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The director of the St. Petersburg Zoo is locking horns with the City Culture Committee and the wife of Governor Vla dimir Yakovlev over the future of his job - as well as that of the entire zoo. At issue are plans by the Zoosad Fund - patronized by Yakolev's wife, Irina Yakovleva - to relocate the 136-year-old zoo and its 2,000 animals to the more verdant environs of the Dolgoye Lake district in the far northwest of the city. The zoo is currenly located on the central, urban Petrograd Side. The Zoosad charitable fund was created by gubernatorial decree in August 1996 - two months after Yakovlev defeated the late Anatoly Sobchak for the city's top post - with the mission of drawing investment to the perpetually ailing zoo. |
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 "President Vladimir Putin has released a new program for reform. Its first goal: 'To make people rich and happy. (List of people attached.)'" Don't panic. |
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The Academy of Sciences has ordered Russian scientists to report to state authorities on contacts with foreign officials, according to a directive shown to journalists by Duma deputy and human-rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov on Wednesday. According to news reports, one directive orders the heads of laboratories and research groups throughout Russia to inform the academy's "foreign department" by June 1 of any agreements and international cooperation deals they may have entered into. |
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A.G. was 14 years old when he and his brother stole a leather jacket and 10 rubles from a passer-by. The police caught them and returned the jacket and the money to the owner. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin ordered the government Tuesday to draw up a $20 billion plan to overhaul the country's rusting housing sector by July 1, a move that will force households to foot the entire bill for housing expenses for the first time since 1917. |
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The much-touted plans for a merger of the pro-Kremlin Unity party and the Fatherland-All Russia movement melted away Thursday when the leaders of the two groups decided to restrict their cooperation to forming a coalition ahead of the 2003 parliamentary elections. |
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MOSCOW - Splinter liberal groups that refused to join the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, last weekend will receive financial backing from self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, their leaders announced Tuesday. State Duma deputies Sergei Yushenkov and Vladimir Golovlyov both refused to join SPS at its founding congress on Saturday, saying they opposed its "servile" attitude toward the Kremlin and its insufficiently liberal charter. They also announced they would create a new liberal party intended to become the voice of small and medium business. Yushenkov and Golovlyov said in telephone interviews Tuesday that they met with Berezovsky in France last week and secured a pledge for funding for the new party. |
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 Russia must embark on a global advertising blitz to drum up tourists - and their fat wallets, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - The 150,000 Chechen refugees living in Ingushetia must return to Chechnya by the end of June if they want to receive government food supplies, said officials from the pro-Moscow Chechen government. The Chechen government previously had given refugees until the end of the year, but last week Prime Minister Stanislav Ilyasov signed a decree moving the deadline forward, his spokesperson Alla Vlazneva said Wednesday. |
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Kiev's Chernomyrdin MOSCOW (AP) - Amid concerns about alleged muscle-flexing by Russia in Ukraine, former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin on Wednesday took up his new post as ambassador to Kiev - and immediately plunged into a political and religious controversy. |
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 MOSCOW - Veteran Gazprom chief executive Rem Vyakhirev was ousted Wednesday and replaced with a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin's in a move that signaled an imminent overhaul of the natural gas monopoly. However, the board meeting that sacked Vyakhirev also chose him as its preferred candidate to fill the post of board chairman, leaving the balance of power in the company unclear. |
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MOSCOW - The newly appointed head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, faced Thursday what could just turn out to be the most challenging endeavor of his career as he set foot into his new offices with a Kremlin mandate to overhaul the world's largest natural-gas company. |
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MOSCOW - He is young, relatively unknown and, in fact, a dark horse. But Alexei Miller is yet another member of Vla dimir Putin's St. Petersburg team who has been brought to the very top. Miller, 39, was named the new executive of Gazprom on Wednesday. He had been serving as a deputy energy minister. Miller's career until Wednesday was a straightforward path from being a low-ranking St. Petersburg bureaucrat to a deputy minister - with one notable exception. He built his career under the wing of President Putin. The two men have known each other for at least a decade, and in the mid-'90s, Mil ler was Putin's deputy at the foreign relations department in St. |
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 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin told the country's top businessmen Thursday that foreign currency rules would be relaxed and the Central Bank and the government have until the end of June to recommend how. |
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MOSCOW - An investigation into oil major Sibneft went straight to the top Tuesday when the Prosecutor General's Office summoned Roman Ab ramovich to answer questions regarding large-scale fraud and theft at the company. The questioning of Abramovich, who controls Sibneft through subsidiary companies, surprised many Kremlin watchers who say the tycoon is closely connected to presidential Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin and therefore "untouchable. |
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MOSCOW - Siberian Aluminum said Wednesday it was continuing its quest to monopolize Russia's once-mighty bus industry. Having acquired Russia's two largest bus factories, LiAZ and PAZ, and a major parts supplier over the last year, Siberian Aluminum will complete the acquisition of the Kurgansky bus plant in southern Russia from gas giant Sibur by the end of June, said Sergei Zanozin, head of Siberian Aluminum's bus holding Rusavtobusprom. |
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'Political' Ford Loan St. Petersburg (SPT) - The World Bank is set to give Ford Motor Co.'s factory near St. Petersburg a $100 million loan to help cope with the "significant" political risk in Russia, Bloomberg quoted the bank as saying Thursday. The plant, currently being built in the Leningrad region, is Ford's first in the former Soviet Union and is scheduled to roll out its first car next year. The loan, from the World Bank's private lending arm International Finance Co., will "give Ford comfort," an IFC official was quoted as saying. "Ford wisely is trying to include heavy-hitters with good political connections, thus diversifying the risk and involving the Russian government at the highest levels. |
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 MOSCOW - Vimpelcom got its long-awaited strategic investor Wednesday as the powerful Alfa Group agreed to pay $247 million for a blocking stake in both Vimpelcom and Vimpelcom-R, the cellular operator's regional arm. |
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MOSCOW - Traveling by rail just got more expensive. The price of train tickets rose 30 percent Friday - a move the government said it hopes will help stem endemic losses incurred by the nation's rail passenger service. "[The price hike] had to be done, Moscow Rail spokesperson Konstantin Pashkov said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - After two days of conflicting media reports, prosecutors on Wednesday finally shed light on their recent meeting with a former government official and prominent oil executive, who was hospitalized Monday after a visit to the Prosecutor General's Office. |
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Dear Editor, It is not so much a fear of crime that gives me pause to return to Russia - it is the rip-offs! [In response to a letter about tourism by J.C. Rettaliata published May 25.] With its history and wonderful culture, Russia has the potential to attract its share of visitors. |
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Anyone who has purchased or rented an apartment in the last few years knows what a "Stalin" building is - as opposed to a khrushchyovka. A Stalin building is one that was built during the Stalin era, the period of totalitarianism and the Gulag. |
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IT'S been a rough election season for Britain's ruling Labor Party. On the day that it released its campaign manifesto, televisions were buzzing with a more vivid image: Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott punching out a protester who had thrown an egg at him. |
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IT was just last December that President Vladimir Putin flabbergasted the world by confessing his admiration for environmental activists in little rubber boats. |
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THE first round of voting in the Primoriye gubernatorial election ended in a sensation: The young entrepreneur Sergei Darkin ended up in first place. This result was a serious blow to the concept of presidential representatives in the regions, since the super-governor of the Far East, Konstantin Pulikovsky, was the one who had insisted so firmly on removing the former governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. |
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IT'S a Sunday afternoon and a group of bulky U.S. Marines and wiry Russian teenagers are taking their positions on a field at Gymnasia No. 2. A dozen people gather to watch. |
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ANY company that doesn't properly safeguard people's personal information will suffer the same fate as a bank that doesn't safeguard people's money. It will go out of business. But privacy is not always desirable - and absolute privacy is a disaster waiting to happen. |
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Your good Global Eye is sometimes reproached by sensitive readers for a propensity toward rhetorical excess - namely, the alleged misapplication of analogy, whereby a relatively innocuous phenomenon is compared and, by implication, equated with a far more heinous one. |
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 One of the first things visitors to St. Petersburg are often urged to do is get out of the city - not because of any shortage of sights, but because a feel for its imperial history is only enhanced by a trip to the parks and apalces of one of the splendid outlying towns. Suburban getaways Not far from the St. Petersburg city center are a number of sites that make for excellent day trips or weekend excursions. |
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 In such a writers' and poets' city as St. Petersburg, it is well worth checking out the literary museums which stand apart from the hundreds of others. |
 The great writer would turn in his grave, but nobody present seemed to care: The Aperitif Club party at the Nabokov Museum on May 18 drew about 150 trendy-minded visitors, who had come to watch Finland's Aavikko and the local Messer Chups, both performing in easy-going electronic styles. |
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General excess, the unofficial motif of the White Nights, is most commonly indulged in outside, in the parks, on the streets and by the rivers and canals of St. |
 They don't make empresses like they used to. Catherine the Great arguably reigns supreme among history's monarchs as an audacious original: a German princess who pulled the throne from under her husband and crowned herself Tsarina of Russia, just days before he was murdered by her supporters. From 1762 to 1796, she ruled with smarts and moxie, influenced by her reading of the philosophers of China and the French Enlightenment. |
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 Perhaps the city's best promoted musical event, Stars of the White Nights, is running through all of June this year, beginning with the premiere of one-act ballets set to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich on May 30. |
 They come from all over, drawn by St. Petersburg's reputation and character as an artistic center, looking for something difficult to find anywhere else - and at a reasonable price for good measure. But we're not speaking of tourists in this case. They're music students. The Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory, a name it took in 1944, was opened as the first musical institution of higher education in Russia in 1862 and while the list of renowned Russian graduates of the school includes composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Pro ko fiev and Dmitry Shostakovich, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, and conductors Yury Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev, a large number of foreign students have been coming to the school in recent years in order to access a rich and unique tradition. |
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 The restaurant scene in St. Petersburg has improved immeasurably over the past few years, and the business shows no sign of cooling off, with new places opening almost every week. |
 It may come as a surprise for some that Russia, with its impressive history of drinking, was so slow in opening a museum devoted to the country's most popular drink, vodka. Russia counts among the world's top alcohol consumers, reaching a national figure last year of 14 liters of pure alcohol consumed per capita. But the idea of the world's first Museum of Russian Vodka is taking shape. It opened on May 31 at 5 Konnogvardeisky Boulevard, and is run by three co-directors - in Russia, three has traditionally been considered the ideal number for sharing a bottle. |
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 St. Petersburg's brewers and bureaucrats say they have been gearing up since March for the city's annual beer festival, which will take place on Sunday, June 3. |
 The Goethe Institute, which has made a name for itself as one of the leading cultural organizations in St. Petersburg with a string of first-rate exhibitions, is turning its hand once more to contemporary opera this summer with Wolfgang Rihm's "Jakob Lenz. |
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Restoring ballets which have been ignored for decades is always a risky enterprise, as the resurrected work often lacks the vitality of the original. The Mariinsky Theater, well aware of the potential pitfalls, has courageously revived three ballets created between 1961 and 1974 to music by Dmitry Shostakovich by the choreographers Konstantin Boyarsky, Leonid Yakobson and Igor Belsky. |
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Sergei Bodrov Jr. has changed focus with his directorial debut, "Sisters." People, he warns, who have come to see "Brother 3" will be disappointed by this more mature and contemplative film - and after the bombast and populist nationalism in 1999's "Brother 2," it is quite likely that Bodrov's film will indeed attract audiences seeking a similar comic-violent mix. |
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The main intrigue of the weekend is the fact that the two most happenning bands in the city are playing on the same day and at exactly the same time. While the horn-driven sound of Leningrad will fill SpartaK for a show called "The Day of Protecting Children From Idiotic Parents," the Brit-poppish Multfilmy will play the Lensoviet Palace of Culture. |
 "With this act, our 'Territorium' period ends," says Akvarium's official Web site about the band's traditional summer concert, which will take place in St. Petersburg on June 21. "Territorium" was the compilation Akvarium put out in October last year, and which is still on the sales charts (however unreliable those may be in Russia). |
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When a place bills itself as a "family restaurant," one expects it to be the sort of place you could take the kids. But when we walked into the elegant, but rather dull interiors of "Dynasty" on 11 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa, the hefty gentlemen with the mobile phones who were finishing their meals made us wonder if the management didn't have another type of family in mind. |
 New York-based band Interzona are making their Russian debut in St. Petersburg this Friday. On Tuesday evening in the Dobrolyot recording studio, located in the bowels of the Lensoviet House of Culture, Mike Danilin was recording the title song of the group's first three-track single album, "Zhivaya Pulya" (Live Bullet). |
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Holocaust Payments JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Holocaust survivor groups and officials in Israel on Thursday praised a German decision to start paying compensation to more than one million survivors of Nazi persecution and forced labor. The lower house of the German parliament ended months of argument on Wednesday by voting overwhelmingly to unblock a $4. |
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Dental Records SCRANTON, Pennsylvania (AP) - Ty Cobb's dentures will be on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, until late fall. |
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