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 Newly minted Moscow region governor-in-waiting Sergei Shoigu suggested in a radio interview Friday that the capital of Russia be moved from Moscow to Siberia.
Answering a question during an interview with the Russian News Service about the possibility of the federal government moving to the Moscow region, Shoigu said: "I think the capital needs to be moved farther away, to Siberia."
Radio host Sergei Dorenko quipped back that Moscow would empty out if such an unlikely step were taken. |
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 An Italian diplomat was beaten up and robbed of 20,000 rubles ($680) in central St. Petersburg on Wednesday, a police source told Interfax.
Giorgio Mattioli, director of the Italian Institute of Culture, part of the Italian foreign mission, was attacked by multiple assailants near Griboyedov Kanal, a few blocks southwest of the Hermitage Museum. |
 Two gay rights demonstrators were detained by police in St. Petersburg on Thursday in what could be the first case resulting from the recently passed city law banning so-called gay propaganda.
Alexei Kiselyov and Kirill Nepomnyashy were arrested outside the Palace of Youth Creativity holding signs bearing the words, "Gay is normal," police told Interfax. Police said the pair was conducting so-called one-man pickets — which do not require City Hall approval — meaning that they were not standing together or yelling slogans. |
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 Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina was brutally beaten near her home on the outskirts of Moscow just after midnight early Thursday, the journalist said on Facebook. |
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The price for gasoline could jump seven to 18 percent in the near future or fuel shortages could arise, Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov warned, Vedomosti reported Thursday.
Russia needs "unambiguous price adjustments" on oil products that he said are far below international market prices. If prices remain unchanged, it will flush the domestic market, and increased seasonal demand in April and May could leave Russia facing a shortage. |
All photos from issue.
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 Construction workers in St. Petersburg hit it big last week, stumbling upon an impressive collection of treasure believed to be the property of one of Russia’s most famous noble dynasties, the Naryshkins.
The treasure, hidden in a small secret room in an old mansion, comprised more than 1,000 precious items including Russian and European silver dinner sets, jewelry and military awards, the Intarsia construction company press service said. It was the company’s workers who found the treasure while restoring the Trubetskoi-Naryshkin mansion on Ulitsa Chaikovskogo in the city center.
Silver travel sets, mirrors and brushes in silver frames, French knives with pearl and porcelain handles and other porcelain objects were among the pieces found.
All of the objects were wrapped carefully in newspapers dated from March, June and September of 1917 — the eve of the Bolshevik revolution that took place in October. All of the pieces were in excellent condition as they had been wrapped in cloths soaked in vinegar, whose scent still remained, in order to better preserve the collection, the press service reported.
The treasure tale touches on two of Russia’s most renowned and romantic figures: Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin. |
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UP, UP AND AWAY
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Petersburgers release a sky lantern during Earth Hour, an ecology event encouraging people and businesses to turn off lights in order to raise awareness
about climate change, from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on March 31. Lights in the Winter Palace and on Palace Square were also turned off. |
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A Yabloko Democratic Party member went on dry hunger strike Monday after being sentenced to 10 days in prison for taking part in a Strategy 31 demo on Saturday.
Maria Kozhevatova, who was holding an anti-Putin poster, was detained at the unauthorized demo in defense of freedom of assembly. Strategy 31 demos have been held regularly in St. Petersburg since January 2010.
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Mikhail Anisin scored a hat-trick as Dinamo Moscow cruised to a 6-1 win and a four-game sweep of SKA St. Petersburg in the Kontinental Hockey League Western Conference finals at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow on Tuesday night.
Dinamo scored early in first period and tallied two short-handed goals in the only game of the series that they dominated. |
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Laughter can sometimes seem to be a rare phenomenon in Russia. Most of those who can be caught laughing are students and bosses, while pensioners and people with low incomes crack a smile much less often. |
 Acclaimed U.S. fashion designer Thom Browne, who was named Designer of the Year 2008 by GQ Magazine and the Most Influential Designer of Men’s Fashion by Global Fashion Awards in 2010 is the headliner of the upcoming Avrora Fashion Week that kicks off on April 9 at the Manezh Central Exhibition hall. |
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City to Get Euro Card
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The European Cities Marketing Association (ECM) and St. Petersburg City Hall signed an agreement last week giving the city the opportunity to join the list of cities where a universal ECM City Card will be used. |
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 MOSCOW — A blaze Tuesday at a Moscow market killed 17 migrant workers who were unable to escape from the metal shed where they were sleeping, the city fire department said.
All were citizens of former Soviet nations in Central Asia, spokesman Sergei Vlasov said. |
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MOSCOW — The father of a toddler in Bryansk has admitted to killing the child and staging her abduction, investigators said.
The announcement brings a tragic conclusion to a case that commanded national attention and drew thousands of volunteers to help in the search. |
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MOSCOW — Yaroslavl has pumped new life into the opposition movement, as the establishment candidate for mayor was trounced in a runoff election this weekend.
Yevgeny Urlashov, a former municipal deputy in the historic city of 600,000, defeated tycoon Yakov Yakushev, owner of a paint company, in Sunday’s voting. |
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MOSCOW — A company that produces children’s notebooks with pictures of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on the cover has refused to withdraw them despite harsh criticism from members of the Public Chamber, RIA-Novosti reported Monday. |
 MOSCOW — A French-made plane operated by UTair crashed minutes after takeoff in Siberia on Monday morning, killing 31 people aboard but miraculously leaving 12 survivors, officials said.
The turbo-prop ATR-72 took off from Tyumen’s Roshchino Airport around 5:33 a. |
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MOSCOW — The Obama administration has complained to Russia about the harassment of its outspoken ambassador, who has confronted television news crews and taken to social media to raise suspicions that his cell phone and e-mail were being hacked. |
 MOSCOW — Russia’s top investigative agency filed new charges last week against police officers accused of torturing detainees amid growing public outrage over police brutality.
The Investigative Committee said it had charged four officers in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk in the torture death of a detainee. |
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KIEV, Ukraine — Jailed former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko will be allowed to leave prison to be treated for a back condition at a Ukrainian hospital, prosecutors said Monday as the government appeared to bow to Western pressure. |
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KIEV, Ukraine — An 18-year-old Ukranian woman died last week, two weeks after her grisly rape set off protests across the country against corruption and favoritism toward the wealthy.
Prosecutors said Oksana Makar was raped by three young men on March 9 in the southern city of Mykolaiv. |
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MOSCOW — A flashmob planned on Red Square by an opposition group was blocked Sunday as police closed Red Square for repairs, Gazeta.ru reported.
The event, called “White Square,” urged participants to “make Red Square white” by walking around wearing white ribbons, a reference to the color that has been used as a symbol for the opposition movement. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s emergency services rescued 675 fishermen on Sunday from an ice floe that was drifting out to sea in the far east of the country.
None of the rescued ice fishermen required medical treatment, the emergency services on Sakhalin Island said. About half of the 675 fishermen were picked up by helicopters and the others by boat. |
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 MOSCOW — “Minister of Catastrophe!” screams the Internet petition established within hours of Monday morning’s tragedy in Tyumen.
There follows a list of dozens of deadly disasters suffered by aircraft, trains and ships over the eight-year period since Igor Levitin became transportation minister in 2004. |
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MOSCOW — The major risks for Russia in the near future are likely to come from an overheated economy, not falling oil prices, as accelerating consumption and lagging output might fuel inflation, Goldman Sachs warned Friday, March 30. |
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MOSCOW — Shares in restaurant group Rosinter surged on the back of unconfirmed reports that it has won the first-ever franchise to run McDonald’s restaurants in Russia.
The RBK daily newspaper reported Friday that Rosinter, which runs some of the country’s best-known eateries, had landed a deal to open McDonald’s outlets at airports and railway stations in Moscow and St. |
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MOSCOW — The 2018 football World Cup will bring Russia nearly 1 million jobs, boost GDP by 527 billion rubles ($18 billion) and attract an additional 95 billion rubles to tax coffers, Vedomosti reported Tuesday. |
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 Russian authorities have begun targeting their wrath at homosexuals.
A bill has been introduced to the State Duma that would ban information advocating homosexuality that is aimed at minors. The initiative was introduced by lawmakers from Novosibirsk, while similar or harsher laws have already been adopted in a number of regions. |
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Even the most truncated of President Dmitry Medvedev’s recent political reforms have begun to falter. Legislation loosening the procedure for registering political parties was the only one of three bills presented to the State Duma that has passed so far. |
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 Pussy Riot unexpectedly occupied the spotlight at the Tallinn Music Week, as Estonian president Hendrik Toomas Ilves, who addressed the Baltics’ largest music industry forum at the Estonian capital’s Nordic Hotel Forum on Friday, spoke in support of the musicians. Alleged members of the Moscow feminist punk band were imprisoned last month after performing an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a church.
The statement in defense of the women came at the end of a speech given by Ilves devoted to the link between rock and roll and freedom. |
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MICHEL PICCOLI STARS
IN THE ITALIAN ART HOUSE
FILM ‘WE HAVE A POPE’
NOW SHOWING AT THE
CITY’S DOM KINO. |
 Identity crisis as faced by the newly elected Pope is at the heart of a new Italian film now showing at Dom Kino.
Nanni Moretti’s film “Habemus Papam” (“We Have a Pope!”), which had its world premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival, celebrates reflection and poignant humor in a cinematic fable about a man elected to a job burdened with responsibilities that he simply cannot face.
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This year, the city has proved that spring really is the time of rebirth. First the Yeliseyevsky store reopened on Nevsky Prospekt in all its former glory — and even with a little extra. The store now has a giant pineapple at its center and two dubious mechanical puppets representing the Brothers Yeliseyev, though situated as they are up on the store’s interior balcony, they actually bear an uncanny resemblance to Statler and Waldorf — the two grumpy old men from The Muppet Show. |
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Âðàã íîìåð îäèí: No. 1 enemy
I am, in general, a big fan of the democratic process. Give the candidates their say, vote ‘em in, or vote ‘em out.
But during the electoral season — which in the United States is pretty much nonstop these days — I start waffling on the “give them their say” part of the process. |
 As Orthodox Easter grows nearer, an exhibit that opens Friday at the Peter and Paul Fortress aims to educate visitors on the checkered history of Easter celebrations in St. Petersburg from the 19th through the 21st centuries.
About 500 items, including graphics, cards, photos, billboards, books and applied art will tell visitors about Easter church services, traditional Easter gifts, meals, folk festivals held during the holiday, anti-religious Soviet propaganda and modern Easter celebrations. |
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 Last week, President Dmitry Medvedev attended top-level talks with Barack Obama on nuclear security, and the world sat up and took notice when his cat went missing. |
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Back to Futurism
Named after Ego-Futurist poet Igor Severyanin, this quaint restaurant off Sennaya Ploshchad opened at the end of last year by local restaurateur Eduard Muradyan provides guests with a trip back in time to the early 20th century.
The simple wooden tables and chairs with green velvet seats are reminiscent of something that could be found under layers of dust in a grandparent’s basement, but nicely complement the overall neutral coloring of the interior. |
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St. Petersburg Cable Television company (TCT), which operates under brands including Tvoi Internet, Tvoyo TV and Tvoi Telefon, has broadened its range of services by introducing a completely new product — home security systems.
According to the company’s representatives, Tvoi Umny Dom (Your Intelligent House) — is a home monitoring system that informs the owner about any events taking place in the house or apartment when nobody is home.
The name of the system brings to mind the little-known 1999 film “Smart House,” where everything inside the so-called “house of the future” was automatic and controlled by an attractive female robot. TCT’s solution is much simpler. |
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 St. Petersburg, Moscow and other Russian cities whose aging water pipes, electric cables and notorious traffic jams have already caused problems for their residents may soon see a breakthrough with their infrastructure issues. |
 Russia had the highest number of Internet users in Europe by September last year, according to comScore market research company.
The next step following fixed Internet access is for people to be able to get online no matter where they are.
“More and more businessmen need to have constant access to their work e-mail, and more young people are constantly posting on social networks, uploading pictures and video right from the event that they’re at,” said Denis Goleshchikhin, head of the northwest department of Yevroset mobile phone retailer. |
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 CALIFORNIA, U.S. — A former student expelled from a small Christian university and upset about being teased over his poor English skills went to the school to find a female administrator, then opened fire when she was not there, killing at least seven people, police said Tuesday. |
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COLOMBIA — Colombia’s main rebel group freed what it says were its last 10 military and police captives, a goodwill gesture that President Juan Manuel Santos praised but called insufficient to merit a peace dialogue. |
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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistani court sentenced Osama bin Laden’s three widows and two of his daughters to 45 days in prison on Monday for illegally living in the country, ordering them to be deported when the sentence ends, their lawyer said.
With credit for time served, the women and several of their other children will leave Pakistan later this month, said lawyer Mohammed Amir Khalil. |
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Issues Archive