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After the United States launched missile attacks on Iraq early Thursday morning, provoking a barrage of worldwide condemnation, Staff Writer Irina Titova took to the streets of St. Petersburg to find out how city residents are reacting. |
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St. Petersburg City Prosector Ivan Sydoruk was reassigned from his position in the city to work as an assistant in the federal Prosecutor's Office on Tuesday, according to an order signed by federal General Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov. |
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GROZNY - Chechnya's top election official said Thursday that final security measures are in place and hundreds of polling stations are ready for Sunday's constitutional referendum. Human-rights activists warned, however, that many of Chechnya's 540,000 eligible voters are confused about the poll, and that turnout might fall below the minimum 50 percent required to validate the referendum. |
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Following a long meeting with St. Petersburg's law-enforcment and security bodies on Wednesday, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov announced that the city was poorly prepared to ensure the security of foreign leaders and residents during its upcoming 300th-anniversary celebrations, and threatened to fire the heads of departments responsible for security in the city, if they failed to meet the goals set at the meeting. |
All photos from issue.
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The mother of one of the three Nakhimov Naval Academy cadets at the center of allegations of physical abuse at the academy was attacked last Thursday in the village of Taitsy, near St. Petersburg, by a group of people she says were academy cadets. Marina Soboleva, who suffered a concussion and a broken nose in the assault, said that four young people in Nakhimov Academy uniforms attacked her at around 10 p.m. when she left her house to collect coal from a communal storage. "One of them approached me and hit my face with a long metal object," she said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "I lost consciousness. When I came round, I saw all four kicking me. |
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 Although a parade of boats to mark St. Petersburg's status as the birthplace of the Russian Navy is scheduled to form an important part of the city's official 300th-anniversary celebrations in May, the participation of a replica of the navy's first vessel, the Shtandart, is under threat due to a lack of funding. |
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 MOSCOW - Top timber company Ilim Pulp on Thursday claimed victory in an ongoing ownership war, by announcing plans to consolidate its four main mills into one company and pursue a New York Stock Exchange listing, part of a five-year, $1-billion investment plan. |
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MOSCOW - The outbreak of war in Iraq is already taking a toll on Russia's tourism industry. "There has been a flood of rejections, especially on popular destinations like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates," Irina Tyurina, spokesperson for the Russian Tourism Union, said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - The car industry is trapped inside a vicious circle: Both top automakers and suppliers are waiting for the other to be the first to commit to full-scale domestic production, sector leaders said at a conference Wednesday. Automakers are looking for assurances of reliable supply for potential local plants, while part makers are holding out for guaranteed demand. And while they demur, the auto industry, badly in need of revitalization, continues to atrophy. "Without a functioning components industry, the Russian auto industry will die," said Eugene Pruss, vice president of the U.S.-based Venture, a multinational auto-components producer and designer. |
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 From March 4 to March 7, nine of St. Petersburg's most promising investment projects journeyed to Cannes, France, to take part in the MIPIM-2003 trade fair, holding a press conference on Wednesday, together with the City Administration's Construction Committee, to discuss the results of their work. |
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MOSCOW - Leaders of the country's furniture industry expressed confidence Tuesday that the government commission on protective measures in foreign trade next month will raise import tariffs on furniture. Local producers saw their share of the market atrophy 13 percent since 1999, slipping to just half of all sales after import tariffs were slashed by 60 percent, said Valentin Zverev, president of the Russian furniture association. |
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MOSCOW - National Reserve Bank, a private bank, said in a statement Wednesday it had bought 26 percent of state carrier Aeroflot from the Millhouse Capital asset-management firm. |
 MOSCOW - The government said Wednesday that it had approved a plan by state pipeline monopoly Transneft to expand the Baltic port of Primorsk to help ship the country's booming oil output to lucrative Western markets. The government resolution said Transneft was now allowed to expand Primorsk to 600,000 barrels per day, or 42 million metric tons per year, and possibly to 1 million bpd in the future, from the current level of 240,000 bpd, or 12 million tons a year. |
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MOSCOW - The service sector grew last year at a faster rate than the production sector for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the World Bank said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Three out of every four Russians have bought pirated goods within the last two years - but didn't approve of it, according to a survey released Wednesday. Only 7 percent of the 2,000 consumers polled in Moscow and Samara said they had never seen pirated goods, and 90 percent said they had a negative view of the practice. |
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TRACKING Moscow's policy-making toward Chechnya since September 1991, I can only conclude that someone in the Kremlin wants to set a world record for inconsistency. Since Sept. 6, 1991, when the last Communist administration was overthrown in Grozny, Moscow has, successively, tried the following tactics: support the new regime; threaten it; land troops; retreat; negotiate and blockade; arm the opposition; bomb; declare victory; negotiate; bomb; declare victory; negotiate; surrender; support the new regime; ignore it; threaten it; bomb; proclaim victory. |
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IF anybody was under the illusion that City Hall's problems with Viktor Cherkesov, until last week the presidential representative for the Northwest Region, were anything but political, Smolny's reaction to the appointment of Valentina Matviyenko as his replacement should have cleared this problem up. |
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 Parties promoted by the Svetlaya Muzyka agency usually draw a crowd that is well dressed, drinks expensive cocktails, and has an ear for relaxed, trendy sounds from some of Europe's top club acts. The secret of the agency's success, says its founder, Ilya Bortnuk, is simple: It has no opposition. "As far as the artists and parties I promote are concerned, I don't have any rivals," says Bortnyuk, who traces the beginnings of Svetlaya Muzyka to a party he promoted at the Nabokov Apartment Museum in April 2001 that featured Italian easy-listening combo Montefiori Cocktail. |
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 MOSCOW - Last weekend, under the auspices of the Golden Mask performing-arts festival, the Mariinsky Theater made its contribution to the current season's exchange of performances with Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, bringing to the Bolshoi's stage two programs of ballet, each danced twice during four evening performances. |
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This weekend will see a local concert by Lo'Jo, one of France's leading world-music groups. The band, whose instruments include keyboards, violin, kora, upright bass, drums, percussion and saxophone, cames with an unique blend of French chanson, African, Arabic, Romany, funk, jazz and dub music, adding elements of street circus. |
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Yelena Molokhovets' book "Podarok Molodym Khozyaikam" ("A Gift to Young Housewives") became a bible for Russian women immediately after it was published in 1861. |
 LONDON - In the 21st-century culture of oversupply and underdemand, it's small wonder that every second musician in the marketplace is sold by agents, impresarios and record companies as unique. It doesn't mean much. But just occasionally it does. And Mikhail Pletnyov - arguably the most distinctive and idiosyncratically remarkable of living pianists - is a case in point. Only in the last 10 years have Western audiences had the chance to come to terms with him, although he made his mark a quarter century ago, when - at 21 - he took first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow and immediately stacked up invitations for impressive world tours. |
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 The opening of an exhibition by legendary Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus at the NOMI Gallery on Friday was marked by magnificent photographs on the gallery walls and a protest by the National Bolshevik Party that saw the Lithuanian Consul General sprayed with ketchup and leaflets handed out to visitors. |
 It's been 25 years since an advertisement in a Hollywood trade paper announced that director Martin Scorsese was in pre-production with a tale of 19th century street-fighting men called "Gangs of New York." Now, a full quarter of a century later, we have the film before us. |
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Writing history books is a lot like Monday morning quarterbacking. In his new book "The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory," Derek Leebaert makes liberal use of the freeze button to comment on the good, the bad and the ugly of the vast expanse of world events since 1945. |
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