andrei Panov, better known as Svin or Svinya (The Pig or Swine) will be paid tribute to this week with a memorial event at the bunker club Griboyedov.
Timed to be held on the eve of what would have been Panov’s 52nd birthday, the event will include screenings of video footage and a documentary film, a photo exhibition and a concert by bands whose members were either Panov’s peers or performed with him in different lineups of his band, Avtomaticheskiye Udovletvoriteli (Automatic Satisfiers), also known by its acronym in Russian, “AU,” which means something like “halloo!” or “yo!”
Called AU Jamboree 6, the event will be held both in the club’s underground area and in the Griboyedov Hill upstairs room on Thursday, March 22.
“It’s no secret for anybody that Andrei is everybody’s favorite, he was very charming,” said Olga Korol-Borodyuk, Panov’s widow and the event’s promoter.
“With his human qualities, talent and charm, he brought a certain aura or atmosphere that people needed in life badly. |
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ANDRE USPENSKI
ALINA COJOCARU IS ONE OF
A GALAXY OF INTERNATIONAL
BALLET STARS DANCING IN
THIS YEAR’S MARIINSKY
BALLET FESTIVAL, WHICH
OPENS THURSDAY. |
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Nacho Duato’s new ballet, which premieres at the Mikhailovsky Theater this week, strives to convey the idea of the immortality of genius and depict its creative process through dance.
“Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness,” which will be shown on March 21, 22 and 24 and on May 15, 17, is a combination of classical music and modern choreography devoted to the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach.
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 “I want to marry a millionaire.” “I will give driving lessons to an 18-year-old girl.” “I’d like to trade my washing machine for a portable TV.” These are examples of classifieds placed in newspapers in the early 1990s, when advertising began to take its first steps in Russia, a country that back then knew little about marketing. |
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Ùóðèòü ãëàçà: to squint, to narrow one’s eyes
When I read 18th- and 19th-century American and British literature, I’m taken by how nonverbal language has changed. |
 Dance talent from the Bolshoi Theater, London’s Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, the Wiener Staatsoper, Het Nationale Ballet and the Béjart Ballet Lausanne will join the Mariinsky Theater’s top soloists at the 12th International Mariinsky Ballet Festival.
The festivities kick off March 22 with a revival of Roland Petit’s poignant 1946 masterpiece “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.”
The event, launched by the Mariinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev in 2001 as a counterweight to the maestro’s other brainchild, the “Stars of the White Nights” festival that runs every year from mid-May through mid-July, assembles a pantheon of ballet stars from the world’s finest ballet companies. |
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 Last week, Channel One began showing “A Short Course in Happy Life,” a much-anticipated new drama from Valeria Gai Germanika, the director of the hugely controversial and popular “School” series. |
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Shipshape
Despite being situated inside an upscale boutique gallery, the branch of the German fast-food restaurant Nordsee that opened in St. Petersburg late last year has its own identity. There is an abiding sense of the sea in every aspect of the eatery, resulting in a wholly cohesive culinary experience. |
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 For several months now, Dostoyevskaya metro station has closed for two hours one evening a week. During this time, the usual crowds of people hurrying about their journey are replaced by animals, as guide dogs practice using the escalator, accompanied by their owners.
Training began at the end of last year, when the metro authorities decided that guide dogs could use the metro without causing harm to themselves, their owners or others around them. |
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 MOSCOW — A tiger can’t change its stripes — which is leading Russians to wonder if Vladimir Putin needs to change his story about which one he shot.
In one of the macho photo moments the Russian leader often indulges in, he was shown on an expedition in the Far East in 2008 with preservationists tracking wild Amur tigers. |
 You don’t need to travel far to find giant rabbits, miniature horses or African ostriches. All of these exotic animals, which might be expected to be foreign to the Russian climate, live on farms in the Vsevolozhsky district of the Leningrad Oblast.
The breeding of rare animals is becoming increasingly popular in Russia, following in the footsteps of Europe, where there are entire associations and clubs devoted to breeding exotic species. |
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Issues Archive