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The turnout for the State Duma elections could be so low that the results will be invalid, the City Election Commission says. "[We ask] to use all possible means to raise the turnout of voters," commission head Alexander Gnyotov said in his address to the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Leaders of three independent-minded Georgian regions were to meet Thursday to discuss what one of them described as "purely economic issues" but what in reality looked like a blunt warning to Tbilisi that any use of force against them could trigger the country's disintegration. |
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MOSCOW - A textbook on modern Russian history that invites students to discuss whether Putin is an authoritarian leader and has formed a police state may be banned in high schools. The Education Ministry's expert council met Thursday night and tentatively decided to remove the book from school curriculums. |
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$100,000 Pay Heist ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - About 3 millon rubles intended to be paid out as wages for workers of construction company PMK-6 has been stolen, Interfax quoted city and Leningrad Oblast police as saying Thursday. |
All photos from issue.
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 The Kremlin wants a tame State Duma, says Grigory Yavlinsky leader of the liberal Yabloko party. "The administration thinks that creating a tame Duma with an obedient majority will be useful for them," Yavlinsky said at a news conference in St. |
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A group of teachers have created a paid homework-help service for St. Petersburg schoolchildren. Called Pifagor, the service is named after Pythagorus, the Greek mathematician whose theorem every schoolchild knows. |
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Vladimir Poludnyakov, head of the City Court officially resigned Tuesday, leaving the post he occupied for 22 years, local media reported Wednesday. "I'm leaving with a light heart," Kommersant quoted Poludnyakov as saying. "Nobody asked me, nobody forced me to go. |
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MOSCOW - A presidential decree Monday to form an Anti-Corruption Council, an advisory body to help President Vladimir Putin fight against graft, appears to be a victory for liberals over hard-liners within the Kremlin - and could signal a priority for Putin's probable second term in office, analysts said. |
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 No longer will St. Petersburgers haul IKEA gadgets and accents back in their luggage from their trips to Moscow or Helsinki. With the opening of the IKEA Kudrovo store, local residents will be able to take advantage of the famous Swedish home furnishings chain closer to home. |
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MOSCOW - The Prosecutor General's Office continued to turn the screws on Yukos on Thursday, slapping former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky with another charge and seizing a number of documents from Yukos-Moskva, the operational headquarters of the oil giant. |
 For more than a decade St. Petersburg has attracted foreigners interested in buying an apartment, either for their own use or for renting out. Yulia Anikeyeva, managing director of DTZ Zadelhoff Tie Leung, estimates that 2,000 apartments have foreign owners, mostly older city stock in the center that has been bought and renovated. Only a few dozen renovated apartments are on the so-called secondary market, she said. |
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 As the real estate market in St. Petersburg becomes more civilized, banks will play an increasing role in attracting institutional investors. This tendency was highlighted by experts from Colliers International at a conference on the future of investment in land and real estate held by Vedomosti in October. |
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The recently enacted Russian Law "On Mortgage-Backed Securities," which was officially published on November 18, 2003, and entered into legal force on the same day, represents a step forward for real estate financing since it lays out the legal framework for securitizing mortgage-backed loans. |
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The resurgence of political uncertainty in Russia heralds an end to the "stability" of the first 3 1/2 years of President Vladimir Putin's regime. However, the increased volatility engendered by the Yukos affair and its fallout, coupled with the collapse of the system of oligarchic capitalism, may ultimately prove salutary for the long-term development of Russian democracy and civil society - and, ironically, work to counter Putin's growing authoritarianism. |
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Finding myself outdoors on Monday afternoon after the first big snowfall in St. Petersburg this winter, I had to jump over numerous deep puddles. I soon realized that if I wanted to get safely to the nearest cafe for lunch, I would need flippers and a helmet: the flippers to speed me through the pools of water, the helmet in case of accidents caused by big piles of snow falling from roofs. |
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 Los Angeles' Brazzaville, featuring members of Beck, Natalie Merchant's and Tom Waits' bands, is bringing its sophisticated, pop-noir sound to the city this Saturday. Formed by Beck's saxophone player David Brown in 1998, the band has released three albums, "2002" (1998), "Somnambulista" (2001) and "Rouge on Pockmarked Cheeks" (2002), which were all re-released in Russia last week. |
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 Olga Borodina may have gained international fame singing the role of Dalila on the world's most venerable stages yet the renowned mezzo-soprano is only now getting ready to perform her top character at the Mariinsky Theater, her home theater. |
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Bad Manners will come to St. Petersburg for the first time - over 25 years after the British ska band was formed. Part of the early 1980s ska revival in the UK, alongside Selector and Madness, Bad Manners is probably the only band which survived, even if its chart success (hits include "Ne-Ne-Na-Na-Na-Na-Nu-Nu," "Lip Up Fatty," "Special Brew," "Lorraine," "Just a Feeling," "Can-Can" and "Walking in the Sunshine") ended in 1983. |
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The standard samsa in St. Petersburg is a thin, flimsy dough folded over an often sparse filling of meat and onions. You can find one outside most metro stations. |
 They have been branded extreme cabaret, black clownage, absurdist comics and flowing parodists. All that is true and yet it still doesn't fully describe their shows. The St. Petersburg-based theater troupe "Comic-Trust" is very much a stylistic polygon, each side connected with a different form of visual comedy. |
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In the winter of 1837, after the bullet, the opium, the sacraments, the convulsions and the coffin lined with crimson velvet, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan of St. |
 A good rule of thumb is, avoid movies with colons in the title. A colon connotes equal weight for both halves of the entity surrounding it. In other words, someone, namely the author, hasn't been able to make up his mind which half is more important. He hasn't discriminated - and that, after all, is his job. |
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In English, we sometimes say that hatred is just one step away from love. Well, in Russian, devotion and betrayal are flip sides of the same word. Moy predanniy drug menya predal (my devoted friend betrayed me). |
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MOSCOW - A Russian joke tells of an American spy who, though he speaks perfect Russian and has a fake passport, is immediately exposed as an imposter. The giveaway? He is black. J.R. Holden, a black American basketball player from Pittsburgh, is equally conspicuous when he takes the floor for CSKA Moscow as a Russian citizen. |
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