|
|
|
|
In the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s order to cut the number of public officials entitled to use flashing lights to skirt through traffic, several incidents of alleged abuse involving high-profile figures have come to light.
On Thursday, the son of Russia’s ombudsman for children failed to appear in court over his refusal to take a Breathalyzer test after getting into a minor fender-bender in April.
The case comes after years of public rancor over officials’ abuse of driving privileges.
Anton Astakhov’s father, Pavel Astakhov, a well-known lawyer and an outspoken advocate for young people’s rights as Russia’s ombudsman for children, said he recommends that his clients avoid police alcohol tests and ask for independent testing instead. |
|
 Founder of social media site Vkontakte Pavel Durov and colleagues threw paper airplanes with 5,000-ruble notes ($155) out the window of their St. Petersburg office, causing chaos among revelers celebrating the city's 309th birthday Sunday. |
|
Bosch is planning to localize more auto parts assembly lines in Russia following a profitable year during which the technology supplier saw its sales in the country jump 50 percent to almost 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), the company reported.
The announcement about the expansion of Bosch's Saratov plant comes just a few years after the company had to cancel its plans to build a second auto production site in Russia due to the economic crisis. |
|
Russia's group Buranovskiye Babushki has made it into the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan, bringing the elderly folk singers from a far-off Russian village to the attention of more than 100 million viewers around the world. |
 Two of the opposition’s most popular leaders emerged from prison Thursday, vowing to ratchet up street demonstrations while a rare, dramatic standoff erupted at a State Duma hearing over a bill that would significantly raise fines for illegal protests. |
|
Russian intelligence agencies are investigating the possibility that the U.S. military may have brought down the Sukhoi Superjet that crashed in Indonesia, according to claims in a tabloid. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
 To celebrate its 309th birthday, St. Petersburg has decided to do something a little bit different. There will be no gaudy carnival making its way along Nevsky this year. Instead, the city authorities’ birthday gift to residents is a pair of unprecedented free concerts by world opera and ballet stars in the grounds of the Mikhailovsky Castle.
At 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 26, opera singers including sopranos Hibla Gerzmava and Maria Guleghina and tenor Vladimir Galouzine will take to a stage erected around the steps of the castle especially for the event.
The next evening, leading lights of the ballet world, including the city’s own Boris Eifman Ballet Theater, will perform a gala concert including excerpts from the cutting-edge choreographer’s ballets “Anna Karenina,” “Don Quixote” and the troupe’s latest production, “Rodin.” The ballet show will open with the Golden Ball scene from Eifman’s “Russian Hamlet,” a particularly poignant choice in light of the fact that the ballet focuses on Tsar Paul I, who built — and was murdered in — the Mikhailovsky Castle.
“The gala concert will be further proof of the fact that St. Petersburg does not only lovingly preserve the artistic legacy of the past, but also creates an original ballet repertoire that sees global success and demand,” said Eifman. |
|
SPONGE BATH
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
The Horse Tamers group of sculptures forged by Pyotr Klodt in the 19th century get a scrubbing down in time for City Day on Sunday. This year, St. Petersburg
marks its 309th birthday. The city will celebrate with a range of events including free opera and ballet shows at the Mikhailovsky Castle. |
|
As Russia faces what experts describe as a hidden diabetes pandemic, St. Petersburg has opened six education centers aimed at helping diabetics to live a full and happy life, despite their condition.
With 3.5 million people officially diagnosed with diabetes, the country is among the top ten countries in the world for the highest numbers of diabetes sufferers per capita.
|
|
The city’s public water transport system is to launch the new navigation season for its aquabuses on Tuesday, May 29, the city’s Transport and Transit Policy Committee announced on its website.
A total of 20 moorings with distinctive yellow roofs are being installed along the routes. |
|
Hermitage Tops List
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The State Hermitage Museum, State Russian Museum and Popov Central Museum of Communications topped the list of the city’s three most popular museums among St. |
|
An authorized International Day Against Homophobia rally held in Petrovsky Park on the Petrograd Side of the city was broken up by ultranationalists and Orthodox radicals and ended with attacks and mass beatings Thursday.
A man shot at two demonstrators with a gun firing irritant fluid, and then a militant crowd smashed windows in two buses carrying Central Asian migrant workers — whom they initially mistook for departing LGBT activists — with stones and attacked those inside one of the buses when it came to a standstill.
Called the Rainbow Flash Mob, the rally — which had been officially authorized by the Petrogradsky district administration — was stopped about half an hour after its start time when the police, who were present in large numbers at the scene, told the organizers that they would not be able to hold back the anti-gay protesters for long, according to the LGBT rights group Vykhod (Coming Out). |
|
 After two years of large-scale restoration work, the city’s historic Summer Gardens, which will reopen to the public on Monday, have been changed beyond recognition. |
|
A deputy officer at the Norwegian Consulate in St. Petersburg was found dead in an apartment Monday morning.
There was no evidence of violence having been inflicted on the man’s body, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The statement did not identify the man by name, but according to the website of the consulate, the vice consul position is held by a man named Bjorn Are Prins, and Gazeta. |
|
Prosecution witnesses gave contradicting testimonies as the trial against 12 opposition activists — dubbed “the Trial of the Twelve” — continued Tuesday. |
|
|
|
 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Monday appointed a Cabinet that has a strikingly familiar look.
Most ministers held on to their seats, received promotions from deputy ministers or came over from the Kremlin.
The shuffle cements Putin’s grip on power while fulfilling a promise by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that three-fourths of the faces would be new. |
|
MOSCOW — New education minister and former Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys rector Dmitry Livanov said the country needs to cut the number of university students that receive money from the state budget. |
 MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who became an official member of the United Russia party Tuesday, insisted that the “reset” was still on during a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the May 19 through 20 weekend G8 summit at Camp David. |
|
MOSCOW — The Kremlin has compiled a dossier on the 126 members of the Public Chamber that measures their degree of loyalty and whether they would be willing to act on Kremlin orders, Novaya Gazeta reported. |
|
|
|
 MOSCOW — If everyone lived like Russians, humanity would need 2 1/2 planet Earths to sustain consumption, though this profligacy is dwarfed by the American lifestyle — which would require no less than four planets to sustain on a humanity-wide scale, according to the World Wildlife Fund. |
|
MOSCOW — Smoking in Russia will soon be more expensive, as analysts say current tax plans will cause the price of cigarettes to jump five times higher by 2018. |
|
More than 2,000 delegates from 51 countries took part in the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum held in the city last week.
Ministers of justice from 13 countries, including the U.S., U.K., China, Ireland, Poland and the CIS countries participated in the second annual forum.
Participants discussed the world’s new legal challenges including the realization of an open government, police effectiveness, legal ethics and more. |
|
|
|
 In the mid-1990s, former President Boris Yeltsin fought hard for the right to sit as an equal at the same table with the leaders of the world’s seven leading democracies. Using a lot of political wrangling, Moscow finally secured permanent membership in this elite club where the real heavyweights are supposed to solve the world’s most pressing problems. |
|
Lots of money, lots of luck and players who didn’t care about winning ugly, just so long as they won, turned Chelsea into the champions of Europe on Saturday night. |
|
|
|
 Singer-songwriter and guitarist Mikhail Novitsky is a frequent sight at rallies and at the opposition camp on St. Isaac’s Square. Apart from music, he is an active member of his preservationist group Green Wave, which he set up to protect St. Petersburg parks and lakes.
On Sunday, Novitsky co-led a “test walk” from St. Isaac’s Square, via Nevsky Prospekt, to Arts Square. The walk was arranged to test the extent of freedom left to the opposition by the authorities, which broke up anti-Putin rallies timed to coincide with his presidential inauguration in Moscow during which hundreds — some wearing white ribbons symbolizing fair elections, some not — were arrested just for being in the street earlier this month.
While walking, Novitsky sang his new songs “Putin Ski Magadan,” urging Putin to leave office, and “Putin Is Afraid of Everybody,” with hundreds — many equipped with white ribbons, anti-Putin buttons and white balloons — walking with him. |
|
THE ACCLAIMED FRENCH PIANIST
HELENE GRIMAUD IS ONE
OF MANY INTERNATIONAL
MAESTROS PERFORMING AT THIS
YEAR’S STARS OF THE WHITE
NIGHTS FESTIVAL. |
 Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov,” which has arguably become the most popular operatic piece by a Russian composer on the international stage in the past decade, has been revamped by renowned British director Graham Vick. The production, which will see the stage on May 25 and 26 and June 26, opens the 20th International Stars of the White Nights festival, which runs through July 15.
|
|
Êîíòðîëüíàÿ ïðîãóëêà: test stroll
As the protest movement continues in Moscow, I really feel sympathy for the one part of the population that has been suffering the most — translators.
The words protesters are using to describe their activities are “simple” words known to any speaker of Russian. But these words each have two or three meanings and carry a cartful of historical and linguistic connotations.
Take the êîíòðîëüíàÿ ïðîãóëêà (literally “test walk”) organized by a group of writers the weekend before last. In general, any peregrination of protesters from point A to point B is a “march” in English. But that word won’t work. First of all, as a translator I’d want to use march for ìàðø ìèëëèîíîâ (March of Millions), the organized protest march that turned violent on May 6. |
|
 Controversial U.S. rocker Marilyn Manson will take to the stage of the city’s Yubileiny stadium on Monday, May 28 as part of his eponymous group’s “Hey Cruel World” tour. |
|
City concert-goers will have a chance to experience a genre quite unlike the usual classical music that characterizes the White Nights season at the revamped Sixth International New Music Festival that starts Saturday.
Titled “The Time of Music: Fin de Siècle,” the festival comprises six consecutive concerts of diverse contemporary music from around Europe and Russia, to be held from May 26 to May 31 at several venues around St. Petersburg.
In accordance with its name, the festival aims to promote the music of famous Western composers of music from the latter part of the 20th century, and young Russian composers of the same genre.
“Contemporary music is a genre that has been lost to the average Russian listener, and trends that have long taken hold in the West are largely off the radar here [in Russia],” Iranian composer Mehdi Hosseini, the director of the festival’s organizing committee, told The St. |
|
 Ksenia Sobchak is continuing her role as the unofficial queen of the barricades — even if the more hardcore activists aren’t too happy about that.
Wearing a thick layer of makeup, she arrived at the Barrikadnaya protest last Wednesday evening and was immediately surrounded by journalists and people filming on their iPads. |
|
Brown bag lunch
Beluga is an interesting space. Its interior, dominated by red brick and wood, is certainly not reminiscent of a restaurant, but rather of someone’s country patio, an old mill or even an artist’s studio. Its rustic aura would trick people into feeling they had escaped the hustle and bustle of city life if only the whirring of embankment traffic weren’t so present in the background. |
|
|
|
 MURMANSK — Whenever you feel the urge to complain about the injustice of the climate where you live, you can always comfort yourself with the fact that it’s probably colder in Murmansk, where snow can linger into May and reappear in September.
But the chilly temperatures and remote conditions come with their own rewards. Pristine wilderness, a long ski season and a prime location for viewing the northern lights are all points of pride for Murmansk residents. |
|
 One really needs to see Klaus Bischoff talk about his cars. The mechanic, who has more than 40 years of experience working with Porsche cars, is the director of the Porsche Rolling Museum in Stuttgart, Germany and pets his beloved vehicles as if they were champion horses of a noble breed as he speaks about their victories. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive