The St. Petersburg Times

St. Petersburg police chief Mikhail Sukhodolsky was removed from his position Friday amid drama at the city’s police headquarters. Armed OMON special task force officers blocked the entrance and exit to the headquarters of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad ...

MOSCOW — United Russia won enough seats to usher government-sponsored bills through the State Duma, but the decline in popular support for the ruling party as revealed by Sunday’s elections will likely have consequences that reach beyond law making.
Led ...

Yury Shevchuk, arguably Russia’s most popular rock musician known for his political dissent, walked out during a press conference in St. Petersburg last month.
He had just performed an unpolished set of new songs, complete with elaborate video art and ...

The world of Russian ballet was rocked by controversy this week when dancers Natalya Osipova and Ivan Vasilyev announced they would leave Moscow’s celebrated Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theater for St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theater.
The married couple, ...

LGBT activists and human rights organizations are protesting in St. Petersburg with petitions against what they say is a homophobic draft law proposed by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in an attempt to gather more votes from conservatives ahead ...

St. Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue will hold an open doors day on Sunday to mark International Tolerance Day.
From 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., people of all nationalities and faiths are invited to visit the synagogue to familiarize themselves with Jewish ...

The Union of Journalists has demanded a full investigation into an “unprovoked” attack by a policeman on a press photographer during a protest rally last week that resulted into costly equipment damages.
On Thursday, the union published a statement saying ...

Moscow took center stage for the arts when the Bolshoi Theater opened on Oct. 28, but St. Petersburg, the historical cultural capital, will quickly answer Moscow’s challenge with an entire cultural complex set to open in fall 2012.
The complex will consist ...

This autumn Russian mushroomers are enjoying a bumper crop of the beloved fungi. Happy hunters have been returning from local forests with baskets brimming with ceps, red-cap boletes, birch boletes, and chanterelles. Some say this year Russia is enjoying ...

Television presenter and journalist Dmitry Gubin, once the editor of the local English-Russian-language publication Pulse St. Petersburg, says he has been blacklisted by Russia’s state-controlled national television at the demand of former St. Petersburg ...