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Jobless Rates Expected To Spike By End of Year
MOSCOW — The number of registered unemployed is likely to rise 18 percent by the end of the year, Federal Labor and Employment Service head Yury Gertsy said Wednesday, a figure that calls into question the efficacy of the government’s multibillion-dollar anti-crisis plan. As many as 2.6 million people will be registered as unemployed by the end of the year, Gertsy said at the presentation of a joint report by the service and the World Bank. The report called the situation on the labor market difficult but in the process of stabilization. Registered unemployment dropped ... |
Rusnano Seeks Tax Breaks From Obama
MOSCOW — Rusnano, the state nanotechnology giant, hopes to press President Barack Obama for tax breaks for Russian technology as it wraps up plans to create a $1 billion venture fund with U.S. companies to invest in Russia. Rusnano chief Anatoly Chubais said Wednesday that his company had prepared a “concrete proposal” for President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama to discuss when the U.S. president visits Moscow next week. “We have one absolutely concrete proposal,” Chubais told reporters after making a speech to the innovation committee of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs ... |
City Police Raid Former Casinos in Bid to Enforce New Ban
 As all casinos in the country should have closed from July 1, 2009, Dmitry Nevelsky, head of the St. Petersburg Association of Gambling Businesses announced ... |
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Train Bombing Suspects Claim Torture
MOSCOW — Two Ingush suspects charged in the 2007 bombing of a Moscow-St. Petersburg train told a court Tuesday that they had been tortured by police and subjected to interrogations in a forest and a cellar rather than the police station. The suspects, ... |
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Most Russians Ignorant Of Pikalyovo Events, Poll Shows
Less than half of Russians have heard anything about the recent events in Pikalyovo, where unpaid workers blocked a federal highway and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly berated factory owners, state pollster VTsIOM said Tuesday. The conflict over ... |
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Belarus Releases Jailed U.S. Lawyer
 MINSK — An ailing U.S. lawyer who was imprisoned in Belarus last year on charges of using fake documents and attempted industrial espionage has walked ... |
Singer Zykina Dies at 80
MOSCOW — Lyudmila Zykina, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved folk singers who rose to stardom from the factory floor to charm millions at the height of the Cold War, died Wednesday at the age of 80. The ITAR-TASS news agency quoted her doctor Vladimir Konstantinov as saying that she had died in a Moscow hospital on Wednesday morning. Born in Moscow in 1929, Zykina worked during World War II as a turner in a Moscow machine tool factory, and her singing career took off after she won a pan-Russian singing competition in 1947. In a career that spanned Russia’s postwar history, she sang in a ... |
Medvedev Appalled by Alcohol Statistics
President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed surprise at how much alcohol Russians drink and ordered the government to develop a program to discourage drinking. “The alcohol consumption we have is colossal,” Medvedev told Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova at a meeting this week. “I was astonished to learn that we now drink more than we did in the 1990s, although those were very tough times,” Medvedev said, according to a transcript on the Kremlin’s web site. He told Golikova to devise an anti-alcohol strategy. “We need to prepare a corresponding program and take appropriate ... |
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In Brief
Professor Detained ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A senior professor at a St. Petersburg university has been arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes on two occasions this summer, according to the prosecutor general’s office. Lyubov Zhigar, ... |
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Finland Gives Nod To Pipeline
MOSCOW — Gazprom-led Nord Stream’s proposed Baltic Sea gas pipeline poses no serious environmental threat to Finland and can move forward to the next step in the approval process, Finnish environmental authorities said. Finland “considers the performed environmental impact assessment to be sufficient in its fundamental aspects,” the Helsinki-based Uusimaa Regional Environment Centre said in a statement Thursday, adding additional studies of the fishing impact and how follow-up monitoring will be conducted are necessary. Nord Stream, a planned 1,200-kilometer natural-gas pipeline connecting ... |
President Instructs Shipbuilder
 MOSCOW — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered shipbuilder Sevmash to complete the overhaul of an aircraft carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov, for India ... |
Unilever Plans Mammoth Ice Cream Plant
MOSCOW — Unilever plans to spend $140 million on building Russia’s largest ice cream factory to tap the country’s increasing appetite for cones and popsicles. The plant is expected to produce its first ice cream at the start of 2011, Antoine de Saint-Affrique, executive vice president of Unilever’s central and eastern European businesses, told reporters Thursday at the building site in the Tula region south of Moscow. De Saint-Affrique said the facility will be Russia’s biggest factory dedicated to making the frozen food. The plant will be Unilever’s eighth production facility in Russia, ... |
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Giving China a Piece of Russia
On June 17, President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed an agreement in which Russia will sell 300 million tons of oil to China over 20 years for $100 billion. That breaks down to $57 per barrel. In order for Russia to deliver that ... |
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Microscopic Art Makes Russian Fiction a Reality
 The well-known Russian story about the left-handed craftsman (“Levsha” in Russian) who shod a life-sized mechanical flea has been transformed from a fairytale ... |
Chernov’s choice
Morrissey roamed through St. Petersburg this week, bequeathing a sweaty shirt to his fans, which means that this summer’s main music event is safely behind us and only a few smaller things are left. One of those, however, is Nick Cave, who is far better known among Russian fans than the ex-Smiths singer. Although he has already been to St. Petersburg back in the 1990s, the news is that Cave, who is due to perform on July 17, comes with a new mustache. Genuine passions, however, are raging on the anarchist punk scene. Alexei Nikonov, the frontman of local punk band PTVP, or Posledniye ... |
An eye for detail
The “Nuddles” on the English menu would have been highly perplexing without the Russian original to hand (“Lapsha,” or “noodles”), and the true nature of the mysterious additive “Rosswater” remains a mystery (“Rosewater,” perhaps?). Dyslexic English translation aside, Fiolet bowled this diner over with its impeccable attention to detail and well-crafted Euro-Asian fusion cuisine. At 8.30 p.m. on a weekday evening it was easy to secure a table on the outdoor patio, which featured a chic, glass-walled but spacious design that maximized the view on the Fontanka River while closing out the grime of the busy street. The patio was busy with sharply dressed patrons, ... |
