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At the opening of the seventh annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum at the Tavrichesky Palace on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov praised the government's record, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref delivered a list of work still to be done, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development President Jean Lemierre came through with the funds and Unified Energy Systems (UES) chief Anatoly Chubais was simply a no show. |
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MOSCOW - As expected, the State Duma's pro-Kremlin majority derailed an attempt by a rather unusual alliance of Communists and liberal Yabloko deputies to pass a vote of no confidence in the government over its unpopular domestic policies. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin presented former St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev as the new deputy prime minister to the cabinet on Tuesday with a warning that he was undertaking what could be the most daunting task of his career. Putin on Monday appointed Yakovlev as a sixth deputy prime minister with a portfolio to overhaul construction, transportation and the collapsing housing sector. |
All photos from issue.
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The Legislative Assembly on Wednesday put aside the question of setting a date for gubernatorial elections in order to deal with a more pressing question: Ensuring that St. Petersburg's election laws are in accordance with federal legislation. The assembly passed in third reading the new city election law at its regular session on Wednesday, while scheduling a special session for June 30 to consider the question of the date for the vote to choose a replacement for Vladimir Yakovlev, who announced his resignation as governor on Monday. |
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At a press conference on Tuesday Valentina Matviyenko said that she needed more time to answer the question that was on most people's minds and raised another that most people say they don't want to hear. |
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MOSCOW - A Saratov court on Wednesday granted the early release of National Bolshevik Party leader and writer Eduard Limonov, who was sentenced in April to four years in prison on charges of illegally purchasing weapons and organizing a criminal group. |
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MOSCOW - The government plans to slash the number of ministries in an effort to cut the red tape that is stifling economic growth, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said in St. |
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Another Cap ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was granted an honorary degree from Bard College, in New York state, on Wednesday, Interfax reported. Kudrin recieved the degree for "scientific contributions and achievements in the field of government service, and for his devotion to the strengthening of the ties between Russian society and the West" the news agency said. |
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MOSCOW - A sexy television ad for Tinkoff beer has excited too many people and should be pulled from the airwaves, the Anti-Monopoly Ministry said Wednesday. In an award-winning 30-second spot, a man in boxer shorts dreams he is lying on the deck of a yacht with his arms around two naked women - one black, one white - and one of the black woman's nipples can be seen briefly. |
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MOSCOW - Troika Dialog won a government tender Wednesday for 26 percent minus one share of Rosgosstrakh, one of the state's leading insurance companies, for 661 million rubles ($21 million), or just 10 million rubles over the starting price. |
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Much has been said about the predictability and lack of intrigue in the upcoming federal parliamentary elections. The reality will be far more colorful than we imagine. This is not to say that something will happen to turn the tables on the major political parties, as happened the last time around - though this can't be ruled out. |
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It is an idea whose time has come ... and gone. To be more specific, the idea of St. Petersburg as Russia's capital was abandoned by Lenin and the Bolshevik government in 1918 and, regardless of how people feel about the Bolsheviks or the reasons for the decision at the time, the intervening 85 years have rendered it virtually impossible to reverse the decision. |
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It's time for a drastic change in tactics. This isn't the time for cleaning workers wearing the name of one of the candidates on their backs, for running television commercials providing subliminal messages promoting a certain candidate or for handing parcels of free food to prospective voters, as was the case in the Legislative Assembly elections in December. |
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 The first production of the whole of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" in Russia since the tsarist era took the stage of the Mariinsky Theater last week. The four operas, sung in German, ran on four evenings from Friday through Wednesday, finally fulfilling Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev's most ambitious project and long-held dream. The Ring Cycle, loosely based on old Germanic legends, last appeared in Russia at the Mariinsky in 1914, the year in which German operas disappeared from the country's stages with the onset of World War I. |
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 Next weekend sees the first running of an ambitious project set to turn the Peter and Paul Fortress into a jazz-festival venue for the first time in its history. |
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The next couple of weeks will see two jazz festivals, the new Peter and Paul Jazz Festival (see article, this page) and the traditional White Night's Swing, promoted by David Goloshchokin's Jazz Philharmonic Hall. However, there is also a hybrid genre called nujazz that is supposed to open new horizons in blending jazz and electronic music, and the NuJazz Festival is being held in the city for the second year. |
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To tell the truth, there are few fans of Russian cuisine to be found among the ex-pat community. Complaints frequently heard center around the appalling and recklessly excessive use of mayonnaise in salads, the parsimonious use of spices of any kind and, dare it be said, the complete lack of taste of your average pelmeni - for many, getting through a bowl of the latter without an industrial-sized canister of soy sauce, is an uphill struggle. |
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The major plight of Russian theater, and St. Petersburg theater in particular, is a shortage of cutting-edge drama, at least according to the founders of a new competition to unearth fresh young talent that kicked off in St. Petersburg earlier this week. |
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Telega: poison-pen letter I don't think my Russian friends and colleagues will take offense if I say that Russia is a gossipy country. I don't condemn it; to the contrary, I take off my hat. |
 Russians, like any other people, love holidays. The difference, as anyone who has lived here for a while will confirm, is that Russia seems to have more of them than other countries. "Holiday St. Petersburg," an exhibition that opened at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall on Monday, documents the history of holidays in St. Petersburg. The organizers see the exhibition as the last word on St. |
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 The middle of June is the traditional time for the month-long Summer Literary Seminars, or SLS, a program that brings established American writers and literary scholars to St. |
 Marking its 25th anniversary this year, the Moscow International Film Festival, which begins Friday and continues to June 29, will once again function as Russia's window onto world cinema. Although the festival was first held in 1959 - if you discount a one-off event that took place in 1935 - the MIFF was for many years not an annual event and thus this year celebrates its 25th birthday. |
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The Festival of Festivals, probably St. Petersburg's top annual film event - screening dozens of films shown at film festivals over the world lately as well as retrospectives - opens Monday, showing films at four cinemas through June 29. |
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BAGHDAD - Scores of gunmen fired in the air and cursed America on Thursday at the funeral of a former Iraqi air force officer killed by U.S. troops during a violent protest in Baghdad the previous day. "There is no god but Allah, America is the enemy of Allah," several hundred mourners chanted as men with Kalashnikov assault rifles fired volleys into the air, in defiance of a U.S. ban on the carrying of weapons in Iraq. There was no sign of U.S. troops in Baghdad's impoverished al-Hurriya district where Tareq Mohammed, a former air force non-commissioned officer, had lived with his wife and five children. He was one of two Iraqis shot dead on Wednesday when sacked members of Iraq's dissolved armed forces confronted U. |
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 Zenit's youth players led it to a 3-0 win over Torpedo-Metallurg Moscow at Petrovsky Stadium on Wednesday night. midfielder Oleg Vlasov capped Zenit's youthful display with his first Premier League goal just five minutes after being introduced as a substitute in his first game for the club. |
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