Latest news with #StPetersburg
Russia Today
a day ago
- Russia Today
Major European museum announces complete restoration (VIDEOS)
Russia's State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will undergo a full restoration of its entire architectural complex, including the iconic imperial Winter Palace, museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky has announced. The large-scale effort is expected to span several years and will involve detailed scientific and architectural planning, he said at a press conference on Thursday. 'We are embarking on another major task. We need to restore the entire complex of Hermitage buildings again. A long time has passed since all this was done last,' Piotrovsky said. 10 facts about Russias astounding Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg The word 'Hermitage' is translated from French as 'place of solitude.'The Hermitage is among the top five most visited museums in our country and the top twenty most popular museums in the Russia,… The head of construction and restoration, Sergey Makarov, said the work will start with the Winter Palace, which has served as the museum's main building since 1917, and the Hermitage Theater. 'We are currently preparing plans for a major restoration of the main museum building. We need to restore the facades, several halls, parquet floors, which are very worn out,' he said, citing high visitor traffic, especially during peak tourist seasons. Makarov added that the theater's renovation will be completed as quickly as possible to minimize disruption. State Hermitage Museum 🇷🇺متحف هيرميتاج في سان بطرسبرغ the Great began assembling the Hermitage's art collection in 1764, initially for private royal use. In 1852, Tsar Nicholas I opened part of the collection to the public with the inauguration of the New Hermitage building, which became Russia's first museum purpose-built to display art. Today, the Hermitage ranks among the world's most visited museums. Major restorations last took place in the late 20th century and continued into the early 2000s, including upgrades to the General Staff Building and the Small Hermitage. The museum recently completed the restoration of the facades of the Menshikov Palace, a historic building dating to the era of Peter the Great.
The Sun
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Playboy model from iconic Pulp album cover has chilling link to Putin
A PLAYBOY model who featured on an iconic album cover has a surprising link to Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin. Ksenia Sobchak, 41, posed for the lads' mag in 2006 and was on the iconic cover of Pulp's 1998 album, This Is Hardcore. 4 4 But the glamorous socialite ditched her party-ways and remade herself into a journalist and liberal politician who has been accused of being a " Kremlin stooge" by opposition activists. She is Putin's goddaughter and the offspring of one of his first political mentors - the ex mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly A. Sobchak - who put him on the path to presidency. The unlikely pair have known each other since the 1990s when her dad launched Putin's political career. However, she has been vocal about being against the Ukraine war - and insists she helps residents of Russian border regions displaced by Ukrainian shelling. She and the President have reportedly have not spoken since the war began, nor seen each other. Sobchak now works as an influencer on YouTube, interviewing critics of the war. arrests of antiwar activists. In a conversation with her 9.5million Instagram fans about the conflict, she said: 'I believe that this is a horrific situation, but we're going to get through this time, we'll get through it together with our audience.' Navalny accused her of being a puppet opposition candidate to Putin - to give the illusion of democracy. She said at the time: "In a system created by Putin, it is only possible for Putin to win. "I am realistic about who will become the president." Sobchak was hit by further controversy in her media career in 2022 when she was hunted by Russianpolice over claims of extortion and tax fraud. At the time she claimed it was a "politically motivated move" when three of her former employees were accused of trying to extort money from the head of state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec. After fleeing cops in Moscow, she escaped to Lithuania via Belarus after police arrested her business partner. However, after returning to Russia, Sobchak visited the Rostec office to reconcile with boss Sergey Chemezov for the "actions of colleagues" accused of extortion and said "their fate will be decided by the court". When the three ex-employees were jailed for seven years, their former boss slammed the verdict as 'way more than injustice.' 'I've done everything we had agreed to get leniency [for Kirill Sukhanov, Arian Romanovsky and Tamerlan Bigayev],' she wrote in a statement. 'Why are you ruining people's lives? 'Why the disproportionality? Just as revenge?' Her despair over the Ukraine war sparked a popular YouTube show in which she deals with stories that Russia's state media usually turn a blind eye to. Her interests include the arrests of antiwar activists, violence committed by soldiers returning from the front and human rights abuses in the southern region of Chechnya. Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton in the Noughties.
Russia Today
a day ago
- Business
- Russia Today
Russia and Malaysia to boost nuclear cooperation
Russia and Malaysia have agreed to expand cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, state nuclear corporation Rosatom announced, following high-level talks in Moscow on Friday. The meeting was attended by Rosatom CEO Aleksey Likhachev and Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof. The discussions focused on the use of Rosatom's Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) technologies, according to a Rosatom press release. 'We value our collaboration and aim for a long-term strategic partnership based on mutual trust and shared objectives,' Fadillah, who is also Malaysia's Energy Transition and Water Transformation Minister, stated at the meeting. Likhachev said Malaysia is interested in Russian floating nuclear power stations, following Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's visit to Russia last month. 'We offered [Malaysia] the entire spectrum: large and small stations, both land-based and floating. For various reasons, the Malaysians are choosing floating nuclear power plants with a capacity of 100 MW each,' he told Izvestia news outlet. 'They can be created here in Russia and brought there fully operational.' During their current visit, the Malaysian delegation toured the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant in St. Petersburg, one of Rosatom's largest facilities, to observe Russia's latest nuclear technologies and safety standards. They also visited the ATOM Pavilion at Moscow's VDNKh – the country's key nuclear science education hub, featuring more than 1,700 interactive exhibits. Fadillah called the experience 'eye-opening,' praising the pavilion as both a display of innovation and a center of historical awareness. 'This visit reinforced my belief that technology, when guided by knowledge, values and responsibility, can be a powerful driver for a future that is sustainable, innovative and globally competitive,' he wrote in a post on social media. During his 5-day visit, Fadillah also held a bilateral meeting in Moscow with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksey Overchuk.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Three Revolutions by Simon Hall review – how Russia, China and Cuba changed forever
If the word 'revolution' implies, etymologically, a world turned around, then what unfolded in Russia in 1917 was just that. Everything changed. Old-school deference was dead; the proletariat was in power. The communist American journalist John Reed witnessed a contretemps that captured the suddenness of the change. In simpler times, sailors would have yielded to senior ministers, but on the day of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, they weren't having it. When, in a last-ditch effort to save the Provisional Government, two liberal grandees demanded that they be let in, one of the sailors replied, 'We will spank you! And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace!' Here was an anecdote confirming Trotsky's lofty pronouncement that the revolution marked the 'forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership'. Where Trotsky was coolly detached in his bird's-eye The History of the Russian Revolution, Reed was breathless in his wide-eyed, worm's-eye memoir, Ten Days that Shook the World. Reed had the zeal of the convert. Born into a pig-iron fortune in Oregon, he rebelled against his preppy upbringing by embracing the bohemia of Greenwich Village: 'delicatessens, bookshops, art studios and saloons, its long-haired men and short-haired women.' Thereafter, he was fired up by the silk weavers' strike in New Jersey in 1913. Four years later, a sense of adventure and a folie à deux with his socialist wife Louise Bryant took them to Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd), where they witnessed the revolution's great set pieces first-hand. Warren Beatty's portrayal of him as a true believer in the biopic Reds, leafleting and dodging bullets, got him down to a tee. So it was hardly surprising that he was faced with sedition charges on his return. He was indicted for violating the Espionage Act for inveighing against American entry into the First World War. Hounded out of his homeland, he fled to Russia and died of typhus, aged 32; no medicines were available on account of the Western blockade of the Russian Civil War. Reed's is one of six lives served up by historian Simon Hall in his new book. Three of them are revolutionaries – Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro – and three are American journalists who filed stories from the frontlines of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, respectively: Reed, Edgar Snow and Herbert Matthews. These are unexpected pairings, chosen, one presumes, for their convenience in enabling Hall to reconstruct his three very foreign societies with the help of a largely monoglot bibliography. The conceit is to chronicle the journeys that represented turning points in 20th-century history. In Lenin's case, it was his return to Russia from Swiss exile in April 1917. Something of a party pooper, he maintained that the February Revolution that overthrew the tsar wasn't the real deal. In good time, his comrades came around, and that's how we got the Russian Revolution. In China, meanwhile, the Long March of 1934-5 was a desperate retreat. It was also a lesson in geography and endurance. On the run from the nationalist Kuomintang party's Chiang Kai-shek, who was working with Hitler's general Hans von Seeckt, some 90,000 troops and persecuted communists made the 9,000km trek from the Jiangxi Soviet in the south to Yan'an in the north. Only about 6,000 survived, and Mao emerged as their leader. For his part, Castro returned to Cuba from Mexico in 1956 aboard the Granma, 'a creaking, leaking leisure yacht'. As one compañero put it, it was not so much a landing as a shipwreck. Not all of them managed to negotiate the mangrove thickets of Playa Las Coloradas and Fulgencio Batista's strafing planes, but Castro did. Three years later, he toppled the dictator. Hall's tired trot through the three coups is less interesting than the three scoops he describes. Besides Reed's, we have the midwestern ad man turned journalist Edgar Snow's. He spent four months swimming and playing tennis with Mao's guerrillas in Bao'an, writing up the experience gushingly in Red Star Over China. Zhou Enlai, wrote Snow, was 'every inch an intellectual', Mao a 'gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure', and the comrades 'the freest and happiest Chinese I had known'. Hall says that Red Star Over China was 'no crass work of propaganda'. But it was. Snow would have known about Mao's purges in the Jiangxi Soviet from 1931-36, in which, it was later revealed, 700,000 people perished. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was equally starstruck by his subject. Here he is on Castro, whom he met in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1957: 'This was quite a man – a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced with a straggly beard.' What's more, Castro was 'not only not Communist but decidedly anti-Communist'. Matthews's dispatches went a long way in swaying American opinion against Batista's dictatorship, but needless to say, some of the more confident pronouncements about Castro's politics aged badly. Hall's potted narratives trundle along, absorbing rich period and cultural details. His strengths lie in storytelling, not history-writing, which is to say he is more at home with description than analysis. But there lies the rub. Unlike Reed, Snow, and Matthews, he is writing at one remove. This necessitates extensive quotation and, worse, lengthy paraphrases that are inevitably weaker than the lapidary originals. Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys that Changed the World by Simon Hall is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
Heartbreak as Florida's beloved Thunderbird Beach Resort faces the wrecking ball
An iconic resort that faced the brunt of back-to-back hurricanes will be demolished and rebuilt, sparking concern that the decades-old Florida staple will lose its nostalgic charm. The Thunderbird Beach Resort, located west of St. Petersburg on Treasure Island, sustained severe damage during Hurricanes Helene and Milton - which both caused widespread devastation last year. With roughly 80 percent of the retro-styled beachfront hotel decimated, its owners were left with no choice but to make the distressing call. 'Sadly, the back-to-back hurricanes that struck our coast last year caused catastrophic damage to the property,' owners Avi & Gilad Ovaknin wrote in a statement in April. 'After extensive evaluations and much deliberation, we were left with no choice but to move forward with a full redevelopment of the hotel.' The Ovaknins added they were 'heartbroken by the loss' of the flagship structure, which has been a coveted family-friendly vacation spot since it opened in 1957, but will do their best to preserve its 'heart, soul, and charm.' Thunderbird guests were also disheartened by the news, but were ultimately relieved that the hotel would be rebuilt. 'Breaks my heart. Been taking me family for decades. Mother's Day weeks, graduations, and family getaways. We will be awaiting the grand opening,' one woman reacted on Facebook. Another user said he hoped developers would be able to keep some of the resort's trademark features, including its unmistakable neon sign and the Thunderbird painted on the bottom of one of its pools. 'I do hope that along with the original signage, that you will put another Thunderbird in the pool,' he wrote. 'I have been coming there since the 1960's and both the big sign and the Thunderbird in the pool always thrilled me as a child.' Someone claimed they have stayed at the resort every time they visited Treasure Island for the past decade. She added she knows 'it won't be the same sweet 1950's style motel' but is optimistic for the new design. 'This just breaks my heart, but I hope what you build honors the historical nature, and has character - well being safer, and more resistant to future flooding,' another added. Hundreds of people have been sharing their fond memories of their relaxing getaways spent swimming in the Thunderbird's two heated pools and getting drinks at its popular tiki bar. Originally, the resort was called the Thunderbird Motel. It consisted of 64 rooms and cost $750,000 to build, St. Pete Rising reported. It became the Thunderbird Beach Resort around 2006, the according to StPeteCatalyst, and grew to 106 hotel rooms throughout two and three story buildings. When developers first drew up plans for the hotels post-hurricane makeover, the design included the same number of rooms, but in one four-story building. These plans included U-shaped structure with three levels sitting atop a 124-sqaure-foot parking garage and featuring a 1,750-square-foot lobby and office area. But since sharing that design in April, the owners have expressed intent to grow Thunderbird into an even larger resort. 'Putting 106 units on this land doesn't really pencil out,' Gilad told St. Pete Rising. 'In order to justify [the development], it's going to require a little bit more units.' He hopes to drastically expand the vacation spot to 160 or 170 units, Thunderbird Beach Resort Manager Donna Jollimore told the outlet. Although the city's code technically does not allow for the new hotel to exceed its previous 106 rooms, Treasure Island board members have been supportive of the massive change. 'It's ok to bring us some stuff that's outside the box. Because if you look around, we need it. We can't live the way that we have for the last 30 years,' alternate board member Mark Zdrojewski said. 'You can put a Ferris wheel on top and I'd probably say yes.' The Treasure Island Board said it is actively working with the Ovaknins' owners to make these expansive dreams come true. Increasing the room count may require a provision in the city's plan, St. Pete Rising reported. The timeline for the demolition and exact rebuild plans remains unclear, but owners have eased some worries by declaring the trademark neon sign will remain. 'Our new plans reflect a thoughtful balance of preservation and progress. While the structure and layout will evolve, the spirit of the Thunderbird will live on,' they wrote.
