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MOSCOW - Taking a break from the slopes, President Vladimir Putin announced tax breaks for small business Thursday that he called as revolutionary as the country's envied 13-percent flat income tax. Putin, who is on a weeklong skiing vacation in Eastern Siberia, said small businesses with up to 20 staff and annual turnover not higher than 10 million rubles (about $320,000) will have the option of paying a 20-percent tax on profits or 8-percent tax on revenues as of the start of 2003. Small businesses will no longer have to pay a number of taxes - value-added tax, sales tax, property tax, income tax and social tax. "I believe that all these proposals may undoubtedly be described as revolutionary, no less important than the introduction of the 13-percent flat income-tax rate for individuals," Putin said in televised remarks on the sidelines of a meeting with leading Russian scientists. |
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 MOSCOW - At the end of the day, it was an anticlimax. Putting behind weeks of dramatic behind-the-scenes negotiations and a full day of laughter, handshakes and kisses by journalists, businesspeople and politicians, Press Minister Mikhail Lesin came out to a crowd of reporters Wednesday evening to announce the long-anticipated decision. |
All photos from issue.
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Nearly 800 delegates from more than 50 countries discussed ways of combating international terrorism in a conference at the Tavrichesky Palace this week. The conference kicked off on March 25 with an unprecedented one-day meeting of representatives of the national security services of 39 countries. "This is a completely new page in the history of world special services' collaboration," said Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, according to Interfax. Representatives of the CIA, the FBI and Britain's MI5, as well as those of secret services from countries like China, Greece and Germany, attended the event. |
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 An elderly woman died Thursday morning when a fire broke out in a communal apartment in a residential building in the Petrogradsky District of the city. |
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MOSCOW - In a setback for human-rights activists, the Presidium of the Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned an earlier ruling that invalidated part of a secret Defense Ministry document used to prosecute high-profile espionage suspects such as environmentalist Alexander Nikitin, military journalist Grigory Pasko and arms analyst Igor Sutyagin. But the Presidium said the court should take another look at the document, Order No. 055, which gives a list of data that the Defense Ministry considers to be state secrets. "The judges didn't tell us that we were not right. They just returned us to the starting point," Nikitin said. The Supreme Court ruled last September that 10 of the document's 650 articles should be annulled, and said the decision would apply retroactively to 1996, when the order was issued. |
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 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin's term hit its halfway mark this week, with politicians and pundits weighing in on the ups and downs of the unusually popular president's first two years in office. |
 MOSCOW - Two former Soviet intelligence officers who fled to the West will likely be tried in absentia if they do not return to Russia, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday, citing Supreme Court sources. The report came on the same day that one of the former officers, Oleg Kalugin, had been ordered to appear for questioning by the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB. |
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Seleznyov May Stay On MOSCOW (SPT) -State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov will likely keep his job, but may instead lose one of his deputies, Interfax reported a well-informed source in the leadership of parliament's pro-government centrist bloc as saying Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - With just four days left before the European Union imposes a ban on noisy Russian airplanes, Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko said Wednesday that he had won a nine-month reprieve on flights to Greece, Belgium, Holland and the Scandinavian countries. |
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MOSCOW - A U.S. government grant of $868,000 to the Itera Group has been put on hold amid vitriolic criticism from Russia's investment community. The grant, from an agency whose purpose is to advance U. |
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Hotel for Sale ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city administration announced Wednesday that it intends to privatize the Pribaltiiskaya Hotel on Vasilievsky Island, Interfax reported. A privatization plan should be ready by the middle of April, the news agency reported, citing sources in the administration. |
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WASHINGTON - The day the Central Bank chief resigned, President Vladimir Putin spent four hours privately consulting with economists who are leading critics of his government's economic policies - and agreeing with some of what they said. |
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"If we look truth in the eye, we have to acknowledge that our level of demand for aircraft does not correspond with the level of industry's capability." - Transportation Minister Sergei Frank at the annual Transportation Ministry meeting Feb. 27. MOSCOW - With a looming deadline to comply with new noise regulations about to put European skies off-limits for 70 percent of Russia's aircraft, the government is stepping up efforts to coax Europe into concessions. |
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RUSSIA'S experience with democracy has been fairly brief. All told, it has had a little more than two decades, from 1906 to 1917 and from 1989 to the present day. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of democracy and the fate of the parliament in this country have largely been one and the same. |
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WASHINGTON - I wonder how many thousands of Russians have been killed by nuclear testing? I have a ballpark figure for how many Americans have been killed: 11,000. |
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ON March 20, the State Duma accepted the resignation of Central Bank head Viktor Gerashchenko. This act not only marked the departure of a man who has played a dominant role in the banking sector for most of the past decade, it also means the departure of the last openly Keynesian central banker in Europe - maybe even the world. |
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WHEN U.S. President George W. Bush last fall ordered the Defense Department to arrange for military commissions to try suspected terrorists, the potential scope of his order was dangerously sweeping. |
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 Zoopark, arguably the most unusually located local club, announced this week that it is closing down. Based in the Leningrad Zoo's lecture hall, the club will hold its last three music shows Friday through Sunday, and then close its doors forever. Zoopark's roots go back to January 1996, although the club has gone through many incarnations over the years. For a brief period in the fall of 1996, it hosted a post-modernist "animal-lovers' club," organized by then Art Director Alexander Donskikh, who is also the lead singer for the pub band Zoo-park. |
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 Theater troupes from Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will be arriving in St. Petersburg next week to take part in the festival "Encounters in Russia," an annual festival organized by local venue Baltiisky Dom. |
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As planned, the new club Orlandina will open on Friday, although Alexei Khvostenko, who wrote the song that the club is named for, will not appear at the opening. According to club management, the emigre poet and painter who has been living in Paris since 1977, was duly invited but cannot enter Russia at the moment because of visa problems. |
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One of the frustrating things about living in St. Petersburg is that one tends to see one's friends, both Russian and foreign, depart for pastures new - often Moscow or back home - and this usually happens just as you are getting to know them properly. |
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When in 1829 an infuriated mob in Tehran murdered the Russian dramatist and diplomat Alexander Griboyedov, along with most of his country's embassy, the shah sent Nicholas I one of his largest diamonds as an apology. The 89-carat stone, known as the Shah Nadir, can still be admired in the Kremlin Armory's diamond collection. |
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Putin Practise MOSCOW (SPT) - President Vladimir Putin took time out from his eastern Siberian vacation Wednesday to plug his physical-fitness drive at a children's skiing competition. "I wish you to carry this love for sports all through your life," Putin, wearing a black and brown ski suit, told the young athletes at the opening of the competition in Baikalsk. |
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