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Filmmaker Dmitry Meskhiyev, who served as the head of City Hall’s Culture Committee from November 2011, has resigned from his job amid speculation that his departure may have been prompted by the prosecutor’s office’s current investigation into the committee’s financial activities.
Meskhiyev himself said the sole reason for his departure was “an interesting job offer” that he felt he could not turn down. He declined to give further details.
Meskhiyev’s short tenure as head of the Culture Committee was marked by numerous conflicts with members of the local artistic community. Even his allies concede that he managed to make more enemies than friends during his period of state service.
For example, the official vigorously defended the merger between the legendary St. |
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CATCHING RAYS
Alexander Belenky / spt
City residents take advantage of the scorching summer temperatures at the weekend to relax on the beach and go swimming in the Gulf of Finland in the resort town of Dyuny. Rain showers are forecast for this weekend, though Friday should be warm and sunny. |
 A new five-story business center and hotel complex due to appear next to the Oktyabrsky concert hall is causing consternation among the city’s Greek community as well as preservationists.
The design for the new building, set to be constructed on the former site of the hall’s ticket office, has already been selected and is currently being assessed by a state inspection.
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A flash mob to call for more bike lanes to be introduced to St. Petersburg is planned to be held Sunday on Prospekt Lunacharskogo, located in a remote part of the Kalininsky District.
The 4.5-kilometer section of Prospekt Lunacharskogo between Prospekt Kultury and Svetlanovsky Prospekt includes one of the very few officially designated bike lanes in the city. |
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Eight protesters were arrested during a Strategy 31 protest in St. Petersburg Tuesday, in the first rally in defense of the right of assembly since stricter rally restrictions were passed into law in the wake of mass protests against electoral fraud. |
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A Nevsky district court ordered a former cook working on a river tour boat to be detained for attacking people with a knife near the city’s River Station, Interfax reported.
“While in detention the man said that he had a bag with explosives, which proved not to be true. |
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The legal nihilism rampant in Russia was once again the focus of discussion last week, as representatives of the city’s Institute for the Rule of Law set up by the European University in St. |
 Almost 300 people gathered in the Dubki park in the neighboring town of Sestroretsk late last month to voice their protest against the reconstruction of the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Local protesters overtook the park wearing hats with slogans and carrying balloons to express their dissatisfaction with the high-profile city project. |
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A man was killed in the Krasnoselsky district of the city last week after a conflict arose over his dog.
On the morning of July 25, Sergei Dorin was walking his Staffordshire Terrier — a breed historically used for fighting — when Ruslan Merzlyakov, who was passing by with his six-year-old son, reprimanded him for walking his dog without a muzzle, saying that the dog could pose a threat to other people, Fontanka. |
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The new St. Petersburg zoo, whose construction is to begin next year, will be the biggest zoo in Europe.
The zoo, which will be made up of six islands inhabited by animals from different continents, is due to open in stages with its first islands (Eurasia and Southeast Asia) opening in 2015-2016, the press service of Intarsia, the construction company in charge of the project, said last week, Interfax reported. |
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Fountains Switched Off
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A number of the city’s fountains were turned off in St. Petersburg during Russia’s Navy Day celebrations on July 29 and will not work on Paratroopers’ Day on Aug. |
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Two people were killed on Saturday night when the car in which they were traveling plunged from the raised Liteiny Bridge into the River Neva.
The car drove through the barrier erected in front of the open bridge at about 3 a.m. and fell into the water.
The car was dragged out of the river up the Arsenal embankment on Sunday morning. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has signed a landmark visa agreement with the United States, the Kremlin said Monday, allowing the long-delayed reform to come into force in September.
The Kremlin did not say when Putin had signed the agreement, but according to a scan on the official pravo. |
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MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, a driving force behind massive protests against Vladimir Putin’s rule, faced a new criminal probe Tuesday on charges of theft that come amid a widening Kremlin crackdown on dissent. |
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MOSCOW — A United Russia lawmaker has announced a bill that would ban the media from disclosing the ethnic backgrounds of suspects, victims and others when covering crimes and trials in what he calls an attempt to reduce racial violence.
Such a ban would reduce ethnic tension, State Duma Deputy Shamsail Saraliyev told Izvestia in an interview published late last week.
“Every day, the media report ‘Two Chechens killed a Russian; an Armenian attacked a Russian.’ Why is there such an emphasis on ethnicity?” he said.
Saraliyev, who served as press and information minister in his native Chechnya before being elected to the Duma in December, argued that this provokes ethnic conflict. |
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 MOSCOW — One of the plaintiffs in the trial against female punk band Pussy Riot reluctantly accepted the apologies of the defendants for their performance at a Moscow cathedral as the trial entered a second day Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Russian authorities broadly respect religious freedoms, but some minority faiths suffer discrimination locally, a new U.S. State Department report said.
The International Religious Freedom Report for 2011, accessible on the State Department website, found that while the Russian Constitution guarantees the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, “laws and policies restrict religious freedom by denying some groups legal status and misidentifying their literature as extremist. |
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 MOSCOW — As Spain’s leading athletes go in and out of the Olympic Village in east London during this summer’s games, they probably have a whole raft of questions on their minds. When do I have to show up for qualifying heats? How many more practices should I fit in? And why, Dios mio, do I have to wear this uniform?
Russian sportswear company Bosco Sport dressed the Spanish Olympic team for free this summer, and both the company and its Olympic outfits have been receiving tons of coverage in media outlets worldwide — though it might not be the publicity that the company had hoped for. |
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MOSCOW — Hampstead Heath is a popular real estate destination for wealthy Russians who are wary of central London.
On one of the highest points of London, surrounded by serene ponds and historic architecture, is a real estate alcove for wealthy, and often secretive, Russian buyers. |
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MOSCOW — The privatization of state-owned lands proposed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will allow for more efficient use of land plots, but a clear mechanism for selling those lands needs to be created, an Economic Development Ministry official said Monday.
The existing legislation should be amended “as soon as possible” for the government to put the plots up for tender, said Andrei Ivakin, head of the property department at the ministry. |
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 Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has made his second public statement regarding the Pussy Riot case. His first comment was in an interview to five Russian television networks in April. He said that in carrying out the stunt at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, the members of Pussy Riot got exactly what they wanted — popularity. |
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Blogger Alexei Navalny has accused Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin of concealing real estate and business interests in the Czech Republic. |
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 With more and more Western musicians — from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Peter Gabriel and Sting — showing their support for Pussy Riot, the female punk-rockers who have found themselves behind bars for an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow church in March, Russian musicians are being criticized for not showing enough support.
The trial against members of Pussy Riot opened in Moscow’s Tagansky District Court on Monday.
Last week, a Pussy Riot support committee — featuring opposition activists and artists — was established in St. Petersburg with the aim of holding benefit events in the city beginning in early September.
Televizor’s Mikhail Borzykin and the Electric Guerillas’ Vadim Kurylyov are so far the only musicians on the committee, which includes opposition activists Olga Kurnosova and Mikhail Yeliseyev, journalist Dmitry Gubin, actors Andrei Devotchenko and Larisa Dmitriyeva and film director Andrei Nekrasov.
However, the committee said it hopes that the number of musicians on the committee will increase, referring to international support for the cause and an open letter calling for the release of the women, who have been held in custody for nearly five months despite having young children. |
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FOR SPT
Works by henri matisse are on show together with those of marc chagall and joan miro at a new exhibit devoted to the school of paris. |
 Work by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro went on display in the city last Friday — at a photo gallery. Yet none of the artists were photographers. What, then, connects the artists and why is their work on show at the Rachmaninov Garden photo gallery?
There are some who deny that photography is a true art, while others consider graphics to be the predecessor of monochrome photography.
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 Work by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro went on display in the city last Friday — at a photo gallery. Yet none of the artists were photographers. What, then, connects the artists and why is their work on show at the Rachmaninov Garden photo gallery?
There are some who deny that photography is a true art, while others consider graphics to be the predecessor of monochrome photography. |
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Ñðîê: term, duration, deadline
According to the great etymologist Max Fasmer, when ancient Russians wanted to cut a deal, they said something like ñúðåêó, which meant “I agree. |
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As Olympic fever sweeps the planet, there are those glued to the TV screen, anxiously following their team’s progress, and then there are those who just cannot manage to feel even the slightest interest in sport. No matter how indifferent you feel to the Games themselves, the Olympic offer at the Hotel Astoria is enough to get anyone feeling warm and fuzzy about female wrestlers and men jumping into sandpits.
The Astoria has teamed up with Brown’s Hotel in London, which along with the Astoria belongs to Rocco Forte Hotels, to bring some dangerously delectable cocktails from The Donovan Bar at Brown’s to the Astoria’s Kandinsky Bar for the duration of the Summer Olympics. |
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 Movie director Timur Bekmambetov has been responsible for some of the Russian film industry’s major post-Perestroika hits, including “Night Watch” (2004) and “Day Watch” (2006). |
 Last week, a new star rose on NTV television, spreading fear throughout the land.
It was Sveta Kuritsyna, 19, the member of a pro-Kremlin youth group who famously babbled in a comment to a journalist that the Putin era was great because “we have started to dress more better. |
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Skylight
A restaurant named Skylight could very reasonably be expected to be found on the top floor. We were therefore somewhat surprised to be escorted to a wide white staircase leading to the second floor of the newly opened Crowne Plaza St. |
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 MOSCOW — When Moscow officials recently banned swimming in half of the city’s outdoor bathing spots because of high levels of microbes and chemicals, the news underlined a perpetual worry: That the water here leaves a lot to be desired.
For most residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the most populous and cosmopolitan cities in the country, that concern typically isn’t over a swim in a local pond but the water coming out of the kitchen faucet. |
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 On Aug. 1, 1812 Russia gained its first and crucially important victory during the Napoleonic wars. The Battle of Klyastitsy in Belarus changed the whole course of the 1812 military campaign, and laid the foundation for future victories. |
 MOSCOW — Moscow city wants more tourists and has started implementing a plan to make life simpler and easier for the foreign visitor. The capital says it has put up new signs in English, sent out volunteers to help tourists, launched a call center, a new website and PR campaign, introduced new souvenirs such as memory sticks and set up tours on double-decker buses. |
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 NEW DELHI — About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country’s northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day.
The outage stopped hundreds of trains in their tracks, darkened traffic lights, shuttered the Delhi Metro and left nearly everyone — the police, water utilities, private businesses and citizens — without electricity. |
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WARSAW — At the end of a rocky foreign tour, senior campaign strategist Stuart Stevens said he was confident that Mitt Romney’s strengths as a candidate would matter more to voters than any controversial comments made on his trips to Britain, Israel and Poland. |
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BEIRUT — Humanitarian conditions have grown even more dire in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo with activists reporting dwindling stocks of food and cooking gas and only intermittent electricity supplies Tuesday as droves of residents flee 11 days of intense clashes between rebels and regime forces. |
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MANILA, Philippines — Fierce wind and heavy rain from a slow-moving, offshore typhoon battered the Philippines again Tuesday, killing at least 10 people, displacing 145,000 others and briefly scaring authorities when it veered onto a direct path toward the archipelago. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive