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 With parents of teenage boys worried about them falling prey to drugs and about the state of their sons' health, St. Petersburg school No. 145 has given its pupils an opportunity to be "real men" - it runs military-style cadet classes. "My son has changed a lot since he joined the cadets' class," said Olga Kurbatova, mother of Fyodor, who studies in the 11th grade of the school. |
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The city's district administrations are putting pressure on private housing committees to ensure that turnout in the presidential elections next month is at least 70 percent, international human rights organization Citizen's Watch said Wednesday. |
 Russia will on Sunday commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of one of the most tragic events in Russian history - the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905. The war, disastrously conducted by the Imperial administration, was neglected and forgotten in Soviet times. As it unfolded there were moments that showed just how indecisive and clumsy the top brass were, but also the courage of regular Russian soldiers. |
All photos from issue.
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Half of the Legislative Assembly deputies at the next election will come from party lists closed to the public, according to a law passed by the city parliament on Wednesday. Deputies elected in single-mandate districts will automatically be removed from party lists, which will be classified until after the elections due in December 2006, the law says. "[The system of the party lists] is good because in this case it will be clear which party deputies belong to and who is really who," Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko faction member, said Wednesday in a phone interview. The law was originally passed at the end of last year, but was vetoed by Governor Valentina Matviyenko and sent back to the assembly with her amendments. |
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 MOSCOW - With air shows and flights across the country, aviators are celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday Monday of Valery Chkalov, who made the first nonstop transpolar flight, covering more than 8,500 kilometers between Moscow and the United States. |
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MOSCOW - An explosion in a Moscow apartment building did not target the author of a tell-all book about the Kremlin, Yelena Tregubova, but her neighbor accused of swindling, police said Tuesday. The explosive device that went off Monday was attached to the door of Yury Sklyar, whose apartment is opposite Tregubova's, a police source told Interfax on condition of anonymity. |
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Oil and metals baron Viktor Vekselberg has snapped up the Forbes publishing family's legendary collection of Fabergé eggs just months before it was to go under the hammer at a Sotheby's auction in New York. |
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The State Russian Museum's collection of pictures by avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich are safe from claims by his descendants for their return, Interfax quoted Yevgenia Petrova, deputy director of the museum, as saying Wednesday. She was speaking after news that heirs of the artist, whose most famous work is the Black Square, have sued the city of Amsterdam in an attempt to recover 14 artworks that they say are rightfully theirs. |
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MOSCOW - In a compromise to keep the shaky nationalist Rodina bloc together, co-leaders Dmitry Rogozin and Sergei Glazyev agreed to put their disagreements aside and concentrate on creating a "united political force," a Rodina official said Tuesday. |
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The first German General Consul to the Kaliningrad region will be sworn in next week during a visit to the former German territory by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, according to the ministry's web site. The general consul will be career diplomat Cornelius Sommer, 63, a former ambassador to Finland. |
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 The city administration will discuss the concept for a new General Plan of development on Feb. 24. Critics say the existing plan is outdated. Relocating factories from the city center to more suitable locations is a major theme of the new plan. This would mean freeing up land attractive for investment in four districts of the city center: the Petrograd Side, Vasilievsky Island, the Tsentralny and Admiralteisky districts. |
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MOSCOW - The editor and opinion editor of Vedomosti will be appointed exclusively by the Financial Times and Dow Jones, the shareholders of the business newspaper announced. |
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MOSCOW - What started as a dispute over an unpaid $800 phone bill could turn into a clash of titans involving hundreds of millions of dollars. A criminal investigation into No. 2 mobile phone operator Vimpelcom, reported Wednesday, is pitting oligarch Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group against the St. |
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MOSCOW - Energy Minister Igor Yusufov said Wednesday that the government wants up to $1 billion for a license to explore and develop one of the three Sakhalin-3 blocs that a consortium led by ExxonMobil won in a tender a decade ago. |
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MOSCOW - A looming hike in oil and gas sector taxation will not exceed $2 billion to $3 billion, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Wednesday. Gref dismissed the Energy Ministry's proposal earlier this week to hit up the sector for as much as $6 billion. |
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MOSCOW - Tax avoidance is theft from orphans, the elderly, and the handicapped, the Russian Orthodox Church announced Wednesday, wading into the national debate on corporate social responsibility. |
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Whether or how our national leadership should be held accountable for having inaccurately asserted, at war's outset, that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction is ultimately a matter for the politicians to debate and the electorate to resolve. |
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The recently appointed head of the Oktyabrskaya Railroad, Viktor Stepov, has a hell of a job to do if he wants to change things for the better. This was my first thought as I tried to get a train from St. |
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The call this week by one of United Russia's leaders, Oleg Morozov, for his party to have more of a say in the creation of the new government to be formed this spring, after the presidential election, is just the latest episode in an ongoing saga that began last May with President Vladimir Putin's state of the nation address. |
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 Refree, the Barcelona-based band which plays sophisticated, melancholy, poetic pop, returns to Russia after two inspired performances in Moscow in October 2002. The band caused a club sensation and was immediately dubbed the "Catalan Radiohead." Refree is the alter ego of Raul Fernandez, the 27-year-old Barcelona-based songwriter, singer and guitar player. Poetic, with clear literaturary influences - one of his songs, "Raisa" was inspired by a character from Russian author Sergei Dovlatov's "The Suitcase" - the sounds of Refree envelop the listener and linger on. |
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 Next week, the American Corner in St. Petersburg will unveil an exhibit dedicated to Louis Armstrong in honor of the organization's two year anniversary. |
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Nat "King" Cole never performed in St. Petersburg, but this week there will be a chance to meet the late jazz legend's younger brother. Singer and pianist Freddy Cole has the talent, and a style, similar to his famous brother, whose fame overshadowed Freddy Cole's own career, but his voice has been described as "darker. |
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Advertisements for a new restaurant and bar called Piyanni Soldat (The Drunken Soldier) feature a half naked woman wearing army pants and gripping a Kalashnikov rifle. |
 Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos", which premiered at the Mariinsky Theater on Monday, thrives on contrasts: heroic opera and light commedia dell'arte, tragedy and nonsense, melancholy and frivolity. Russia's first production of the opera - directed by Frenchman Charles Roubaud - was premiered more than 90 years since it was written. The opera was not met with much enthusiasm when it was originally shown in Stuttgart in 1912 but eventually gained fame for its theatricality, wit and musical harmony. |
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 This Sunday's concert in the Herzen State University provides a sampling of contemporary compositions by foreign and Russian composers, the majority of whom live in the city. |
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Through the Soviet era, every 10th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War would regularly bring a swathe of war films - and some more will likely be launched in 2005, when the 60th anniversary comes around. Given the high feelings of patriotism with which the date is associated, it's understandable - particularly in the light of national ideology - that such Soviet works were celebratory to the point of bending history and fact. Exceptions to this rule were rare and, indeed, proved the rule by their very defiance. One of the most notable was the late Elem Klimov's "Come and See," which, with its searing depiction of partisan warfare against occupying German forces in Belarus, went on to become one of the key works of the first creative wave of perestroika. |
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 A British writer who was moved to tears the first time she heard about it from an Intourist guide during a visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1979 has published an award-winning novel set during the Siege of Leningrad. |
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êÂÏÓÌÚ - ~ÚÓ ÒÚËiËÈÌÓ .Âo/ooÒÚ'ËÂ: remodeling your apartment is a natural disaster. If one of your now-abandoned New Year resolutions was "fix up the apartment," here's a reminder that this is a good time of year to do a bit of @ÂÏÓÌÚ (repair work, redecoration) so long as it's not Í++ÔËÚ++Î,Ì(o)È @ÂÏÓÌÚ (major repairs): for that you need open windows. |
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Churchill Letters Find WASHINGTON (AP) - Winston Churchill predicted World War I two years before it broke out, Library of Congress scholars discovered in a newly unearthed collection of the British prime minister's letters. The letters to Churchill's cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, have not been seen in decades, even by scholars, Librarian of Congress James Billington said. |
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Weightlifter Banned MOSCOW (AP) - Vladislav Lukanin, one of Russia's top prospects for a weightlifting gold medal at the Olympics, has been banned for two years for doping. |
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Issues Archive