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Want to know who the elite of St. Petersburg's elite really are? Perhaps the only way to answer that question is to ask the members of the elite themselves. That is the approach taken by a recent study by Gallup, Channel 6 television and the Smena newspaper. According to the study, the city's 20 most influential people now include Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky and Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater - both of whom rated considerably higher in this survey of the elite than they have in similar "most influential" studies in the past. Rubbing shoulders with them in the top five spots according to the survey are Governor Vladimir Yakovlev in first place, President Vladimir Putin in second, and Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov in third. |
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 Maria Fyodorovna Berggolts, 89, is the only surviving family member of poet and blockade-era radio voice, Olga Berggolts. Puttering among the books cluttering her intelligentsia-style apartment with a view of the Neva River, she endlessly recites, with heartfelt intonation and longing, the hundreds of her sister's poems that she knows by heart. |
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UPPER VEDENO, Chechnya - Raybek Tovzayev is a Chechen warlord who fights on the side of Mother Russia against the rebels of his homeland whom he calls bandits. He was born in a red-brick house perched on a mountaintop where three ancestral villages of his clan look out over the Vedeno Gorge, a narrow slash of valley cut since prehistory by the retreating snowmelt from the high Caucasus further south. |
All photos from issue.
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The Russian Foundation for Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation will begin distributing 835 million German marks ($376 million) this month, as compensation to former Nazi-era slave laborers in the former Soviet Union. According to Lyudmila Narusova, head of the foundation's oversight council and widow of former mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the first 2,000 payments should be received by the end of July after an agreement was signed with Sberbank earlier this month. |
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MOSCOW - A pioneer test flight of a U.S.-funded "solar sail " - which could allow spacecraft to travel great distances using virtually no fuel - ended in failure this weekend, launch organizers said. |
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MOSCOW - Aeroflot called on the government to crack down on abusive passengers Friday, saying current lax penalties did little to fight air rage. Meanwhile, the airline's general director, Valery Okulov, said Aeroflot intends to enforce stricter limitations on smoking on its flights. On the issue of unruly passengers, an Aeroflot spokesperson said the airline has already put security staff on flights, but the government must act to stop violent behavior that threatens lives. "If laws in some countries dictate stiff fines or even imprisonment for offenders, penalties imposed by Russian law are so minor that they are almost laughable," the spokesperson said. |
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 British pop legend Sir Elton John transformed an 18th-century ballroom into a modern music hall on Thursday, playing a benefit concert for an elite audience of about 500 people at the Catherine Palace in Pushkin to raise money for the restoration and construction of local architectural monuments. |
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Mirilashvili Release? ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -The St. Petersburg City Court board has ruled the extension of the imprisonment term for Mikhail Mirilashvili to be unlawful, Interfax reported Friday. The City Court Board asked the Oktyabrsky District Court to reconsider its ruling. Mirilashvili was arrested in January on kidnapping charges. |
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 Leaving his tuxedo behind in Moscow and donning a typical tourist outfit, complete with a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, Nikita Mikhalkov , the Academy Award-winning Russian director of "Burnt by the Sun," arrived in St. Petersburg on Monday. |
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MOSCOW - Partnering up with Itera, LUKoil expanded its natural gas operations abroad Monday when it signed a production-sharing agreement with the government of Uzbekistan. |
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MOSCOW - Top presidential adviser Andrei Illarionov said Monday that the weekend economic summit of leading industrial democracies was a watershed event that made Russia a full participant in the elite G-8. Illarianov, who joined President Vladimir Putin at the meeting in Genoa, Italy, said Russia has moved from asking for help to suggesting solutions, and from talking to taking action. |
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MOSCOW - National No. 2 airline Sibir and global accounting giant Ernst & Young say they will begin wooing foreign investors this week in an effort to get the first Western-style aircraft leasing program in Russia off the ground. |
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The Open Society Institute, an organization that works within the framework of the Soros Foundation, is undertaking a project to finance the installation of payphones in Russia's prisons. As part of a program called "Payphones in Prisons" announced by National Payphone Network (NTS) in April, the Soros Fund is considering an investment in the neighborhood of $1 million. |
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MOSCOW - The economy grew by about 5 percent in the first half of the year and the rate of inflation is slowing dramatically, the State Statistics Committee said Friday. |
 Russia's most popular brand of beer, Baltika, has begun to slip as its share of the market has been falling steadily, but the success of other brands within the Baltika family has helped the company itself maintain its position. A number of industry analysts think that the brand has grown boring and that the company must alter its advertising policies or be faced with a continued decline in consumer interest. |
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MOSCOW - Railways Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko last week called on the government to cough up $785 million - the amount he says his ministry will lose this year as a result of a new unified tariff policy. |
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$320M Bond Payment MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia transferred to international creditors $320.53 million in interest on sovereign Eurobonds maturing in 2005 and 2018, a Finance Ministry spokesperson said Monday. "The funds are reserved. [Russia's foreign debt agent] Vneshekonombank is instructed to transfer them to Citibank today," he said. |
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Editor, I have just visited St. Petersburg during a cruise-ship stop and wish to relate the strong impression that the city and its culture made on me. Of course, the architecture and layout of the city are magnificent, and as has been said before, it is perhaps the grandest city conceived in the last millennium. |
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U. S. President George Bush spent a busy weekend meeting with seven other world leaders in Genoa, Italy, with mixed results. His session with Russian President Vladimir Putin brought a promising agreement to coordinate discussions both on reducing offensive nuclear weapons and on building a limited missile defense. |
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LATELY the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office has been trying to capture a big fish while ignoring all the small ones with a surprising stubbornness. The prosecutor's office tends to keep track of people who are fairly influential and, as it usually turns out, the results of those efforts can sometimes be scandalous. |
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PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin recently signed the first post-Soviet friendship treaty between the two countries. "The treaty will bring friendship from generation to generation," Jiang said after the signing ceremony. |
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TO warm up for his summit meeting with Western leaders in Genoa, Italy, on Saturday, and for his separate conference with U.S. President George Bush, on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin hosted his first full news conference at the Kremlin. In it, he portrayed himself as the kind of leader the rest of the G-8 is hoping he will be: politically moderate and committed to opening Russia's economy. |
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 With a look of frustration, Georgy Fyodorov yelled "Time out!" as a bewildered elderly couple, heading home from a day of sunbathing at Laskovy beach in Solnechnoye on Sunday, tried to make sense of the group of half-naked bodies diving after a strange-looking disc. |
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Somehow this dull and dented coin is a perfect symbol. Bearing the date 1739, it hangs in the opulently restored second-floor of the Laima fast-food restaurant at 12 Nab. |
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Pope, Bush Meet CASTELGANDOLFO, Italy (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush began a meeting with Pope John Paul II on Monday, with the two - who agree on most moral issues except for the death penalty - expected to discuss a range of issues. Bush was greeted by an honor guard of Swiss guards and was received by the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano who took the U. |
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Issues Archive