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 St. Petersburg’s notorious anti-gay law was put into practice for the first time last week, when two men arrested Saturday during a demo near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall were charged with “promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism among minors.”
Out of eight protesters, two were detained because the policemen found their posters to be illegal under the new law, in force since March 17. They were also charged with failing to obey a police officer’s lawful orders — an offense punishable by up to 15 days in prison.
Igor Kochetkov, chair of the LGBT rights group Vykhod (Coming Out), held a poster reading “No to hushing up hate crimes against gays and lesbians,” while Sergei Kondrashov’s placard read “Our family friend is a lesbian, my wife and I love and respect her. |
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GOODNIGHT MOON
DMITRY LOVETSKY / AP
The moon is seen with the Peter and Paul Cathedral in the foreground last week. Spring finally looks set to arrive in the city this week, with weather
forecasters predicting highs of 11 degrees Celsius on Friday — though accompanied by rain — just in time for Orthodox Easter this weekend. |
 Is Alexander Shishlov, St. Petersburg’s newly elected ombudsman, a dark horse? This question seems too difficult to answer for many players on the local political scene.
The veteran Yabloko politician, who until recently served as an advisor for the Russian representative office to the OSCE and other international organizations in Vienna, was proposed for the job by City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko.
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A new business school is set to open in the city on April 11 with the goal of bringing the best of European hospitality to Russia.
The man behind the SwissAm Hospitality Business School is Walter Spaltenstein, the owner of a hospitality school in Lucerne, Switzerland. |
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St. Petersburg residents were scratching their heads about the existence of UFOs on Tuesday after seeing mysterious lights hover over their city overnight. |
 A journalist and two volunteers will start living a Greenpeace-approved ecological way of life in St. Petersburg this week.
For two weeks from April 9 to April 23, Anna Ivanova, PR director of Metro newspaper, and two other volunteers will follow Greenpeace recommendations in their daily lives and write online about their achievements and difficulties, Greenpeace said. |
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Future hockey stars will take the ice at the Yubilieny Sports Palace from Wednesday through Saturday, when junior teams from Russia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden will join Team St. |
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Killer Stucco
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A piece of stucco molding fell from the façade of a building at 141 Nevsky Prospekt, killing a man last week.
An investigation is underway.
Diplomats Attacked
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An Italian diplomat was beaten up and robbed of 20,000 rubles ($680) in central St. |
All photos from issue.
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GORI, Georgia — A museum that has honored Josef Stalin in Georgia since 1937 is being remodeled to exhibit the atrocities that were committed during the Soviet dictator’s rule.
Georgian Culture Minister Nika Rurua said Monday that his nation, which became independent in 1991, can no longer host a museum “glorifying the Soviet dictator.”
Stalin was born Josef Dzhugashvili in the central Georgian town of Gori in 1879, and the museum opened here in 1937, at the height of purges that were later dubbed the Great Terror.
The gigantic museum includes the house where Stalin was born and some 47,000 exhibits, including his personal belongings and death masks. |
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 MOSCOW — The Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years in an American prison will be on the agenda for upcoming talks between the two countries.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will bring up the Viktor Bout case with counterpart Hillary Clinton during his visit to Washington, which starts Wednesday. |
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LONDON — Congolese defender Chris Samba insists that he remains committed to Dagestani club Anzhi Makhachkala despite his anger at being the target of racism in the country that will host the 2018 World Cup.
A banana was thrown at Samba, who is black, after a match at Lokomotiv Moscow last month, the third such incident against an Anzhi player in the past year.
“I feel extremely passionately about racism in football and will never let the small community of racists break me,” Samba said in a statement. “I’m a strong character and will keep fighting for my team.”
Samba left English Premier League club Blackburn in February to join Guus Hiddink’s Anzhi for a reported £12 million (then $19 million). |
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 MOSCOW — Astrakhan became a new rallying cry for the country’s fledgling protest movement Monday when key opposition figures called for support of a 25-day hunger strike of mayoral candidate Oleg Shein in the southern city. |
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MOSCOW — A passenger listed among the deceased was discovered alive in a Tyumen region hospital a week after a deadly plane crash that killed 31.
Hospital officials said DNA testing confirmed that Dmitry Ivanyuta, 25, was actually in the hospital’s intensive care unit under the name of a passenger who perished in the crash. |
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 MOSCOW — A decision on building a tunnel under the Bering Strait to connect the railway infrastructures of Russia and North America should be made before 2017, Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin told journalists Saturday, Interfax reported.
“I am sure that Russia needs to develop railway services in the Far East and Kamchatka, and I believe a decision on building [a tunnel under the Bering Strait] should be made within the next three to five years. |
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MOSCOW — Russian and Belarusian air authorities have settled their dispute over flights, in a move that may see Belarusian companies providing internal flights in Russia and vice versa. |
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MOSCOW — Just days after Sergei Shoigu, the next governor of the Moscow region, said in a radio interview that he wasn’t sold on the idea of expanding Moscow’s boundaries, President Dmitry Medvedev and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin sat a chair away from him at a government meeting on Monday and detailed the city’s expansion plans. |
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MOSCOW — Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday reiterated a call for extensive privatization and proposed naming a federal prosecutor for business rights. |
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 Since being enthroned as head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill has never gotten much attention from the world press — until last week. Unfortunately, the reason for this attention will give his future biographers a hard time. The patriarch was caught lying. |
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Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that President-elect Vladimir Putin is poised to undertake the most significant reform Russia has seen in recent years by creating a National Guard from scratch. |
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 The JFC Jazz Club, a small jazz venue in a courtyard on Shpalernaya UIitsa in downtown St. Petersburg, has become a staple of local jazz and is reputed for its careful selection of artists and diverse, often innovative daily concerts in a comfortable environment.
This week, the club, which has hosted more than 5,000 concerts — featuring international jazz figures such as Eddie Gomez, Lenny White, Courtney Pine, Randy Brecker and Paul Bollenback — celebrates its 18th birthday and launches its 18th indoor music festival, Jazz Spring in St. Petersburg, which will last 18 days.
The JFC Jazz Club opened on April 12, 1994, and was initially called the New Jazz Club and located in the Tavrichesky Gardens.
“It all began with me playing in a band, we traveled a lot and spent a lot of time in Lille, France,” said Felix Naroditsky, JFC Jazz Club’s founder and director, who played the trumpet with the Admiralty Brass Band in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“We were based in Lille and went to other cities and to Germany from there. And when we had a night off, which was not very often, we liked to go to one music place called Blue Piano Club.”
“Visually, it had a blue color palette and maybe it wasn’t a real jazz club, but rather a jazz bar. But we liked that the musicians there changed all the time and that it had an interesting atmosphere. |
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STANISLAV LEVSHIN
JONAH ACOSTA OF THE
ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET
IS AMONG THOSE
PERFORMING AT THIS
YEAR’S DANCE OPEN
FESTIVAL. |
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The women arrested for allegedly belonging to Pussy Riot have been supported by Amnesty International and Estonia’s president and parliamentary deputies, but without knowing the background, some readers appear slightly confused about why an anti-Putin protest had to be held in a church.
So why in a church? First of all, the song and video, both entitled “Holy Madonna, Drive Putin Away” was technically a prayer, a desperate action undertaken by the group after seeing that 100,000-strong peaceful demos have no effect.
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 “Salmon swims upstream, it is born that way; and I have the same sort of character,” says Arthur Mitchell, founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem — the first ever African American classical ballet company — in way of explanation for his admirable courage and nerve. Mitchell, 78, is an icon for several generations of African American dancers.
It is hard to be the first, but if you win, adrenaline and glory are all yours, and Mitchell thrives in an environment of challenge and resistance. |
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 The 11th International Dance Open Festival that runs from April 13 through 16 celebrates a diversity of styles, while showcasing the finest traditions of Russian ballet. |
 Artist Nikolai Vasiliyev is using adhesive tape to get the idea of social problems to stick in people’s heads. His exhibit, “Tape Art,” is the first project to be shown at Mixed Media, a new exhibit space at Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art.
Tape art, which has existed for about 25 years, is a type of street art in which artists use tape instead of paint to create images.
Vasiliyev used this inexpensive, readily available material to create a collection of children’s portraits that have never before been shown together. |
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 While spring is seemingly in no rush to reach St. Petersburg, snapshots of sunny Italy going on display this week at Rosphoto photography center will bring a little cheer to the city. |
 Last week, the Federation Fund brought another batch of Hollywood stars to Moscow, film star Jim Carrey was reported to be on the point of marrying a Russian student, and Komsomolskaya Pravda revived the art of face-reading to solve the enigma that is It Girl and journalist Ksenia Sobchak. |
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Market fresh
From spring to harvest in the blink of an eye, Bazar celebrates the seasons of St. Petersburg. Located in the premises that were formerly home to the restaurant Vesna, one of the many fusion restaurants in the city, Bazar showcases a new novelty from this little nook in Konyushennaya Ploshchad — home-grown cooking. |
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 TVER — Scattered across the world are three monuments to Afanasy Nikitin, one of the first-recorded Europeans to go to India — and a Tver native.
There is a black obelisk to the south of Mumbai where he purportedly stepped ashore and a statue in Ukraine’s Feodosiya where he documented his adventures. But the grandest memorial stands in his hometown.
The bronze figure shows the bearded explorer, who may have converted to Islam while in India, striding forward and full of purpose. |
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 MOSCOW — Anna Skladmann’s exhibition “Little Adults” gives viewers a rare glimpse into the closely guarded world of the children of Russia’s newly rich elite, the first generation of heirs and heiresses who were born into the wealth amassed by their parents in post-Soviet Russia. |
 MOSCOW — In the years following his disappearance from his truck battalion during a mission in Afghanistan in 1982, some of Alexei Zuyev’s former comrades in arms reported seeing him alive behind enemy lines.
But as it turned out, the 19-year-old Soviet soldier who disappeared 30 years ago in Afghanistan’s Parvan province was shot by his captors, the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Army. |
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