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MOSCOW (AP) — The Soviet soldiers used their own bodies as shields, covering women and children escaping on ferry boats from a Nazi bombardment that killed 40,000 civilians in a single day. It was the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II.
"They were all hit in the back," said 90-year-old Alexei Stefanov. "But they did not flee."
Stefanov is among the few surviving veterans of the battle, which claimed 2 million lives and raged for nearly 200 days before the Red Army turned back the Nazi forces, decisively changing the course of the war. Russia celebrated the 70th anniversary of that victory on Saturday, with President Vladimir Putin taking part in ceremonies in Volgograd, the current name of the city in southern Russia that stretches along the western bank of the Volga River. |
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 MOSCOW — Russia on Saturday celebrated the 70th anniversary of the decisive Soviet victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad amid talk of the revival of Stalinism, the temporary renaming of Volgograd to Stalingrad and the launch of buses bearing Stalin's image. |
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MOSCOW – Ballet may be high art onstage, but last month's acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet chief Sergei Filin has drawn attention to the fact that it is a dirty business behind the scenes.
Two weeks after an unidentified assailant threw sulfuric acid in Filin's face outside his apartment building, the attack remains in the national spotlight. |
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MOSCOW – Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev took the floor in the Kremlin on Thursday to outline a wide range of goals for his Cabinet, in a move seen as a show of unwavering support for him from President Vladimir Putin. |
 MOSCOW – A leading rights group lashed out at President Vladimir Putin on Thursday by saying he had “unleashed the worst political crackdown” in the country’s post-Soviet history after returning to the Kremlin last year.
Human Rights Watch’s annual report, released Thursday, says the string of restrictive laws enacted since last summer, as well as the ongoing harassment of Kremlin critics, amount to “the swift reversal of former President Dmitry Medvedev’s few, timid advances on political freedoms. |
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MOSCOW – Provincial judge by day, war correspondent by night.
That very nearly describes Sergei Berezhnoi, a 57-year-old arbitration court judge in Belgorod who traveled to Syria last week to observe the country's civil war and write firsthand accounts for an obscure Abkhazian news portal. |
 Amid a rising number of strikes nationwide, workers at metro-railcar producer Vagonmash appealed to the St. Petersburg human rights ombudsman to demand back wages of millions of rubles.
The St. Petersburg-based company, which produces railcars for the Moscow, St. Petersburg and foreign metro systems, owes the 592 workers more than 35 million rubles ($1.2 million) in back wages, the local prosecutor's office and the ombudsman's office said following a probe into Vagonmash. |
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 MOSCOW – When the now-infamous ban on U.S. adoptions was first introduced in the State Duma in mid-December, some Russians suggested that a more appropriate response to the United States' sanctions-imposing Magnitsky Act would have been to push their compatriots to adopt American children. |
 MOSCOW – More then 40 percent of Russian businessmen have moved into the shadows since the government increased social taxes in 2011, business ombudsman Boris Titov said.
Titov, the government envoy for protecting the rights of small and medium-size businesses, said the introduction of a 34 percent social tax in 2011 forced many businessmen to move their companies to places like Kazakhstan. |
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MOSCOW – Rosneft chief Igor Sechin said Wednesday that Russian investment in Venezuela remained safe even as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is battling cancer. |
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MOSCOW – The Kremlin plans to set up a non-governmental organization in the United States to monitor the fate of Russian children adopted by American families, a news report said Thursday.
Existing arrangements for such monitoring laid out in a bilateral treaty that came into force in November will be torn up by Russia's controversial ban on adoptions to the U. |
All photos from issue.
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Strategy 31 will mark its third anniversary in St. Petersburg with an unauthorized rally Thursday. The movement set up to defend the right of assembly will protest a bill that would ban protests in most of the city and that the Legislative Assembly passed in a first reading last week.
For three years, regular rallies at Gostiny Dvor have drawn dozens to hundreds of participants, journalists and spectators, as well as overwhelming police presence and measures, resulting in dozens of arrests, fines and brief prison sentences.
A campaign that calls on the authorities to obey the constitution, whose Article 31 guarantees the right of assembly, Strategy 31 has become a major irritant for the powers that be, who have effectively abolished the previous system under which organizers were merely required to inform them about a planned rally, rather than ask for permission.
Conceived in 2009 by the Moscow-based author Eduard Limonov, who founded The Other Russia party in 2010 after his previous organization, the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), was banned for alleged extremism three years earlier, Strategy 31 rallies have been held in dozens of cities across Russia, although the rallies have attracted fewer participants in recent months than when the campaign was at its peak in 2010. |
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TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
IGOT TABAKOV / SPT
A man pulls a child on a sled along the frozen Moscow River in the Strogino neighborhood of northwestern Moscow on the weekend.
Temperatures in St. Petersburg are set to hover around 0 degrees Celsius this week, with snow forecast for Friday and Saturday. |
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The eyes of the city’s cultural community were on the Mikhailovsky Theater on Jan. 25, as the company presented the Russian premiere of Benjamin Britten’s 1961 opera “Billy Budd,” which features an all-male cast and is set on board a ship. But the venerable institution, established as an imperial theater back in 1833 by the decree of Tsar Nicholas I, was also the focus of public and media attention that night for a less illustrious reason.
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The well known Russian circus artist Vyacheslav Polunin has been appointed art director of the St. Petersburg State Circus, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky announced last week, Interfax reported.
“We decided not to hold a contest for the position. Vyacheslav Polunin will be appointed head of the circus. He has a lot of plans and we’ll support him,” Medinsky said.
Medinsky said that he had recently visited the St. Petersburg State Circus and discussed the situation with the city’s authorities.
“This circus is one of the oldest in Russia and it made a depressing — even shattering — impression on me. The circus is in a bad condition,” Medinsky said. |
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 Turkish traveler Gürkan Genç, who is currently traveling around the world by bike, arrived in St. Petersburg on Jan. 20, having covered nearly 5,000 kilometers of his epic journey. |
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Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the city’s Mariinsky Theater, has been elected principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra for five years starting in 2015, Interfax reported.
“The decision was made on January 23, 2013 by a majority of Munich City Council in anonymous voting. |
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A new item may soon appear on the black market in Russia, and the deals are bound to be multiple. The product in question is human blood, which is rapidly becoming in short supply, owing to recent amendments to the blood donation law that effectively ban financial compensation for donors. |
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Born in Mid-Air
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A female passenger gave birth on board a flight from St. Petersburg to the Kyrgyz city of Osh on Jan. 22.
Flight attendant Alexei Romanyuk delivered the baby on board the plane, which was flying on a route operated by Russian airline Rossiya, Interfax reported. |
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 MOSCOW — Lawmakers on Monday said they would shelve a bill blocking foreigners from working in state television if they made remarks “discrediting” Russia or its government.
Critics of the bill — which was designed to target popular Channel One television host Vladimir Pozner after he called the State Duma a “silly woman” on air last month — said it would enforce a form of media censorship. |
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MOSCOW — Hundreds of protesters on the Thai island of Phuket, a popular destination for Russian tourists, staged a protest Monday against “Russian-owned” businesses, accusing them of undercutting local competitors and taking jobs from native-born workers, the Phuket News newspaper reported. |
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MOSCOW — A 32-year-old appliance salesman has been accused of murdering 13 elderly people in the Pskov and Rostov regions during a four-month period in late 2005, according to a statement posted on the Interior Ministry’s website on Tuesday.
The man would visit pensioners in their homes, peddling clothes irons, kettles, and other goods. |
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MOSCOW — With a United Russia deputy declaring that Russia is not Sodom and Gomorrah, the State Duma gave tentative approval to a bill that would ban “gay propaganda” to minors. |
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MOSCOW — Fifteen crew members from the Shans-101 fishing boat that sank in the Sea of Japan on Sunday night have been saved by rescuers, while eight have been reported dead, news reports said Monday.
The survivors include 11 Russians and four Indonesian nationals, Gazeta.ru reported.
The boat sank after being overturned by a high wave in stormy weather in the Sea of Japan near the Primorye region.
Survivors said they threw overboard the bodies of eight crew members who died of hypothermia while on rescue boats, Interfax reported. So far, those bodies have not been found.
The search for the missing crew members continues, with 10 ships and four aircraft from the Emergency Situations Ministry, the Navy and a local airline. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Monday dismissed Magomedsalam Magomedov as leader of turbulent Dagestan, a republic where authorities are fighting a militant Islamist insurgency. |
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MOSCOW — The net appears to be closing on former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov after military investigators opened an investigation into extravagant improvements at a dacha belonging to his brother-in-law, a news report said Monday.
Serdyukov resigned in disgrace last month amid allegations that several of his close associates had enriched themselves via the fraudulent sale of Defense Ministry real estate, but investigators have yet to level accusations at Serdyukov himself. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin will soon recommence his “active hobbies” despite several months of speculation about his health, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Izvestia on Monday. |
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Last October, the number of active users of the world’s most popular social network Facebook reached 1 billion, accounting for more than half of the world’s Internet population. But in Russia, Facebook is unable to overcome the country’s homegrown copy, VKontakte.
“Our long-term aim is to reach a certain level of penetration in the market: Fifty percent of Internet users, but what percentage of users we have now I’m not allowed to tell you,” said Yekaterina Skorobogatova, Facebook development director for Russia.
According to research by the Sarafannoye Radio social marketing lab, Facebook, which launched a Russian-language version in 2008, occupied eighth place in the rating of the 20 most popular social networks in Russia in 2009, and climbed up to the fourth position the year after that. |
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 MOSCOW — Cellphone subscribers will now be able retain their current numbers when switching operators provided they don’t switch more than once in six months, according to a draft of changes published by the Communications Ministry on its website Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Norilsk Nickel’s new chief executive, Vladimir Potanin, asked President Vladimir Putin to exempt his company from export duties to free up approximately $500 million a year for modernization of the nickel giant, a report said Monday.
In a letter to the administration earlier this month, Potanin asked Putin to order the government to consider the issue, Kommersant reported, citing sources familiar with the letter. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is unconcerned about natural gas exports from the United States driving down the price European consumers pay for Russian gas, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt. |
 MOSCOW — Real estate developer Sergei Polonsky, currently being held in a Cambodian prison following a scandalous New Year’s celebration, told Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an open letter published on Polonsky’s blog on the Ekho Moskvy website that his detention is part of a conspiracy.
In the letter, the former millionaire claims that on Jan. |
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 Russia is taking the helm of the Group of 20, and with that honor comes a unique opportunity: To lead the international community toward sustainable, inclusive growth and shared prosperity in 2013.
The Russian government has pledged to focus its G20 presidency on practical solutions to stimulate growth and jobs, manage government debt and regulate the financial sector. |
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Every self-respecting intelligence agency should have a full-time Putinologist. One reason is that President Vladimir Putin alone rules Russia. What he says goes. |
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 Photographer Alexandra Demenkova has found herself in some hair-raising situations in the line of duty.
“I have found myself in danger a lot of times; it always happened when I was taking pictures,” Demenkova recalled during an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in her native town of Kingisepp in the Leningrad Oblast.
“It was mostly with drunken men — or women — when I felt in danger, when people would suddenly get aggressive and attack me, wanting to beat me up, or worse, kill me. |
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 “Soviet Pin-Up,” which sees the merging of Soviet social posters with American pin-up art, is a genre that couldn’t have existed just a few decades ago. |
 As St. Petersburg marked the 69th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad this weekend, Dutch film director Jessica Gorter came to St. Petersburg for several screenings of her award-winning documentary on the subject.
Called “900 Days: The Myth and Reality of the Leningrad Blockade,” the documentary features several survivors of the 1941 to 1944 Siege of Leningrad, giving personal accounts of their lives as children during the siege and sharing their views, which frequently contradict the official propagandist line. |
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.jpg) A trash circus, a celebration of hedonism, a grotesque theatre: The performances of Berlin-based indie band Bonaparte, which returns to St. Petersburg this week, can be described in many ways, but one thing is certain — this is no ordinary band. |
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Room for dessert
If you walk into Bengel & Zaek in the historic Dom Mertensa building on Nevsky Prospekt in search of real food, don’t be surprised if you decide that an éclair, a couple of macaroons and an espresso counts as lunch. To bypass the sumptuous display of pastries that rivals that of any Parisian bakery to have lunch at Mertens, the adjacent restaurant, seems a needless act of will. |
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 With travel hospitality websites like Airbandb and CouchSurfing spurring a fast-growing trend of travel based on interaction with locals, a young team of city tour guides is attempting to show visitors to St. Petersburg a fresh view of the city.
Sptnik offers tours of the city’s metro stations, a Soviet architecture tour and excursions devoted to different kinds of cuisine, as well as pub crawls and other themed tours. |
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 In a grim Soviet reality, he lived the lifestyle of a playboy. While not a dissident, he sang satirical songs. While not writing a single song that would praise the authorities, he wrote ballads about World War II and was a symbol of patriotism for many Russians. |
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Issues Archive