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 When Russian beauty Maria Konnenkova went to the United States in 1924, she had no idea that a few years later she would become a Soviet secret agent and date famous physicist Albert Einstein. She did so to gather information on the top-secret U.S. |
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In a city renowned for its art, the St. Petersburg Property Committee has told all local cultural figures using studios belonging to City Hall that they will be privatized. |
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"Can you swim?" was the question asked of Yekaterina Kovtunovich, a 22-year-old student of English and German at St. Petersburg State University at her interview at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a required part of the visa-application process. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday that the military will continue to enjoy Soviet-era benefits, even though the government is drawing up social reforms to replace most benefits received by the population with cash payments. |
All photos from issue.
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A prominent expert on ethnic and racial issues Nikolai Girenko, who was shot dead in his apartment over the weekend, was buried in St. Petersburg on Thursday. "The death of Nikolai Girenko shocked us," said Girenko's boss, Yury Chistov, director of the St. Petersburg Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, at the civil funeral in the St. Petersburg Center of the Russian Academy of Science. "We've been through situations when our scientists were killed for jackets, miserable pensions or political activities. But it's the first time that a scientist was killed for his professional work," Chistov said, website Fontanka.ru reported. |
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 Sir Paul McCartney's concert on Palace Square may be the last given in the city's main square. Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum, located around Palace Square, said Wednesday that the city should ban concerts in the square. |
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St. Petersburg finally has just cause to be called the "Venice of the North" with the six new gondolas and one enterprising attorney. Although founder Peter the Great had planned for a city based on Amsterdam, St. Petersburg's canals and the work of Italian architects have lead it to become known as the Russian version of its Italian cousin. |
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One of the most significant Russian Orthodox icons, the miracle-working Virgin of Tikhvin, arrived from the United States and was displayed in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow on Wednesday. |
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The leading telecommunications and internet service provider, Golden Telecom, plans to shift its main coordinating center for the Northwest region development from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the company's vice-president Andrei Patoka said Wednesday. By delegating main control functions over the Northwest to St. Petersburg, Golden Telecom hopes to promote its distance connection programs more efficiently, he said. Golden Telecom has 4,000 corporate clients in St. Petersburg and 32,000 subscribers. Patoka named the Eldorado retail chain, Promstroybank, Menatep bank, and the Baltika brewery among Golden Telecom's largest clients in the region. |
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 A new ferry route linking St. Petersburg with Rostock in Germany via Tallinn began operating Wednesday as Silja Line, the leading ferry operator in the Baltic Sea region, launched its ferry vessel Finnjet on the new route with the first 500 passengers on board. |
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MOSCOW - Russia is the No. 1 destination for retail expansion, according to a new industry ranking of 30 emerging markets. For the second consecutive year, Russia ranked as the most attractive investment choice in an annual study released Tuesday by management consulting firm A. T. Kearney. This year's list is heavily dominated by Eastern Europe, with Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia and Slovakia making it in the top 10. The Global Retail Development Index ranked countries according to economic and political risks, market attractiveness, market saturation and time pressure, or the urgency to enter a market. After Vietnam and Turkey, Russia is still perceived as the riskiest of the top 10, but by overall market attractiveness it places well ahead of No. |
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 MOCSCOW - The nation's fastest-growing airline wants its passengers - and planes - to lighten up. Sibir, the Novosibirsk division of Aeroflot in communist times, plans to shed its Soviet image with a re-branding campaign that will turn its conservatively painted fleet of jets into a flying canvas of colors and silhouettes. |
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Call for Law on Charity ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - In order to preserve and protect city monuments, a new law regulating the activity of charities must be passed, Interfax quoted Ivan Sautov, the director of the Tsarskoye Selo complex, as saying Wednesday. "Cultural curators have been trying to initiate such a law for years," Sautov said. |
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Contrary to the feverish hyperbole of some commentators, Russia has not been experiencing a banking crisis, let alone anything comparable with the scale of the 1998 financial meltdown. Nevertheless, the nerves of depositors and companies, still raw from the trauma of 1998, have been so shaken by hype and rumors that one or two banks have been hit by runs on their deposits. |
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Russians this week observed the anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a date still engraved on the national consciousness 63 years later. |
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According to the results of an opinion poll released last week, Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais is no longer the most hated man in Russia. That honor has now gone to exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The analysts attribute this change to Chubais' lower profile following the defeat of his party, the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, in the parliamentary elections last December. |
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 Neoangin, a Berlin-based one-man band, is actually Jim Avignon, a singer, keyboard player and pop artist, who sometimes uses music in his art projects, just as he adds his art to his lo-tech musical performances. A frequent visitor to Moscow, he will make his first trip to St. Petersburg to spend a few days in a studio with the local ska band Dva Samaliota and perform at the band's bunker club Griboyedov. |
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 Pedro Almodovar's award-winning "Bad Education" opened the 12th International "Festival of Festivals" on Wednesday, heralding the start of a week-long movie fiesta. |
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Berlin-based pop artist and musician who calls his one-man band Neoangin, after a throat medicine, will spend four days in the city to play a concert and record a CD with local ska band Dva Samaliota (see article, this page), but this week will also see another pair of foreign acts performing as well as a pair of music festivals, plus the first ever local Kiker Tournament. |
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As June days pass, feelings once frozen during the eternal winter and St. Petersburg's somber spring become fully revitalized and the desire for a delicate and enchanting locale in which to indulge newly-aroused romantic spirits takes hold. |
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A happy coincidence has given birth to the following suggestion for an exciting walking route. On nearly the same day exhibitions of work by the artists Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and, last week, Eduard Gorokhovsky opened in St. Petersburg. In the 1970s and '80s, these artists had similar social and artistic trajectories - they had the same official occupation of children book's illustrator that they each combined with an unofficial, artistic conceptualization of everyday Soviet life. This underground art movement (which included many other Moscow artists) was known as Moscow Conceptualism, part of the international Conceptualism movement. |
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 The fate of a foreigner living in Russia is frequently attached to one of the two big cities: Moscow or St. Petersburg. But secretly everyone seems to be looking for an escape, a place untouched, free of foreigners and the hustle of the big cities. |
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Koshatnik/Koshatnitsa: cat lover, cat fancier. For Russians, human beings are divided into two categories: sobachniki i koshatniki (dog lovers and cat lovers). They allow for the odd fellow with a passion for guppies or parakeets (or who indulge in the fad for exotic pets, like pythons or marmosets), but basically they believe that you are destined to love a beast that thumps its tail or a beast that purrs — it’s one or the other. |
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Iran Frees Britons TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Eight British servicemen who were detained after their boats strayed into Iranian territorial waters have been turned over to British diplomats, officials said Thursday. Protesters angry about the occupation of Iraq tried to approach the six Royal Marines and two sailors as they arrived at Tehran's airport accompanied by British consular officers, but they were kept away by police. |
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Issues Archive