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 MOSCOW – A week after President Vladimir Putin called totalitarian sects a "threat to society," pro-Kremlin youth activists in Moscow staged a picket against Mormonism, accusing the U.S.-based religious group of a range of crimes from fraud to pedophilia to sheltering CIA agents.
In addition to its stated goal of fighting lawbreakers, Thursday's protest by United Russia's Young Guard appeared aimed at raising fears about Western influence, a growing trend in recent months. |
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.jpg) MOSCOW – Federal investigators have opened an inquiry in response to a complaint from two women that they were held in the basement of a Moscow shop against their will for a decade. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday rejected a government plan to develop science and technology after describing its reliance on a surge in private funding as "absolutely unrealistic."
The proposal, reviewed at a Cabinet meeting, envisioned that private companies would increase spending on research tenfold by 2020, compared to this year. None of the Cabinet members put a ruble number on either state or private expenditures during the discussion.
A brainchild of the Education and Science Ministry, the 2013-2020 plan had to gain approval from the Finance Ministry, which had insisted on reducing the state share of funding for the proposal to 30 percent over time. |
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 MOSCOW — The Federation Council on Wednesday passed amendments to the law on treason that could make it possible for law enforcement officials to target people collaborating with international organizations. |
 MOSCOW — The co-owners of Norilsk Nickel have resumed talks to settle the long-standing dispute over control of the nickel and palladium giant, in a move that could result in replacing the company’s management.
The two largest shareholders of Norilsk Nickel — Vladimir Potanin’s Interros holding and Oleg Deripaska’s RusAl — have returned to the negotiations table, Norilsk Nickel’s chief executive Vladimir Strzhalkovsky told journalists Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW — A State Duma deputy has called on veteran television journalist Vladimir Pozner to apologize for saying on national television that Russian courts are unfair and that the prosecution of an opposition activist is being carried out KGB-style. |
 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Thursday proposed increasing the membership of the presidential human rights council from 40 to over 60 people after more than 400,000 votes were cast for candidates to the council in an online selection process.
Putin suggested the expansion at a meeting Thursday with council head Mikhail Fedotov, who presented the president with over 80 candidates for 13 open spots on the body. |
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MOSCOW — As the search-and-rescue operation for the missing Amurskaya cargo ship entered its fifth day Thursday, investigators said the freighter had violated multiple safety regulations and was not cleared to leave port. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has delayed a series of official visits abroad, giving rise to speculation that he is suffering from an injury exacerbated during a hang-glider flight with a flock of rare Siberian cranes in September.
Although the Kremlin officially cites Putin's busy schedule as the reason for the postponement of the official visits, news reports said Thursday that Putin's health was to blame. |
All photos from issue.
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The future of the European Embankment looks to be in doubt, with speculation swirling around the large-scale project after its investor announced the discontinuation of funding for it last week.
The site is now tipped to be inhabited by the Supreme and Supreme Arbitration Courts, which will reportedly move from Moscow to St. Petersburg and occupy the site where Peterburg City, a daughter structure of VTB Development, had planned to construct an elite multi-functional residential complex at a cost of 47 billion rubles ($1.5 billion).
The presidential administration has earmarked the site for the courts, Kommersant daily reported Monday, referring to anonymous sources in the courts. No other media reported the claims.
Last week, VTB Development, which is headed by Sergei Matviyenko, son of St. Petersburg’s former governor Valentina Matviyenko, officially announced the discontinuation of construction financing for the European Embankment project. The company did not comment on the reasons for the decision.
The presidential administration allegedly plans to buy the European Embankment from VTB. The prospect of impending negotiations on the issue serve as an explanation for the discontinuation of the project, though VTB Development has still made no official comment, Kommersant said, referring to sources on the St. |
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DIZZY HEIGHTS
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Cleaners dust the giant chandeliers in one of the halls of the State Hermitage Museum on Monday. The museum unveiled its plans to restore the legendary Strasser
clock the same day. The 18th-century clock, which has had an eventful history, is due to be restored for the Hermitage’s 250th birthday in 2014. |
 The Trial of 12 — in which activists from The Other Russia face charges of re-launching and conducting the “extremist activities” of the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in a case they see as fabricated and politically motivated — hit a new low this week, when the prosecution presented the evidence collected during searches of activists’ apartments in 2010 and 2011.
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 The State Hermitage Museum’s legendary Johann Strasser clock, also known as “the mechanical orchestra,” is to be restored by 2014 as part of the celebrations of the museum’s 250th anniversary.
The elaborate 18th-century clock has been silent for at least 150 years. |
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Would-Be Emigrants
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The proportion of Russians willing to move abroad permanently has grown in the last four years from 17 percent in 2008 to 22 percent this year, Interfax reported, referring to Levada Center research. |
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 MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced at a weekend congress of his new Civic Platform party that he is quitting business to enter politics full time, and delegates overwhelmingly elected him as their leader.
Prokhorov, 47, said he would place his fortune, estimated at $13. |
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MOSCOW — Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s 1990s privatizations and head of Rusnano, said the authorities can’t stop anti-Kremlin street protests and predicted that the rallies could easily swell to half a million people. |
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MOSCOW — A Just Russia, the moderate-left State Duma party that includes several leading opposition figures, suffered the latest in a series of setbacks Monday when leaders of two of its founding groups announced they were splitting off.
Leaders from the Pensioners’ Party and the Rodina party said they were ditching A Just Russia because party officials had put personal ambition ahead of party unity.
“Rodina’s ideas, activists and leaders were either ignored or dismissed,” Igor Zotov and Alexei Zhuravlyov said in a joint statement signed Monday, Interfax reported.
Analysts said the move was no surprise and was unlikely to spark an exodus from A Just Russia, but signaled trouble within the party, especially for leader Sergei Mironov. |
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 MOSCOW — The Swedish government has awarded a Russian human rights lawyer from Dagestan with the Per Anger Prize for defending victims of human rights violations, a news report said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Loose cargo may have sunk a freighter that disappeared in rough seas in the Far East, shipping industry insiders said Tuesday, while bad weather continued to hamper a broadening rescue operation.
But the Russian Union of Seamen rejected the idea that the Amurskaya, which was carrying 700 tons of gold ore, might have been the target of foul play because of its cargo. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court on Tuesday upheld a decision by City Hall to ban a gay pride parade on May 27.
The parade’s organizer, Nikolai Alexeyev, said the ruling indicated that the authorities had no intention of fulfilling their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and promised to lodge an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights. |
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 St. Petersburg hotels traditionally rely on conferences and other services to see them through the winter period, when fewer tourists visit the city than in the summer months. This year, however, local hotels are expecting more tourists in the coming winter season than during the same period a year ago.
According to data from Maris, part of the CBRE affiliate network, this year three-star hotels will see 42-52-percent occupation (compared to 35-42 percent in 2011), four-star hotels will be 40-47 percent occupied (compared to 39-45 percent in 2011) and 35-45 percent of rooms will be occupied in five-star hotels (compared to 35-42 percent in 2011). |
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 Now that business conferences on all conceivable subjects — from medical research and tourism development to heavy machinery — are regularly held in St. |
 The St. Petersburg labor market has entered its traditional autumn peak, with local companies showing 58 percent more vacancies in late August than at the beginning of the summer, according to data from the recruitment website HeadHunter.
“The growth of activity on the market is consistent in this period between the summer holidays and the run-up to New Year that starts in late November to early December,” said Maria Margulis, head of the 1000 Kadrov recruitment agency. |
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MOSCOW — The government has published a proposal to improve the services of its trade offices around the world.
Put together by the Economic Development Ministry, the plan seeks to help domestic companies in the bare-knuckles global fight for markets, resources and investment. |
 MOSCOW — After six full years of development, President Vladimir Putin finally has a car more beautiful than U.S. President Barack Obama’s, the ZiL auto company announced.
A ZIL-4112P prototype, with a 7.7 liter engine and six-speed automatic transmission, was unveiled to federal television channels Sunday just months after Putin ordered government departments to seek appropriately patriotic, domestic alternatives to the mostly German foreign brands he and other top government officials have become accustomed to being driven around in. |
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 As City Hall focuses its efforts on bringing inexpensive hotels to the city, developers say that in order to attract investors, some kind of financial incentive is necessary. |
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 The decision by BP and AAR, the Russian shareholders of TNK-BP, to sell their stakes to state-owned Rosneft crowns a very successful year for the company — and particularly for Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Before taking over TNK-BP, the country’s third-largest oil company, Rosneft struck several multi-year investment deals. |
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The views of Soviet dissident writer Alexander Zinovyev, much like his work and his life, cannot be categorized according to conventional ideas or stereotypes. |
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 Alexei ‘Lyokha’ Nikonov, songwriter and frontman of PTVP, one of Russia’s most radical bands, describes the group’s new album “Ultimatum” as “most hard-edged and insolent in its nihilism.”
According to Nikonov’s album notes, it is “an attack on daily routine [and on the] opportunism of those who surround us and [on the] conformism of those who are being surrounded; war against narrow-mindedness and servility; war against Philistinism and indulgence; our Ultimatum.”
“Ultimatum,” made available for free download on Friday, is the band’s eleventh album. PTVP’s first disc in two years, it is a departure from “Poryadok Veshchei” (The Way Things Are), the 2010 album described by Nikonov as PTVP’s “pop album.”
“This [“Ultimatum”] is obviously not a pop album, there are no hits here. We consciously made a point of not having any pop songs, even if the songs are short — 2’30” and sort of radio format — but this is all, of course, a parody of radio format,” said Nikonov, 39, sitting in the corridor outside PTVP’s rehearsal room Sunday. |
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FOR SPT
LITHOGRAPHS BY THE FRENCH
ARTIST HENRI DE TOULOUSELAUTREC
ARE ON SHOW AT THE
CITY’S PERINNIYE RYADY GALLERY. |
 The fifth Bok o Bok (Side By Side) film festival, which aims to strengthen the LGBT community in Russia and unify people against discrimination in all its forms, opened in the city last week with screenings at several venues.
This year’s festival theme is the worldwide LGBT movement, and the festival features films from countries around the world, including China, Chile and Uganda, where the LGBT movement is relatively new and faces strong opposition.
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Ñåêðåò: secret, know-how
One unexpected consequence of having a dog is that you instantly become the go-to person for anyone looking for an address in your neighborhood. You are clearly ìåñòíàÿ (local) or the more slangy çäåøíÿÿ (from around here), so you must know how to get to Polyclinic No. 586 or the much vaguer ìåñòî, ãäå óëè÷íûé ðûíîê ïî âûõîäíûì (the place where there’s a street market on the weekend).
Usually midway through my earnest and detailed instructions for how to get from here to there, it dawns on the lost Russian inquirer that a foreigner is giving them directions. Sometimes that disqualifies me in their eyes and they hurry off to find a real Russian. |
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 The stars of the Moulin Rouge are on show on Dumskaya Ulitsa, in an exhibition of Parisian bohemian decadence par excellence.
Housed in the Perinniye Ryadi gallery, the troupe of the legendary dance hall performs in all its color and glory in an exhibit of lithographs by the French post-impressionist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), that opened Thursday under the title “Paris, Paris. |
 The 10th Multivision international animation festival began in the city Saturday with an evening of French animated films at Dom Kino to mark International Animation Day (Oct. 28).
The evening formed part of a series of cultural events organized to mark the opening of the festival, including a campaign in support of putting up a memorial to one of the best loved characters of Russian animation, the Plasticine Crow, which took place on Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa on Oct. |
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A passage to India
Cardamom, which opened at the beginning of the autumn at the foot of the Tuchkov Bridge on Vasilyevsky Island, is the latest arrival on the city’s small but unhurriedly growing Indian culinary scene. |
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 St. Petersburg’s blossoming contemporary culture scene was bolstered over the weekend by the addition of a brand new performance arts space the like of which has not existed in the city before.
A dedicated group of creative enthusiasts, among them the organizers of the Lyogkiye Lyudi contemporary dance school and the ByeByeBallet art space on Ulitsa Belinskogo is behind the new project: A multi-purpose space — Skorohod — that will see performances of contemporary indie theater and dance productions, as well as music performances, lectures and festivals, both foreign and local. |
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Issues Archive