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Most city residents waking up this dreary Tuesday morning knew somewhere in the back of their minds that it was a holiday. But they weren't quite sure which one. Many thought that it was Independence Day, a widely accepted misnomer for June 12 - officially called the Day of the Passage of the Declaration of State Sovereignty and which was made perhaps Russia's least understood state holiday May 25, 1991. |
All photos from issue.
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 LEVASHOVO - Two military training jets collided in midair during a routine acrobatic maneuver on the first day of the annual Levashovo air show on Sunday, killing one of the pilots and leaving officials mystified as to the cause of the tragedy. According to eyewitnesses, the two Czech-manufactured L-39 training jets were flying in close formation, their wing tips some three meters apart. |
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Policeman Killed ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Yev geny Malikov, a 34-year-old policeman, was gunned down near the hotel Karelia late on Thursday, RBC agency reported. |
 More than 50 firefighters and 20 firetrucks battled a three-hour blaze when a 19th-century warehouse caught fire Saturday morning at central St. Petersburg's bustling and infamous marketplace, Apraksin Dvor. There were no injuries, although about 1,400 square meters of storage space were destroyed. |
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MOSCOW - A duo of Boris Berezovsky's trusted journalists, whose articles in Nezavisimaya Gazeta were perceived as conveying the tycoon's viewpoint, were appointed Friday to replace Vi taly Tretyakov at the helm of the paper. |
 After spending the last 10 years studying and working in the United States, Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, recently took a break from her research to teach a semester at Moscow State University. Before her return to New York, Khru shche va spoke with The St. Petersburg Times about becoming a citizen of the world, her grandfather's legacy and the country she currently calls home. |
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Regional power utility Lenenergo is taking its show on the road this week after receiving the go-ahead from Russia's Federal Securities Commission to proceed with the launch of a level one American Depositary Receipt (ADR) program. The company announced the FSC's decision in a press release issued last Wednesday, although company officials said that the official documentation for the decision was not received until Friday. |
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MOSCOW - Foreign automakers Peugeot and Volkswagen are feuding over a promotional campaign that is drawing attention to the dangers of comparative advertising in Russia. |
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"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." - Jean Baptiste Colbert MOSCOW - There is a lot of hissing going on in corporate circles over the country's current profit tax. The reason is simple. Suppose Russian Pancakes earns $100 selling hotcakes and spends $90 on flour, butter, advertising and labor. The profit is $10 and taxable $3.50 under the current 35 percent profit tax. But suppose that the government decides that only $80 of those expenses can be deducted, making Russian Pancakes' official profit $20. The profit tax rate then effectively jumps to 70 percent and leaves the company with a measly $3. |
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 Novosibirsk, Siberia - No. 3 airline Sibir is angling to become just the third Russian carrier to gain direct access to London. Sibir general director Vladislav Filyov met with British Ambassador to Russia Sir Roderic Lyne at Sibir's Novosibirsk headquarters on Thursday and urged him to help make traveling internationally easier for Siberians. |
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MOSCOW - Gazprom plans to reduce its share of the domestic gas market from 90 percent to 75 percent over the next decade, allowing other producers to fill in the gap. To get access to Gazprom's pipeline monopoly, howver, those producers will have to help pay for building new lines. |
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German Prices Up FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - The German inflation rate rose in May to its highest level in nearly eight years, putting added pressure on the European Central Bank to postpone a widely anticipated interest rate cut. |
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WITH the replacement of Gazprom CEO Rem Vyakhirev, investors are starting to notice many fundamental economic reforms in the works. Many of the state's plans are really just plans to begin planning - for example, a plan to introduce a corporate governance code was announced last fall, with the actual code to be announced and discussed this spring. |
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IN April, to quell criticism from Western regulatory agencies, the State Duma ratified the Convention on Money Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime (the Strasbourg Convention), which facilitates the recovery of laundered funds from foreign financial institutions. |
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A GROUP of Russian human rights activists, intellectuals and artists opposed to the war in Chechnya held a press conference 12 days ago in Moscow in an effort to call attention to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the republic and to a statement they had obtained from Chechnya's fugitive president, Aslan Maskhadov, agreeing to unconditional negotiations with the Russian government. |
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IT was a three-day weekend; that much was clear. However, few people seemed to have a very good idea exactly what we were celebrating on Tuesday. Most of those who took a guess called the holiday by its popular name, Independence Day. |
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PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin's attitude toward the oligarchs remains a subject for speculation. Many oligarchs are uneasy now that Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky have lost their media positions and Rem Vyak hi rev was ousted as Gazprom CEO. Even the loyal Ro man Abramovich was summoned to the prosecutor's office for questioning recently, although no charges have been brought against him. |
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The sun came out for the fifth annual beer festival, which kicked off at 1 p.m. this Sunday, with an estimated 500,000 revellers, 40 different brands of beer, and, as always, a chronic lack of toilets. The festival, which is fast becoming as much a part of city tradition as the White Nights, had everyone from marching bands to local Britpop sensations Multfilmy entertaining the crowds, and took place in St. |
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EU Expansion on Track LUXEMBOURG (AP) - The European Union said Monday that its plans to admit new members from formerly communist Eastern Europe remain on track even though Irish citizens voted down the treaty designed to pave the way for EU expansion. |
 With the White Nights' Festival in full swing, Mariinsky Theater artistic director Valery Gergiev took time out to talk to the press, discussing a few last-minute changes that have been made to the program, some of the problems the theater faces in staging opera, and lesser-known highlights that will be coming up in the days ahead. |
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Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov, the eminent historian and Turcologist, lived and worked here from 1990 to 1992. From the Republic of Tatarstan. With such illustrious parents, it was perhaps inevitable that Lev Gumilyov was going to be famous in his own right - with Nikolai Gumilyov for a father and Anna Akhmatova for a mother, two of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, he was almost genetically disposed to greatness. |
 Already famous for its rich collection of art, the State Hermitage Museum is also abundant with beautiful ideas. The sound of an antique fanfare heralded the launch of the museum's new project, "Tuba Mirum," on Tuesday. Running through the end of June and centered around the restoration of the Hermitage's Main Gates, Tuba Mirum combines a music-related exhibition and a series of symphonic concerts in the museum's halls as well as in its church and courtyard. |
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Jail Time LOS ANGELES (AP) - Former Los Angeles Raiders quarterback Todd Marinovich on Monday was ordered to report to jail for a week. He then must check into a stricter drug treatment program than the one in which he currently is entered. |
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