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FORT WORTH, Texas — For a time in Cold War America, Van Cliburn had all the trappings of a rock star: sold-out concerts, adoring, out-of-control fans and a name recognized worldwide. He even got a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
And he did it all with only a piano and some Tchaikovsky concertos.
The celebrated pianist played for every American president since Harry Truman, plus royalty and heads of state around the world. But he is best remembered for winning a 1958 piano competition in Moscow that helped thaw the icy rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Cliburn, who died Wednesday at 78 after fighting bone cancer, was "a great humanitarian and a brilliant musician whose light will continue to shine through his extraordinary legacy," said his publicist and longtime friend Mary Lou Falcone. |
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 MOSCOW — The official at the center of Russia's controversial ban on U.S. adoptions struck back at critics Thursday, saying "pedophiles" were his most strident detractors and that journalists who accuse him of downplaying child abuse in Russia for political reasons are "either blind or dumb. |
 MOSCOW — A senior U.S. lawmaker says he has been denied a Russian visa as a result of his vocal backing of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which allows Washington to punish Russians implicated in human rights violations with a visa ban and asset freezes.
Chris Smith, a Republican congressman from New Jersey who has served in the House of Representatives since 1981, said it was the first time his visa application to Russia had been denied over many years of coming to the country. |
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MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin on Thursday hosted his French counterpart Francois Hollande for four-hour-long talks in the Kremlin, which diplomats said were direct and productive. |
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MOSCOW – A first meeting between new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov might have been a key development in tense U.S.-Russian ties this week, but Russian media instead savored a declaration by Kerry that Americans have "the right to be stupid."
Two prominent Russian personalities told The St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday that they think Americans do tend to be too narrow-minded.
Kerry, making his first foreign trip as the United States' top diplomat, made the comment while talking to German students ahead of the meeting with Lavrov in Berlin on Wednesday.
"As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view," Kerry said in comments posted on YouTube. |
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 MOSCOW – Gennady Zyuganov, re-elected Saturday as leader of the Communist Party, a position he has held for 17 years, said Tuesday that public calls to remove Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s graves from the Kremlin Wall Necropolis came from “provocateurs” and “SS loyalists. |
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MOSCOW – The Investigative Committee said Wednesday that anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny fraudulently obtained his credentials as a lawyer.
The accusation against one of Russia's most prominent opposition figures is the latest in a series of blows traded between Navalny and the powerful Investigative Committee. |
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Top-seeded club SKA St. Petersburg took a 3-1 lead in the Kontinental Hockey League Western Conference quarter-finals with a one-sided 6-1 win over Atlant Moscow Oblast at the Mytishchi Arena in Mytishchi on Monday night, and is well-placed to make further progress in its quest to lift the Gagarin Cup. |
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MOSCOW – Former Moscow police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, sentenced to 11 years in prison for his involvement in the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politikovskaya, said he knows people involved in two other high-profile killings, a news report said Wednesday.
Pavlyuchenkov claims to have information on the murders of editor-in-chief of Russian Forbes Paul Khlebnikov in 2004 and of editor-in-chief of a Tolyatti newspaper, Alexei Sidorov, who was stabbed to death a year earlier, Kommersant reported. |
All photos from issue.
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 The Miniature St. Petersburg sculpture park, which contains small versions of some of the city’s architectural marvels, from Alexander’s Column and the Hermitage to St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Church on the Spilled Blood, is looking for an owner and a bodyguard.
Owing to an absurdist-style bureaucratic lapse, the sculpture park that first opened to the public in July 2011 in Alexandrovsky Park near Gorkovskaya metro station belongs to everyone and nobody all at once. This means that no one has ever been assigned to look after it, clean it, protect or repair the miniatures, which were designed by local artist Alexander Taratynov and presented to the city of St. Petersburg by Alexei Miller, the head of Russia’s oil and gas giant Gazprom. |
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A WINTER’S TALE
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A lone figure stands on a snow covered bridge surrounded by some of the city’s only inhabitants that seem unconcerned with the dropping temperatures.
As the cold weather returns and a chance of snow is forecast for the weekend, conditions are ripe for traditional winter entertainments in the city’s parks. |
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Payments Flak
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — President Vladimir Putin has strongly criticized the high increase in the cost of communal services in a number of the country’s regions and demanded that the Russian Regional Development Ministry provide a clear explanation of such growth, news website Fontanka.ru reported.
“In some districts of St. Petersburg communal payments have risen by 40 percent.
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 Opposition political groups and concerned citizens continue to protest against a new local bill on demonstrations that effectively bans protests in the city center, passed by the Legislative Assembly last week in its third and final reading.
In hopes of preventing Governor Georgy Poltavchenko from signing it, the Yabloko Democratic Party has filed a complaint against the bill, describing it as “outrageous” and “illegal. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said last week that returning a Jewish book collection confiscated after the Bolshevik Revolution was impossible because it would open a “Pandora’s box” of claims on such property.
“[If Russia] starts satisfying these sorts of claims, there would be no end to them and no telling what the consequences might be,” Putin said at the vast new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — Swedish furniture giant Ikea said meatballs sold in its 14 stores in Russia are not affected by a European recall over fears of horse meat.
Ikea said the frozen meatballs that it sells locally use certified Russian ingredients and it will not suspend sales. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is negotiating to supply liquefied natural gas to China, and the two countries expect to reach a long-coveted gas cooperation agreement within a few months, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said Monday.
The deal, if closed, will bring the curtain down on years of price disputes between Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation, with the latter asking for a discount on the amount Russia charges European consumers.
“We have made a significant breakthrough on gas cooperation issues over the last few months, and there are all chances to reach certain agreements on expanding gas supplies,” Dvorkovich told journalists after a meeting with Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Wang Qishan. |
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 GROZNY — French actor Gerard Depardieu said he was inspired by the leadership of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and accepted a five-room apartment from him during a visit to Grozny. |
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CHELYABINSK, Ural Mountains — Almost 3,000 residents have applied for financial aid in the Chelyabins.k region, which is still recovering from the meteorite explosion that took place Feb. 15, a news report said Tuesday.
Municipal bodies received 2,746 applications for lump-sum compensation and 28 requests for emergency aid from people in need of basic necessities, Interfax reported. |
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NOVGOROD, Western Russia — The record-breaking Expedition Trophy auto race kicked off in Veliky Novgorod on Monday with 15 teams, including one team of Russian Orthodox priests on a mission to bless Lake Baikal, Interfax reported. |
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 MOSCOW — Oleg Smolin, a State Duma deputy with the Communist Party, praised a law that entered into force Monday and requires companies to hire disabled people or face fines of up to 10,000 rubles ($330).
“We supported this legislation because it looks like a first step forward,” Smolin, who is blind, told The St. |
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Russia’s first comprehensive anti-corruption law, Federal Law No. 273 “On Combatting Corruption,” has been amended to require companies to have compliance officers and programs, according to international law firm Baker & McKenzie. |
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KIEV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said his country would not pay Russia a $7 billion fine for violations of a gas delivery agreement.
“We have refused to pay these fines, and now we are in negotiations,” Yanukovych told a national television show Friday.
In January, Gazprom billed Ukraine’s Naftogaz Ukrainy with a $7 billion bill for gas it says Ukraine did not buy in 2012, although it was obliged to do so under a so-called pay-or-take contract.
“I think we will genuinely restore normal relations with Russia in the gas sphere. We’re not losing hope,” said Yanukovych. “We need to think about how to make use of our gas-pipeline network, and no one except Russia can guarantee us a given volume of gas,” Yanukovych said. |
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 President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday prohibiting smoking in public places. The legislation is due to come into force in July 2013 with a ban in schools, hospitals, airports and the public areas of apartment buildings. |
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 The sudden resignations of three State Duma deputies with the United Russia party and rumors of the imminent resignations of six more have caused widespread surprise. Within a span of just days, Deputies Vladimir Pekhtin, Anatoly Lomakin and Vasily Tolstopyatov relinquished their posts after having served only one year of their five-year terms. |
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Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder why Keira Knightly is the go-to Western actress to play Russian beauties? Doctor Zhivago’s Lara, Anna Karenina: really? She may be a beautiful woman, but by the Russian standards of beauty when these works were written, she’s not what you’d call ðîñêîøíàÿ æåíùèíà (a sumptuous woman). |
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.jpg) Pep-See, the local “extreme disco” band fronted by three flamboyant female singers who seem to like wearing their grandmothers’ clothing while singing upbeat songs with sometimes dark overtones, will mark its 20th anniversary Friday with a birthday bash at Kosmonavt, a large concert venue located in a former Soviet film theater.
According to the band, musicians Kesha Spechinsky of the group Vnezapny Sych, who wrote some of Pep-See’s best-known songs such as “Vovochka” and “Parni. Muzyka. Narkotiki” (Boys. Music. Drugs) and Vitaly Kudryavtsev, whose songs for Pep-See include “Manya” and “Disco,” will join Pep-See on stage to perform their songs with the band.
After three albums released in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pep-See stopped putting out CDs, preferring live shows and the occasional audio upload and YouTube video.
Anna Kipyatkova, one of the three frontwomen, said this week that what the band is up to can be seen in last year’s video “Gorye” (Grief). The fast-paced and side-splitting short film stars Ivan Turist, who fronts the local avant-rock band NOM, as the main villain, and was directed by NOM’s bass player and singer Andrei Kagadeyev. |
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FOR SPT
THE 13TH MARIINSKY
INTERNATIONAL BALLET FESTIVAL
LIFTS OFF THIS WEEK WITH
PERFORMANCES BY SOME OF
THE COUNTRY’S BEST DANCERS. |
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Sunday, March 3 marks the first anniversary of the imprisonment of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot. Symbolically, the arrests took place on the eve of the election that landed Putin back in the presidential chair amid public cries of rigged voting and other gross violations.
The female group, clad in bright clothes and colored balaclavas, became in some ways the face of the movement of those sick of fraud and televised lies, and who opposed a regime that was set on keeping hold of power at any cost.
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 Renowned St. Petersburg film director Alexei German, who was a legend in his own time, died in the Military Medical Academy Hospital on Feb. 21 after a lengthy illness. He was 74.
Hundreds of people attended the secular memorial service at the Lenfilm studio and the subsequent funeral at St. Petersburg’s Bogoslovskoye cemetery on Sunday. They were there to bid farewell to the man behind the films “The Trial of the Road,” “Khrustalyov, My Car!” and “My Friend Ivan Lapshin. |
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 Few people might identify Central Asia as one of the birthplaces of globalization, but those who view it as a strictly 21st-century phenomenon may be surprised to learn that similar cultural and commercial exchanges have been taking place for thousands of years in the arid steppes and mountains of China and Mongolia. |
 Works by the groundbreaking American choreographer William Forsythe will take center stage at the forthcoming 13th Mariinsky International Ballet Festival, which kicks off Feb. 28.
March 3 will see the revivals of William Forsythe’s ballets “The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude” and “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. |
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Less than meets the eye
It’s a strange phenomenon witnessed at many St. Petersburg restaurants that the wait staff seems surprised and even miffed when customers come in looking for a meal. |
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 February and March have become extremely busy months for the growing number of Russian students seeking to continue their university education abroad, with most deadlines for testing and applications falling in late winter.
Many students see a foreign education as a good way to gain an advantage in their chosen profession, develop international experience, or even as a first step in the emigration process. |
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 Though he doesn’t aspire to rub shoulders with the likes of Boris Akunin or P.D. James, Ignaty Dyakov nevertheless had good reasons to make a foray into the world of mystery writing. |
 With St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo International Airport celebrating its 90th birthday this year, and talks underway about declaring the original terminal building a historic landmark, preparations for the opening of a new terminal at the end of this year continue apace. The airport is also continuing to develop and improve its lesser-known services, which include aviation ornithology and behavioral profiling. |
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 LUXOR, Egypt — A hot air balloon flying over Egypt’s ancient city of Luxor caught fire and crashed into a sugar cane field on Tuesday, killing at least 19 foreign tourists in one of the world’s deadliest ballooning accidents and handing a new blow to Egypt’s ailing tourism industry. |
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BEIRUT — At least 141 people, half of them children, were killed when the Syrian military fired at least four missiles into the northern province of Aleppo last week, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. |
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WASHINGTON — The U.S.-led military command in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a decline last year in Taliban attacks and is preparing to publish corrected numbers that could undercut its narrative of a Taliban in steep decline.
After finding what they called clerical errors, military officials in Kabul said Tuesday that a 7 percent drop in “enemy initiated attacks” for the period from January through December 2012 reported last month will be corrected to show no change in the number of attacks during that span. |
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Issues Archive