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 In a move that could cost St. Petersburg millions of dollars in tourism revenue, Russia's Foreign Ministry changed visa regulations for visitors arriving on cruise ships, prompting two Finnish cruise lines, Silja Line and Kristina Cruises, to cancel scheduled trips to Russia. Prior to a ministry decision that took effect at noon on Tuesday, Finns and other foreigners arriving on cruise ships were not required to have Russian visas as long as their stay in port was less than 72 hours, a figure in line with international standards. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Moscow and Tbilisi ratcheted up their angry rhetoric over the crime-infested Pankisi Gorge on Wednesday and Thursday, but the lawless border area is just a tactical battlefield along a much broader front where national interests collide. In essence, Russia and Georgia are at loggerheads over a Cold War-style dilemma: Which world power will hold sway in the unstable but strategically important Caspian region - Russia or the United States? While Moscow is intent on retaining its grip on an area that boasts large energy resources and is emerging as a key transit route from Central Asia to Europe, Tbilisi has pinned its hopes of economic development and security on the West. |
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MOSCOW - The number of Russian women smuggled out of the country for sexual exploitation abroad has skyrocketed in recent years, but police are virtually powerless to prevent it, Interior Ministry officials said at a news conference Tuesday. |
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Battling TB ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Vladimir Yakovlev has given the city administration's healthcare committee the task of developing a program to fight against tuberculosis within the next two weeks. The governor's press service told Interfax on Thursday that Yakovlev had said at a meeting in Smolny that he would allocate additional funds from the city budget in order to stamp out the illness. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin turned his attention to coal on Thursday, promising miners in Siberia that he intends to boost the ailing industry by creating a competitive domestic fuel market by gradually raising natural-gas prices. "There is no other country in the world [like Russia] - everywhere else coal is cheaper [than gas]," Putin said in televised remarks from the Kemerovo mining center of Mezhdurechensk. |
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MOSCOW - Chelyabinsk regional prosecutors who investigated the corruption allegations against lawmaker Vladimir Golovlyov called the sums embezzled and the number of people involved "unprecedented," and said that they believe Golovlyov's death in an apparent contract hit last week was linked to the case. |
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One of the largest dairy producers in Russia, Wimm-Bill-Dann Products, has bought the St. Petersburg dairy firm Roska for $11.7 million, Yevgeny Chvertkin, first vice president at Wimm-Bill-Dann, announced at a press conference on Tuesday. The Roska factory, built in 1987, currently has an output of 27 million tons of dairy products and 40 million tons of processed milk per year, although the maximum production capacity at the plant is 165 tons of dairy products and 500 tons of processed milk per year. |
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A new board of directors and a new acting general director were elected by an extraordinary shareholders meeting of the Northwest Shipping Co. on Saturday. |
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MOSCOW - In what appears to be a swift victory for the state, a deal was struck in the small hours of Wednesday morning between embattled general director of the Kristall distillery, Alexander Timofeyev, and the government-backed candidate, Alexander Romanov, a source said. |
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MOSCOW - Russia is seen as slightly less corrupt than last year, but is still in the bottom third of a ranking conducted by the Berlin-based Transparency International corruption watchdog and released Wednesday. |
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ALL of a sudden, it looks like Sept. 11 never happened. After the announcement of a 10-year, $40-billion cooperation deal with Iraq, the sale of five nuclear reactors to Iran and the recent visit of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, some people in Washington are beginning to think that Russia is returning to its position as patron saint of the "axis of evil. |
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ALMOST a year ago, Russia and the United States joined forces to fight terrorism. Moscow helped to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; in return, Washington tacitly gave its new Russian friends a free hand in the Caucasus after it was established that al-Qaida terrorists had links with Chechen rebels. |
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 Sergei Shnurov, the notoriously foul-mouthed leader of St. Petersburg's popular ska-punk band Leningrad, put the band on hold in February - when it was at the height of its popularity, after its album "Piraty XXI Veka" ("Pirates of the 21st Century") and a sell-out show at the Yubileiny Sports Palace. |
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For the first time in three years, Morrissey will tour Europe in September, and chances are higher than ever that the former vocalist and lyricist of 1980s English gloom-merchants The Smiths will play in Russia at last. |
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Although open for just three years, from 1912 to 1915, Brodyachaya Sobaka, or "The Stray Dog", managed to build itself a secure reputation among St. Petersburg's multitude of literary landmarks, right up there with Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, the Nevsky Prospect of Gogol's short story and the apartment on what is now called Nab. Kanala Griboyedova where Raskolnikov axed an aged loan-shark in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." For the ace faces of Russia's literary Silver Age, this was the place to be seen, the essential destination for every self-respecting intelligentsia socialite and the place to casually let slip your finest bon mots in high-brow conversation. |
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 Kaliningrad. Not a name that would be recongnized among the world's great destinations for travellers: A backward, isolated enclave of Russia, best known for its domination of the world market in fossilized tree sap; Full of grey, Soviet apartment blocks, due to the fact that under 10 percent of its old buildings having survived World War II. |
 NEW YORK - When Harrison Ford stars, the audience expects a hero. The president will kick butt through every corner of his plane and vanquish the terrorists. That fugitive doctor will foil his pursuers and prove he didn't kill his wife. Indiana Jones will conquer the snakes and outwit the Nazis. |
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There is a kind of man who meets a woman on an ocean voyage and winds up having a shipboard romance. Then there is the man to whom this happens: a barefoot woman in a sable coat, a diplomat's wife, arrives at his cabin after a flirtation at dinner. |
 Next year, as everyone with any connection to St. Petersburg well knows, the city will celebrate its 300th anniversary. However, a much less well-known town, Lodeinoye Polye in the Leningrad Oblast - which was founded just before St. Petersburg - can lay claim to two of the former imperial capital's titles: the home of the Baltic Fleet and the "Window on the West. |
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