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 President-elect Vladimir Putin on Thursday took part in the unveiling of a new monument to cellist and human rights advocate Mstislav Rostropovich, calling him an outstanding musician and humanist, Interfax reported.
Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev, former President Boris Yeltsin's wife Naina and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also took part in the ceremony. |
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A group of 675 fisherman stranded on a piece of ice that broke from the shore and began drifting out to sea Sunday has been rescued, Interfax reported. |
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Five companies in the AST Group, which includes one of Russia's top book publishers, could be hit with a 6.7 billion ruble ($228 million) bill for back taxes on income hidden from authorities through shell companies, Vedomosti reported Thursday.
Last week, the Investigative Committee conducted a search of the offices of Polimiks-Tsentr, a logistics company that is part of the AST group, which includes more than 100 companies, including the AST publishing house, one of the two largest in Russia. |
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Investigators have searched the apartment and dacha of former St. Petersburg police chief Mikhail Sukhodolsky, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
The searches were part of an official inquiry into accusations of fraud and abuse of power against the management of an Interior Ministry branch providing security services. |
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Two separate passenger jets were grounded by engine failure Thursday morning, one of them a Soviet-designed plane that figured in a crash that killed an entire hockey team in September.
A Soviet-designed Yak-42 flying from Saratov was forced to make an emergency landing several minutes after takeoff Thursday morning when one of the plane's engines failed. |
All photos from issue.
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 A new city law banning homosexual propaganda among minors has caused widespread criticism abroad and a divided response in Russia, with many petitioning for the city to be boycotted by tourists.
St. Petersburg is unlikely to suffer a decrease in the volume of tourists as a result of the petitions and negative response to the new law, St. Petersburg tourism officials said.
“I’m not worried about the new law affecting tourism volumes in St. Petersburg,” Sergei Korneyev, deputy head of the Russian Tourism Union told The St. Petersburg Times.
“It is normal to observe the laws of a country to which a person travels. For instance, in Muslim countries laws and traditions are quite strict, but tourists obey them,” Korneyev said. |
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ROCKING THE BOAT
DMITRY LOVETSKY / SPT
Gay rights activists protest on the Neva River last summer. A city law legislating against the ‘propaganda’ of homosexuality among minors comes into force on Friday. Reactions to the law, its interpretations and the history of homophobia in Russia are examined on pages 6-10 |
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On March 30, 2012, the infamous amendments to the St. Petersburg Law on Administrative Offenses will come into force. The law stipulates fines for the public dissemination of propaganda of “homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderness” among minors. The second part of the same law provides for increased liability for propaganda promoting pedophilia.
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 Vitaly Milonov, the man behind the controversial bill against “promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism to minors,” fully intends to catch Madonna committing a possible offense when the pop diva visits St. Petersburg in August, as well as probe the German industrial rock band Rammstein for an alleged act of indecency during a recent local concert. |
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In comments published in The St. Petersburg Times, the sponsor of the city’s recently passed anti-gay law, Vitaly Milonov, said “why should we copy European laws?” in reference to protection-of-rights legislation passed in a few Western countries. |
 It was a long time ago, at the beginning of the 1990s. It was a wild, difficult time, but a time that was of great interest to photographic journalists because entirely new, incredible subjects, previously banned and impossible to cover, were opening up.
I worked back then in a youth newspaper, Smena, and I was always on the lookout for interesting subjects for photo reports. My colleagues Felix Titov and Alexei Danichev and I had found out that the club Mayak, on Krasnaya Ulitsa (now Galernaya Ulitsa), would be holding something of a closed evening that would be, we were told, “not for everyone. |
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 Russian laws against homosexuality have a long history. Orthodox clerics condemned sex between men and youths. They also condemned men who shaved, used make-up, or wore gaudy clothing as devotees of the “sodomitical sin. |
 Perhaps what’s most surprising amid the homophobic rhetoric and the new law targeting the “promotion” of gay lifestyles is the fact that St. Petersburg’s gay scene has never been more visible or felt less threatened than it does today.
Like many aspects of Russian civil society that tentatively grew up in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian movement characterized itself by keeping its head down, not upsetting the authorities and trying hard to avoid creating trouble, a strategy most unlike that used by other, more provocative European gay rights movements. |
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 The first authorized protest rallies against electoral fraud since the March 4 presidential vote were held in St. Petersburg on the weekend.
Saturday’s march from the Petrograd Side across the Neva River to the Field of Mars drew more than 3,000 and went smoothly, but Sunday’s 1,000-strong stationary meeting on Konyushennaya Ploshchad was marked by arrests. |
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Finnish citizens and companies that own real estate on Russian territory near the border will have to give up their land under a new Russian law.
According to Russia’s land law, which has been in effect since 2001 and has recently returned to the spotlight, foreigners cannot own real estate on Russian border territories. |
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The head nurse at a state dental clinic in the Kirovsky district of St. Petersburg has been fired in what some say was a politically motivated decision. |
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SKA St. Petersburg marches on to the KHL Western Conference finals after a convincing 4-0 win Friday night over Atlant Moscow Oblast in game 6 of conference semi-finals at the Mytishchi Arena in Mytishchi in the Moscow Oblast.
With the win, SKA wrapped up the series 4-2 and advanced to face perennial powerhouse Dinamo Moscow in the conference finals. |
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The city’s Audit Chamber has found massive violations in the construction of the Mariinsky Theater’s second stage.
The company responsible for building the theater is the North-West Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration Directorate. |
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Hamburg Comes Closer
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — German airline Lufthansa launched a new flight Sunday from St. Petersburg to Hamburg, Germany.
The 2.5-hour flight will operate twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays.
“Hamburg is popular both among business travelers and among tourists. We have been planning to launch the route for a long time,” said Ronald Schulz, Lufthansa’s regional director in Russia and CIS countries. |
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 MOSCOW — Oleg Kashin lit another cigarette. His iPhone beeped, as it does every few minutes.
“They probably could have fired me for participating in the opposition rallies,” he said, flicking aside the background image on his phone, Kazimir Malevich’s “Reaper on a Red Background.”
The stub where his left pinkie used to be wiggles like a pig’s tail as he taps out a text message.
A political reporter for Kommersant, Kashin’s work on pro-Kremlin youth groups and Khimki forest defenders likely led to the savage beating that almost killed him in 2010, leaving him in a medically induced coma with a broken leg, a fractured jaw and a pinkie that had to be amputated. |
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Monday that the relationship between Russia and the United States was at its best during his term in office.
Medvedev was attending a nuclear summit in Seoul, which is his last opportunity to meet counterpart Barack Obama before he yields the presidency in May to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — A Leningrad Oblast journalist has been accused of fomenting extremism by editing an address by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to make him sound critical of the government.
The journalist, Andrei Kolomoisky, posted a video to his blog on the website of the Vyborgskiye Vedomosti newspaper of Putin speaking to the camera while sitting in front of the Russian flag on the eve of the Dec. |
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MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday unanimously approved in the third and final reading a Kremlin-sponsored bill reducing the minimum required national party membership from 40,000 to 500, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — The percentage of Russians who say they want to leave the country has dropped by half since last summer and is now lower than it was in the final days of the Soviet Union, according to a new poll.
Eleven percent of all respondents told the state-run VTsIOM pollster that they would probably want to emigrate, a significant drop since June, when 22 percent said they would like to move abroad. |
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MINSK, Belarus — Thousands turned out for an anti-government rally in Belarus Sunday to call for the freeing of political prisoners and for their country to become a European-style democracy. |
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 Is the Cold War over? Textbooks say yes and even cite the date that hostilities ended: Dec. 3, 1989, during the Malta Summit of Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush. But some doubts still remain — or have reappeared.
Today, leaders in Russia are playing their cards exactly by the Leonid Brezhnev playbook. |
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The citizens’ awakening in Russia dates from the disputed State Duma elections on Dec. 4 and the first protest held on the following day on Chistiye Prudy. |
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 Open Your Eyes, a film festival focusing on human rights and directed against xenophobia and fascism, opens this week.
The city of St. Petersburg proudly boasts of its UNESCO-awarded official tolerance program, yet it has just passed an infamous “anti-gay” law, which indicates that the city authorities’ idea of tolerance is somewhat radical.
Last year, the Open Your Eyes festival was shut down dramatically four hours before its scheduled opening at the Mikhail Shemyakin Foundation, which canceled the event after its director was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. Prior to its cancellation, it had been rejected by two state-owned movie theaters, Dom Kino and Rodina.
The official explanation was that there were no available slots in their programs for the events, but Dom Kino’s administrator was recorded on tape as saying that the anti-fascist festival “contradicts the ideology” of the city’s Culture Committee. The Culture Committee denied any involvement.
The festival was to open with “Russia 88,” Pavel Bardin’s mockumentary about a group of neo-Nazi skinheads in Moscow, a film that annoyed the Russian authorities so much that several attempts to screen it in Russia were dealt with by the OMON riot police. |
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RUSSIAN MUSEUM
AMATEUR AND
PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS
SUBMITTED BY PEOPLE
FROM ALL ACROSS RUSSIA
ARE NOW ON SHOW AT THE
MARBLE PALACE. |
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A gay group will picket Russian concerts by Madonna, who declined an invitation to participate in the boycott of St. Petersburg announced as a result of a notorious anti-gay law signed into law in the city earlier this month.
The appeal to Madonna was made by journalist Masha Gessen, who asked international artists and companies to join the boycott on the New York Times Latitude blog website.
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 A century after the most daring artistic minds of Russia joined forces under the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and took Europe by storm with the arts extravaganza that came to be known collectively as the Russian Seasons, the ballets are returning to the city of their birth. |
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Commuter: æèòåëü ïðèãîðîäà, åæåäíåâíî åçäÿùèé íà ðàáîòó â ãîðîä
Common wisdom has it that when a new object or concept appears in a language milieu, the speakers of that language get cracking and come up with a name for it. |
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After conquering Moscow, the Aluminum Show will be performed for the first time in St. Petersburg at the Lensoviet House of Culture on March 28.
Combining visual theater with modern dance, acrobatics, special effects and puppetry, the Aluminum Show is often compared to Blue Man Group, Stomp and Cirque du Soleil.
The avant-garde performance tells the futuristic tale of a young machine looking for its parents. During its travel adventures through a surreal and fascinating world of aluminum, the machine meets a human friend, who helps it to get back home.
The performance is geared toward both children and adults thanks to its striking visuals, humorous scenes and an interactive aspect that allows the audience to touch unusual aluminum objects during the performance. |
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 While contemporary life in its entirety can’t be packaged into just 350 photos, the State Russian Museum has managed to capture a decent glimpse of modern Russia with the Second Photobiennale of Modern Photography. |
 When British boy band of the 1990s East 17, and euro pop acts Snap, La Bouche and Culture Beat walked off after a nostalgic disco night at Moscow’s Olimpiisky Sports Complex this month, they had a very unpleasant surprise. The Federal Migration Service locked them in their dressing rooms and fined them for working on tourist visas. |
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Tapas tavern
The creative minds behind a cozy little tapas bar on Ulitsa Belinskogo near the circus have opted to forego the quest for an original or witty name in favor of a cunningly laconic approach: By making the restaurant’s name — Belinskogo 6 — the same as its address, they have succeeded in making it both memorable and easy to locate. |
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Issues Archive