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MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny’s plans to launch a debit card that donates a percentage of all transactions to his anti-corruption work have been frozen after the bank behind the project pulled out, an associate of the opposition leader said.
“The bank decided not to pursue the project,” Vladimir Ashurkov, chief executive of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, said without specifying the bank. “I understand they were afraid of the political risks.”
The launch of the co-branded card, envisaged as the latest accessory for anti-Putin protesters, was scheduled for earlier this year but has been postponed indefinitely.
“We had talks with a couple of other banks, but there are no concrete plans at this stage,” Ashurkov said Friday. |
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 MOSCOW — A broad swathe of expert opinion maintains that the only way for Russia to defuse the ticking time-bomb of its pension system, which runs an annual deficit of 1. |
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MOSCOW — Around 200 people held a rally Sunday in Moscow to mark the sixth anniversary of the unsolved murder of crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya.
Participants held up candles and pictures of the journalist and spoke in remembrance of Politkovskaya, a sharp critic of Kremlin policies in Chechnya, who was shot inside her Moscow apartment building in 2006. |
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MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a first-person documentary aired on his 60th birthday Sunday that the current generation of opposition leaders needs to be cast aside and he brushed aside concerns the two-year jail sentence for punk bank Pussy Riot was too severe. |
 MOSCOW — Thousands of kilometers from the capital, a lone interactive whiteboard sits in a customs warehouse on Russia's southern border.
The device's Turkish manufacturer, Vestel, is rushing to get the unit to its Moscow showroom and start selling the product to schools. But more than two months is expected to pass before that happens and Vestel can join other companies cashing in on supplying classrooms with the newest education technology. |
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 MOSCOW — State-controlled NTV television is scheduled to air two new politically themed documentaries this weekend: an opposition expose Friday and a feature about the day-to-day life of President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, his 60th birthday. |
 MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry on Thursday complained that it had not been properly informed by United States authorities that a group of Russian citizens had been arrested on charges of smuggling microelectronics, raising “serious concerns” for Russia, Interfax reported.
“A lot is unclear in this story. It raises serious concerns, and we are counting on U.S. authorities to protect the rights and interests of the Russian citizens who have been arrested and face these charges,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told journalists. |
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 MOSCOW — The Communications and Press Ministry has proposed banning children from using Wi-Fi networks in public, potentially making cafes, restaurants and other locations providing the service responsible for enforcing the law. |
 MOSCOW – The Coalition of Kiosk Owners said Wednesday that it would submit a 165,000-signature petition to President Vladimir Putin this week to halt pending bans on sales of cigarettes and beer.
A law passed last year forbids kiosks from selling beer as of Jan. 1. The Health and Social Development Ministry is now seeking to ban retail outlets with a floor area of less than 50 square meters from selling tobacco products. |
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 MOSCOW – Foreign films could become a rare delicacy for movie lovers if the Culture Ministry approves proposals to impose quotas on such films in local theaters. |
 MOSCOW — UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, is cutting back its presence on the ground in Russia and might even exit the country, a development experts described as a significant blow to children's welfare.
The decision reflects a failure to negotiate a new operating agreement with the Kremlin, which is increasingly eager for Russia to be regarded as a donor country rather than a recipient of aid. |
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 MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed a law introducing a single voting day for regional and federal elections, a measure that opposition politicians said was illegal and would benefit the ruling party. |
 MOSCOW – An 11-year-old boy discovered a mammoth carcass in the northern reaches of the Krasnoyarsk region in what scientists are calling one of the best-preserved specimens ever found.
After making the discovery, young Yevgeny Salinder told his parents, who then informed polar explorers living on the icy Taimir Peninsula where the discovery was made, the Taimirsky Dolgano-Nenetsky district administration said in a statement Thursday. |
All photos from issue.
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 The defense said it would demand the exclusion of an expert analysis from the case as the hearings of the Trial of 12 continued after a two-week pause Tuesday, dismissing the prosecution’s experts as utterly incompetent and unqualified.
The defense exposed large sections of Wikipedia articles copied by the “experts” complete with hyperlinks and formatting, a lack of specialist education and ungrounded claims in the text of the analysis, which described the secretly recorded videos of The Other Russia’s activists meetings as meetings of the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP).
If found guilty, the activists face between two and three years in prison.
Vitaly Batov and Natalya Kryukova, who analyzed the videos for the prosecution, came from Moscow to testify in St. |
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PAINTED LADY
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A model shows off her finery at the Nevskiye Berega beauty festival that ran from Friday to Monday at the Petersburgsky Sports and Concert
Complex. The regular event showcases the work of beauty therapists, hairdressers, make-up artists and other beauty industry professionals. |
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The global online travel resource My Destination has launched operations in St. Petersburg as part of a global expansion covering more than 100 other destinations and spanning 60 countries.
The My Destination website is powered by a community of local experts who provide unrivaled local knowledge and unique local deals, said Tim Stanley, director of My Destination in St.
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A planned land reclamation project in the Gulf of Finland near the town of Sestroretsk is dangerous for local ecology, according to a commission set up by the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, Interfax reported.
The assembly’s commission on the ecological protection of the St. |
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Passenger Saves Lives
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A bus passenger saved a number of lives when she took the steering wheel from a dying driver on the St. |
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Three suspects in the murder last month of Alexander Viktorov, rector of the St. Petersburg Service and Economics University, were arrested Sunday, including the alleged hitman.
According to the St. Petersburg police, the detention was made with the help of special forces, Interfax reported. |
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St. Petersburg military enthusiasts will re-enact historical events at the Oreshek fortress at the Days of Russian Glory festival on Oct. 6.
The re-enactment will commemorate the anniversary of Tsar Peter the Great’s capture of the ancient Russian fortress from the Swedes in 1702. |
 Hundreds of bikes that could be used free of charge may grace St. Petersburg’s streets next year, as at least two schemes started by local firms in 2012 are to be extended.
Marina Veselova, coordinator of the FreeBike project run by Velodrive company, said Monday at a roundtable hosted by Vecherny Peterburg newspaper that the scheme had been launched in August. |
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Helsinkibar will celebrate the food of Finland with a three-day Finnish Cuisine Weekend starting Friday.
Finnish star chef Jyrki Tsutsunen, who is popular in Finland for his cookery TV shows and who has been chef of the General Consulate of Finland since 2007, will offer a national menu that includes pike cutlets, Lapland mashed potatoes, applesauce with parsnips, sautéed chanterelles and cranberry sauce. |
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 MOSCOW — On Monday, the same day that the U.S. Agency for International Development ended its 20-year presence in Russia, President Vladimir Putin proposed bringing nonprofit groups that provide social services under closer government supervision, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — A close ally of President Vladimir Putin lashed out Monday at a Russian Orthodox protest that closed a performance of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” as “just plain stupid. |
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MOSCOW — Downcast officials in Krasnodar and Yaroslavl tried to stifle their disappointment Monday after their cities failed to make the list of host sites for the 2018 World Cup.
Some in Yaroslavl were quick to link their marginalization with the humiliation of the ruling United Russia party during mayoral elections earlier this year. |
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MOSCOW — Construction workers in the city of Tula unearthed medieval homes and jewelry while building an underground car park near the city’s kremlin, a local museum said Monday. |
 TBILISI, Georgia — President Mikhail Saakashvili on Tuesday conceded that his party lost Georgia’s parliamentary election, defying the opposition’s expectations that he would cling to power at all costs and preserving his legacy as a pro-Western leader who brought democracy to the former Soviet republic. |
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MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin did not attend Saturday’s reunification of his nationalist Rodina party, but the re-emergent bloc is likely to become his political vehicle, pundits and party insiders said. |
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MOSCOW — The tail section of a wartime shell sent to be scrapped at a Krasnodar region military facility landed in a vegetable patch while its owner was digging potatoes, a news report said Tuesday.
The shell, which could date back to the 1940s and was meant to be destroyed at the Taskino army base, landed in the stunned gardener’s patch Saturday after exploding during officers’ attempts to destroy obsolete ammunition. |
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The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) and the Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) have opened a Taiwan Trade Center in St. Petersburg in an effort to push for more development in economic and cultural exchanges with Russia and boost communications between the business circles of the two countries.
The local center is the 56th of its kind for Taiwan. TAITRA’s first branch in Russia, the Taiwan Trade Center in Moscow, was established in 1992.
TAITRA is Taiwan’s leading non-profit trade promotion organization. Its mission is to raise the country’s business profile on an international level and expand global markets for Taiwan’s producers. |
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 MOSCOW — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg paid a visit to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Monday during a trip coinciding with the social network’s push to recruit programmers and tap coding talent in Russia. |
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MOSCOW — The Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill will “almost certainly” be closed in the near future, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said.
“There has been a lot of discussion, there is a group that is analyzing various courses of action...most likely the plant on Baikal will close, almost certainly,” Dvorkovich was quoted as saying last Friday. |
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MOSCOW — The number of mortgages issued this year could reach record levels, with 933,000 deals worth 1 trillion rubles ($32.2 billion) expected to be financed in the real estate market, Alexander Semenyaka, general director of the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending, said last week. |
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MOSCOW — A new town of 60,000 residents will appear next to the science city of Zhukovsky, 20 kilometers east of Moscow, as part of the planned National Aircraft Manufacturing Center.
A 2008 decree by then-President Vladimir Putin ordered the creation of an aviation manufacturing technopark in Zhukovsky, to include the design bureaus of United Aircraft Corporation, Ilyushin, MiG and Sukhoi. |
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 As the U.S. presidential election approaches, President Barack Obama’s “reset” with Russia has been dealt two painful blows, both of which are either directly or indirectly the fault of the Obama administration. After working in Russia since 1992, USAID was ordered to close the doors of its Moscow office by Monday. |
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Regional elections, which will be held in less than two weeks, will be the first since the State Duma elections last December that sparked the mass protest movement. |
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 Perestroika is back. Interest in Russian rock music in Finland is on the rise again, says Finnish author Tomi Huttunen, whose recent book on Russian rock is the second in Finland after Artemy Troitsky’s pioneering “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” published in Finland at the height of perestroika in 1988 under the title “Terveisiä Tšaikovskille” (Tell Tchaikovsky the News).
Huttunen, whose book is called “Pietari on rock,” a pun that can be roughly translated as “St. Petersburg Means Rock,” came to St. Petersburg last week with a bus full of about 30 interested Finns from all around the country including remote Lapland as well as eastern and western Finland.
They walked around places made legendary by the Leningrad rock musicians of the 1980s — including former locations of the Leningrad Rock Club and the bohemian hangout unofficially known as “Saigon” — and attended a concert and a party at the Mitki art group’s studio featuring Vladimir Rekshan of the local 1960s/70s rock legends Sankt Peterburg, as well as Alexei Zubarev, guitarist with the art-rock band Sezon Dozhdei in the 1980s and Boris Grebenshchikov’s BG Band and Akvarium in the 1990s. |
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FOR SPT
MARTIN ROSETE’S FILM ‘VOICE
OVER’ IS ONE OF THOSE BEING
SHOWN IN THE CITY THIS WEEK
AT THIS YEAR’S MANHATTAN
SHORT FILM FESTIVAL. |
 The world’s largest short film festival begins Wednesday in St. Petersburg — and in another 299 cities around the globe.
Ten films from Norway, the Netherlands, the U.K., Peru, France, Romania, the U.S., Spain and Russia will be shown simultaneously in 300 cities, and everyone who goes to see them will have the chance to be on the jury: The winner of the Manhattan Short Film Festival is chosen not by professional critics, but by audiences.
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Ñà÷îê: net, lobby, slacker
A couple of weeks ago, President Vladimir Putin made a joke about Pussy Riot and group sex — or rather he quoted an old Soviet joke about group sex. Like all old jokes, there are about 25 versions of it, but the punch line is always something like this: ãðóïïîâîé ñåêñ ëó÷øå, ÷åì èíäèâèäóàëüíûé, ïîòîìó ÷òî ìîæíî ñà÷êàíóòü (group sex is better than individual sex because you can —).
Rats! Just when it gets interesting, the poor foreigner is slayed by slang.
Out come the reference books. Search engines are set in motion. Phone calls are made. In researching this tantalizing word, I have learned a tremendous amount about ancient Russian games, the habits of university students, the joy of fishing and butterfly hunting and the extraordinary fantasies and speculations of an army — and navy — of armchair etymologists. |
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 Psoy Korolenko, the Moscow-based singer-songwriter, is set to perform as part of a duo with St. Petersburg-based pianist and composer Alyona Alenkova this Friday at Dusche club, in a concert dedicated to their upcoming album “Russian Riches. |
 Juris Poskus’s “Kolka Cool,” a poetic black-and-white film about the tough love between rough youths from a tiny village on Latvia’s Baltic coast, took the Best Film award at the St. Petersburg International Film festival that concluded Saturday.
The Latvian director has spent his summer vacation in Kolka for years, and recently it occurred to him that the fishing village has a particular breed of people who would serve as a fascinating subject for a film. |
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Reach for the Sky
Once again the benefits of St. Petersburg’s low, flat horizon have yielded another excellent rooftop restaurant, this one a stone’s throw from Petrogradskaya metro station, perched atop the Tolstoi shopping mall. |
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 NALCHIK — Everyone knows that a horseshoe brings good luck. So maybe it’s no coincidence that Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic, means “little horseshoe” in the local Kabardian and Balkar languages.
Several versions are floating around about the origins of Nalchik’s name. Some say the Nalchik River makes a horseshoe-shaped curve in this city. Others say Duke Atazhukin, an 18th-century warrior and politician who played a major role in the history of the Kabardians, lost a horseshoe nearby, while a third version has it that a lot of people lost their horseshoes in the area around the time when Nalchik was established. |
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 Wednesday evening marks Zenit’s first home game in the Champions League group stage, and the face-off with Italian side AC Milan could not come at a worse time. |
 “Art Has a Mind of Its Own”: The motto of this year’s Beethovenfest, which ends on Oct. 7 in Bonn, is the kind of thought that could easily have come from the U.S. composer John Cage, renowned for his unorthodox use of musical instruments in search of a new sound. It is revealing that the centennial of the birth of the eccentric composer was one of the key events of this year’s Beethoven festival. |
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Issues Archive