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 For the third time in a row, members of the United City faction in the Legislative Assembly sabotaged the chamber's regular Wednesday sitting this week by not showing up. But members from the faction, which is made up of factions that support Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, said that they will be in their seats next week, and they will be there with the specific intent of removing Legislative Assembly Speaker Vadim Tyulpanov, of the pro-Kremlin Unity faction, from his position. |
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 Whenever Angelina Gambaryan spotted the long list of tenants who owed large amounts in back payment for communal services on the door of her building, she would look away, in order to avoid seeing her own name there. |
All photos from issue.
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 Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said on Tuesday that not all necessary steps to guarantee public safety during St. Petersburg's upcoming 300th-anniversary celebrations have been taken. He also said that the Interior Ministry is monitoring extremist groups that could disrupt the festivities, and vowed to crack down on criminals and illegal residents in St. |
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MOCOW - The Federation Council on Wednesday rejected a bill banning the use of profanity and foreign words in official situations as too vague, and called for a joint commission to be set up with the State Duma to rewrite the legislation. |
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 MOSCOW - What a difference a couple of years can make. Just over two years ago, in a dispute often cited as a reason never to invest in Russia, Mikhail Fridman and other major shareholders of TNK were threatening to scuttle global oil giant BP's $471-million investment in Sidanco. |
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MOSCOW- BP's spectacular $6.75-billion commitment to Russia reverberated throughout the corporate community Tuesday, as business leaders and economists alike called it a pivotal event that could open the floodgates to further investments across the economic spectrum. |
 Federal Audit Chamber head Sergei Stepashin sent shockwaves though the St. Petersburg City Administration on Monday by announcing that the sale of government shares in the city's prestigious Grand Hotel Europe had contained violations. "The government stake of shares in the Grand Hotel Europe was sold for peanuts. |
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Airlines flying to the airport said that losses resulting from the cancellation of flights would be considerable. Although a final decision is only due at the beginning of March, Prokhorenko, who also works as the head of the city's External Relations Committee, said that there was little doubt that the airport would be closed. |
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MOSCOW - The days of decline and fall for the Russian ruble are over. Faced with surging demand for the national currency as oil dollars flood the economy in unprecedented volumes, the Central Bank this week declared a strong ruble policy for the first time since the steep devaluation in 1998. Forced to navigate between market forces bolstering the currency and flaming inflation by printing money to absorb excess dollars, the Central Bank, which had planned to let the ruble depreciate to 33.7 per dollar over the course of the year, now says that a stronger national currency is inevitable as long as oil prices remain at multi-year highs. Central Bank Chairperson Sergei Ignatyev announced the sea change in Poland earlier this week, saying that the government would meet its inflation target of 10 percent to 12 percent by letting the ruble strengthen 4 percent to 6 percent this year. |
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 MOSCOW - No. 5 oil major Sibneft said Wednesday that it wants to parlay its leverage over TNK asset Onako into a stake in TNK's new $6.75-billion mega-merger with BP, despite the architects of that deal having ruled out the possibility of their new baby being shared with anyone else. |
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MOSCOW - The head of Norilsk Nickel's largest union on Tuesday urged his colleagues to stop their hunger strike, widening a rift between the metal giant's two labor groups. "A hunger strike is not the way," Valery Glazkov, head of the 42,800-member Alliance of Trade Unions, said in a telephone interview. |
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REGIME change in Iraq, probably by war, now seems inevitable "in weeks rather than months," as U.S. President George W. Bush puts it. France and Russia are unlikely to veto a United Nations resolution specifically authorizing the use of force against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. |
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SITTING in the Legislative Assembly chamber and watching yet another session not taking place this Wednesday, the thought, which has occurred to me on more than one occasion, crossed my mind that the current goings-on at the Mariinsky Palace are more suited to the stage of the Mariinsky Theater. |
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 Violinist, composer and arranger Alexei Aigui pays a rare visit to St. Petersburg this weekend to perform with his ensemble, 4'33". Although the group plays regularly in Moscow, it last appeared in St. Petersburg at a poorly organized concert at the SKIF festival in 2001. According to Aigui, this weekend's concerts will largely be based on 4'33"'s most recent album, "Schastye, Slava I Bogatstvo" ("Happiness, Glory and Wealth"), released in September, with some older numbers. |
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 After 17 years of producing alternative music, seminal art-rock band Vezhlivy Otkaz is calling it quits with a final St. Petersburg show at Red Club this weekend. |
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Leading local ska-punk band Spitfire celebrates its 10th birthday with a gala concert at the Palace of Youth, or LDM, on Saturday. The band dates its history from Feb. 10, 1993, when it made its stage debut at the now-defunct Indie Club. |
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"A Trattoria is a home away from home for many Italians. Eating in a Trattoria is like eating with an Italian family. The mood can be relaxed or boisterous and most of the time friendly. |
 The program for the Mariinsky Theater's upcoming international ballet festival, which gets under way next Friday, includes the world premiere of "Princess Pirlipat," a new work conceived as a prelude to Tchaikovsky's perennial favorite "The Nutcracker. |
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St. Petersburger Yulia Belomlinskaya became a living legend in New York's Russian community in the 13 years she spent in the city, as an artist, actor, singer - and dominatrix. |
 Mikhail Brashinsky's debut feature "Gololyod" ("Black Ice") is the latest in a recent line of films that have tried to capture Moscow's mood during the last decade. Perhaps the most profound to date is Alexander Zeldovich's "Moscow" (1999), which shares "Black Ice"'s sense that a new stratum of society has evolved with an inherent predilection for self-destruction that is as damaging as any criminal violence in the non-cinematic world. |
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It is 1910. Lev Tolstoy lies dying in the stationmaster's house at the railway station of Astapovo, a remote village in provincial Russia. Journalists from all over the world, along with a crowd of eccentrics and opportunists, have gathered, hoping to derive some advantage from the novelist's last hours. |
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Yuzabilnost saita: the user-friendliness of a Web site. I thoroughly enjoyed the debate in the State Duma and the press on the new language law, particularly concerning the use of "non-standard" language (nenormativnaya leksika). I don't believe obscene language can be "banned" if only because sometimes only "non-standard" language can adequately describe Russian reality. |
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