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 St. Petersburg police have launched mass document checks of the Roma community in a move intended to protect tourists from being robbed in the street. No police comment was available Monday. The Russian Tourist Industry Union, or RST, said the checks were being made at its request and were intended to make the streets safe for the summer. |
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Poor transport infrastructure, overpriced accommodation, procrastination over visa procedures and absence of strategic planning of cultural events count among the most frequent complaints encountered by St. |
 Sebastian FitzLyon, Australia's honorary consul in St. Petersburg, on Sunday placed flowers on a plaque at the Suvorov Military Academy dedicated to Alexander Zinovieff, a 24-year-old Russian officer killed in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war. The occasion was 100 years to the day since Zinovieff, FitzLyon's great uncle, was shot dead. But, in a quirk of fate, Zinovieff was remembered not only by his mourning family, but also for many years by the man who killed him, and by his family. |
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 A small boy looks at the decorations in the Church of the Icon of the Vladimir Virgin. Boys from Kronstadt's Navy Cadet Corps on their way to classes last week when the fortress town's anniversary was marked. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Navy chief Vladimir Kuroyedov has ordered the decommissioning of an entire class of strategic nuclear submarines despite proposals to modernize their armament systems after at least two failed missile launches, a senior commander said Monday. |
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Visa Easing Backed MOSCOW (SPT) - Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen supports a mutual easing of the visa regime between the European Union and Russia, Interfax reported Vanhanen as saying Monday after he met with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. |
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The Audit Chamber on Friday unveiled a damning report of "massive" financial abuse by Roman Abramovich's government in Chukotka - and then grudgingly praised the tycoon for making life better for the 50,000 people who inhabit the remote Arctic region. In its highly anticipated probe of the region's finances, the budget watchdog found that the richest free man in Russia awarded massive tax breaks to firms linked to his oil company Sibneft; illegally spent more than 1 billion rubles; presided over "massive" legal violations, and ran up the bankrupt region's debt to 9.3 billion rubles. "[We found] ... massive violations of financial discipline, budget and tax legislation," auditor Sergei Ryabukhin told a packed news conference. |
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 For billionaire Roman Abramovich, who started a multi-million shopping spree last year with the purchase of Chelsea soccer club, apparently the sky is the limit. |
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MOSCOW -Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has resigned as leader of the small Social Democratic Party of Russia (SDPR) after falling out with its chairman, Samara governor Konstantin Titov. Gorbachev announced his resignation at a meeting of the party's Political Council in Moscow Saturday after "losing political and human faith" in Titov, a source in the party quoted Gorbachev as saying. |
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The Chechen Election Commission was to publish a resolution Monday that presidential elections for the war-torn republic will be held Aug. 29, Itar-Tass reported. |
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MOSCOW - Nearly 75 years after they left Russia, nine of the jeweled Fabergé eggs made their official return last Tuesday. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II was among the guests who attended the opening of a Fabergé exhibition in the Kremlin Patriarch's Palace, which along with the nine imperial eggs is displaying six other eggs and a number of other items created by Fabergé for the tsarist family. |
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MOSCOW - For two years, the Kremlin has been working on a new media law that would shorten its leash on the press. By this fall, President Vladimir Putin is expected to introduce a bill to the State Duma that would replace the current media law, in place since December 1991. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has postponed his annual state of the nation address to parliament, probably because of the murder of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, reports say. Putin initially planned to deliver the speech last Wednesday but rescheduled the event for Wednesday this week. |
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MOSCOW - Kommersant editor Andrei Vasilyev on Thursday handed over responsibility for the newsroom to his deputy, Alexander Stukalin. An official announcement of the change came out of a Kommersant board meeting late Thursday in London. |
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MOSCOW- The Committee of 2008 last Tuesday laid out its strategy for picking which of its prominent members would lead the liberal democrat camp into the next parliamentary elections in 2007. "Effectively, it's a primary," said former SPS leader Boris Nemtsov, referring to the preliminary elections in the United States used to determine a party's candidate. |
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 Moscow's Globex bank opened its first branch in St. Petersburg on Friday. Globex is planning to launch a total of five branch offices in St. Petersburg in 2004 and 15 in the Northwest region within the next two years. "St. Petersburg's market being tight is a myth," said Ilya Morozovsky, chief of the new branch office. |
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Aeroflot to Hike Fares MOSCOW (SPT) - Flagship carrier Aeroflot plans to increase ticket prices on international flights, the airline said Wednesday. |
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The European Union has thrown its weight behind Russia's bid to enter the World Trade Organization in exchange for a promise from Moscow to gradually liberalize gas prices and trade and perhaps ratify the Kyoto Protocol. "The EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but positivelyaffect our position on the Kyoto Protocol," President Vladimir Putin told reporters after the two sides signed a more than 400-page trade deal at a summit Friday. Putin stressed that Russia "did not package the issues of WTO and the Kyoto Protocol" - as many observers have suggested it was doing in an attempt to obtain better WTO entry terms from the EU. |
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 Blamed for going on e-mail "phishing" expeditions in the West, Russian hackers have now tried to bait customers of Citibank CIS. The country's bankers, authorities and general public seem unprepared to deal with phishing, the latest e-mail borne plague that adds a criminal element to spam. |
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The same judge will preside over the trials of jailed billionaires Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, increasing the likelihood that their request to be tried together will be granted, Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Anton Drel, said Friday. Drel said the date for trial of Khodorkovsky, who has been imprisoned since October on charges of fraud and tax evasion, will be set at a hearing on May 28. The trial of Lebedev, in jail on similar charges since July, convened on Thursday but was quickly postponed also till May 28. "The judge will be [Irina] Kolesnikova, the same as for Lebedev," Drel said. "I don't rule out that the court will approve a defense request and merge the cases of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. |
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 Ten years ago the JFC Jazz Club changed the local jazz scene by providing a cozy place with an atmosphere of almost no barriers between players and the public, where jazz lovers and curious visitors could feel at home. |
 The clients of insurance companies operating in St. Petersburg aren't looking for anything special. They show pragmatism and common sense, mostly signing up for traditional, classical policies, insuring their cars, homes and health. As managers from insurance company Gaide point out, the demand has only recently begun to change, with clients insuring expensive yachts and boats. |
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Technology investors in India, Russia and other emerging markets must be willing to roll up their sleeves when they open their pocketbooks, participants in a World Bank conference in Washington said Tuesday. |
 Long the thorn in the Russian side, tick season has officially arrived bringing with it diseases for dacha, or country house, enthusiasts and the like. "In Russia, ticks are particularly active in early May, peak throughout June and taper off in August and September," said Yulia Koshcheeva, an epidemiologist at EuroMed Clinic. |
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Russia, what a tease. First, it dithers on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Next, its bad-boy diplomats humiliate the blue suits from the European Union by continuing to dither - even when the EU types beg. Finally, President Vladimir Putin says Russia will probably ratify. |
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A rebuke from the European Court of Human Rights will hardly have President Vladimir Putin quaking in his boots. Yet this week's verdict in the case of the exiled businessman Vladimir Gusinsky sends the Kremlin an important reminder of the standards by which it will be measured if it wants to be ranked among Europe's democracies. |
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City Hall's plans to reform the communal housing services sector are advanced, but has the government thought of all the fishhooks? The plan applies mainly to old houses built during the Soviet era, which are serviced by district housing administrations. |
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Goon Squad Matters of great importance are suddenly in the air all around us: stark evidence of war crimes by the leaders of the West; the growing certainty of a humiliating geopolitical defeat inflicted on the world's greatest power; terrorism and torture as the mirrored emblems of the age, a deadly double helix giving rise to a hideous global reality. |
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Issues Archive