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 SESTRORETSK, Leningrad Oblast - Galina Rybina, 44, stands at the edge of the beach joyfully stretching her arms toward the warm sun and running sand between her toes. The sky is clear, the air is warm and Rybina is completely naked. Welcome to the Dunes nude beach in Sestroretsk, about 30 kilometers northwest of St. |
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MOSCOW - Top U.S. finance and trade officials praised Russia's economic reform efforts on Thursday and said that they would work hard to turn promises of cooperation into action. |
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The weekly newspaper Chas Pik said that it will not publish a retraction of an article that accused environmentalist and former espionage defendant Alexander Nikitin of being a spy. The newspaper plans to appeal a libel verdict against it that was handed down by a federal court earlier this month. |
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MOSCOW - U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the United States will not wait for Russian agreement to deploy a planned national missile defense system. |
All photos from issue.
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 A dirty man in Tajik national dress accompanied by a pair of equally dirty children were approaching passersby on Staro-Nevsky Prospect asking for money. Some people stopped and fished change from their pockets. Others, perhaps inured by the frequency of such requests in recent months, kept looking straight ahead as they wordlessly hurried past. |
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Nuclear Plan Blasted BANGKOK (Reuters) - An international labor union said Tuesday it was shocked by Russian plans to build a nuclear reactor for Myanmar, possibly in return for produce it said was associated with forced labor. |
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 Judging by the number of firms that have recently announced development plans in the region, and by the opinions of industry analysts, there may be no better time than now to move into the St. Petersburg supermarket sector. But while a number of Russian firms have said they are planning to do just this, certain advantages held by established European grocery chains may make competing and surviving difficult. |
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MOSCOW - Aeroflot is in negotiations with a group of international investors to set up a brand-new airline in Ireland, a move that would give the Russian air carrier access to all of Europe, an Aeroflot executive close to the talks said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - Russian regions that continued to service their debts after the federal government stopped honoring its own in 1998 are being rewarded. Major rating agencies are keeping many regional ratings at the sovereign level and hinting that some could go higher. |
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$800M Norilsk Project KALGOORLIE, Australia (Reuters) - Canadian-Australian miner Argosy Minerals Ltd. said Thursday that Norilsk Nickel would end up with a controlling stake in a proposed $800 million nickel project in New Caledonia. |
 MOSCOW - The largest Russian oil company LUKoil is guaranteed regular media attention. Analysts and journalists intently follow the dynamics of the company's development. Its corporate news provokes changes in the stock market. LUKoil's oil production has not grown recently as much as that of other companies, but LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov said this is not a bad sign. Alekperov, named on Forbes magazine's 2001 list of the world's richest men, said his company is not inclined to "abrupt movements" and puts its emphasis on the economics of production and not on its volume. |
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 MOSCOW - Russia is writing off $572 million owed by the world's most heavily indebted poor countries through a bilateral debt-relief program, top presidential aide Andrei Illarionov was quoted as saying Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Top oil producer LUKoil thundered against the country's judicial system Thursday for allowing a minority shareholder to win a two-day ban on its exports through pipeline monopoly Transneft, costing it $1 million. LUKoil vice president Leonid Fedun said the Ryazan court ruling was a "purely psychological act without any basis in the law. |
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Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest nickel producer, has grabbed the No. 5 spot on the annual list of the top 50 non-fuel mining companies compiled and published by "Who Owns Who in Mining. |
 MOSCOW - The real estate industry should not expect the new Land Code to start working smoothly overnight nor to solve all problems with recalcitrant local administrations, said the man behind the code. "The Land Code on its own won't be able to change the situation completely because there is a very notorious bureaucratic tradition in this country and an ineffective justice system," said Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Alexander Maslov at a meeting last week of the real estate committee of the American Chamber of Commerce. |
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MOSCOW - The high-voltage feud between Unified Energy Systems chief Anatoly Chubais and Alexander Remezov, the person he is trying to remove as head of the capital's electric utility, Mosenergo, took a new twist Wednesday with each side claiming victory. |
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MOSCOW - Domestic poultry production should grow 10 percent this year to 893,000 tons, but it still won't meet demand, the chairman of the Russian Poultry Union said Thursday. Russia was the world's largest producer and consumer of poultry in the early '90s, but now more than 90 percent of all poultry is imported from the United States, union chief Vladimir Fisinin told a news conference. |
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A senior official in the administration of U.S. President George Bush recently described President Vladimir Putin's dilemma this way: The president of Russia wants to rebuild Moscow's influence in the world, but he must choose between two mutually exclusive strategies. |
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WHAT makes a person influential? That is the question that Gallup, Channel 6 and Smena tried - and failed - to answer last week. But it certainly did make for thought-provoking reading. |
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IT is the purpose of this space to reduce all the city's problems down to tidy 400-word solutions, presented with compelling elegance. Some problems, though, refuse to be distilled in this manner. And the problem of the Luli gypsies, reported on page 3 of this issue, certainly fits into this category. |
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Congressional Record Did Gary Condit kill Chandra Levy? That's the question that has engulfed/consumed/devoured the American media for weeks on end, to the exclusion of all else. |
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 It used to be that Baza was just a small shop located in Pushkinskaya 10 selling vinyl almost exclusively to a miniscule group of esoteric DJs. Over time though, it started promoting club events and educating the younger generation of DJs in the art of the scratch and spin - while trying as hard as it can to make an international breakthrough for the local talent. |
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What do a giant rubber fish, a room lined with boots, and two sculpted mushroom clouds hanging over a grand piano have in common? Answer: they're all exhibits at the second annual Pro Arte Project series of exhibitions previewed on these pages earler this month. |
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When the temperature rises to 30 degrees Celsius or more, the best place on the local club scene to head to may well be Fish Fabrique - or rather, its yard. An alternative cafe at the Pushkinskaya 10 arts complex, the club puts tables and benches outside in the summertime, and now, probably because of the new competition from the nearby and free-entrance Cynic, it is not overcrowded. In any case, it's a (literally) fresher alternative to packed basement clubs, such as Moloko was when Tequilajazzz played there last week. "People are not eager to go to concerts in the summer - they prefer to sit in the yard and relax," said Fish Fabrique's owner Pavel Zaporozhtsev, adding that he would not concentrate on his club's music program too closely until September comes around. |
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 Fyodor Dostoevsky is celebrated as one of the most influential writers in Russian literature. His life and work, inseparable from St. Petersburg, have become almost mythic texts for millions of readers around the world. |
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This week at the Mariinsky Theater, choreographer Boris Eifman brought audiences to their feet with his newest work, "Don Juan and Molière." Eifman's latest in a series of ferociously popular ballets (his "Red Giselle" featuring most prominently among them), "Molière" will no doubt serve to reconfirm what St. |
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My first acquaintance with Yury Mamleyev was in the spring of 1999 at a reading in the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. Fittingly for a writer who made his name in the unofficial and esoteric intellectual circles of the 1960s, he chose an underground venue. |
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The latest addition to the neighborhood that is fast becoming St. Petersburg's "restaurant district" - the area around Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa - is a pleasant little eatery with the charming name Po Barabanu ("Beat the Drum"), which opened its doors earlier this month. Po Barabanu's owners have chosen a playful martial theme for their restaurant, treating it with an excellent sense of humor. The staff is dressed in toy-soldier outfits straight out of "The Nutcracker," and the interior is decked out with bright colors and clever wooden sculptures. Although the hard, straight-backed chairs would probably be better in a military mess hall, the basement dining area is well air-conditioned and a relaxing place to eat. |
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 It's no "Gladiator," but "The Arena" packs a helluva punch for a film made on a limited budget, with amateur actors, by a man who knows how to do things on the cheap. |
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"Don't be scared," they told the audience. "Everything you see is meant to be the way it is, and you must not worry." Forewarned and forearmed, our group of 18 was led up the five flights of stairs to the attic in which "Smeshnoi," an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man," ("Son Smeshnogo Cheloveka") is performed. |
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St. Petersburg club kids get their fun on the beach this weekend as the musical-arts festival "Open Air" takes over two forts off Kotlin Island, located in the Gulf of Finland 35 kilometers to the city's west. |
 One day in 1988, a middle-aged woman participating in a televised satellite broadcast between the United States and the Soviet Union stood up and uttered to the world the immortal words that would soon become the most hackneyed cliche for any student of Soviet and Russian sexual culture, "There is no sex in the Soviet Union. |
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Sex. It seems to be everywhere these days. In fact, finding a local nightclub, bar, restaurant or even cafe without a strip show can be pretty hard work. |
 Before I was commissioned to write this article, I had never been to a casino, either in St. Petersburg or in the United States. I was, to be honest, not only a novice, but a skeptic as well. I was a victim of the stereotype that local casinos are places to avoid, most likely filled with gun-toting, jump-suited, gaudy-German-car-driving New Russians competing to see who can have his head shaved closest to the scalp. |
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 If you are looking for the heart of St. Petersburg's gay and lesbian community, you won't stumble onto it by following a pair of teenage girls holding hands. |
 Things have changed a lot since the days when people were reticent even to talk about erotic subjects, and any photographs of nudes were considered contraband. Back then, it was illegal just to bring erotic magazines into the Soviet Union and black-marketeers did a brisk business selling smudgy photocopies of back issues of Playboy and Penthouse. |
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Have you ever wondered what would happen if you called one of those numbers boxed off from the rest in the classified sections of papers like the one you're reading now? You know, those ads featuring exotic names that drip seduction like Lolita or Svetlana, and that reassuringly declare, "We Speak English. |
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Hooker Safety TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Police have rounded up some 500 prostitutes in a bid to protect them from a mysterious killer and to clean up a northeastern city, Iran's official news agency reported on Wednesday. The detentions, which began early this week, follow the killing of 19 prostitutes in Mashhad, 757 kilometers northeast of Tehran, during the past year. |
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Vikings Re-Sign Moss EDEN PRAIRIE, Minnesota (AP) - Randy Moss hinted he might have to look elsewhere for a Super Bowl ring. Maybe now he believes he can get it with the Minnesota Vikings. |
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