ERIC KRAUS & ALEXANDER TEDDY krausmoscow@yahoo.com DESK NOTE 12 DECEMBER 2011 Russian Facebook Protest – A Field of Dreams

by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow The Financial Times, a London newspaper, recommends that under your Christmas tree you put a book called Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, who was the Moscow correspondent of The Economist between 2004 and 2007. According to the recommendation, “it’s a sinister, seductive read that paints a murky moral portrait of the new […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 5th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow To gauge the future welfare of Russia and the Russians, nothing is more telling than the Cat Test. Michel de Montaigne (left) originated it in one of his 16th century essays, when he wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 24th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently conceded that the oligarchs who were running Russia behind the shaking hand and raddled brain of Boris Yeltsin had caused such chaos, Putin was obliged to use what he called “manual control” to recover the country. The evidence given last week in the UK High Court […]

by John Helmer - Monday, November 21st, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow At a time when mass protests against the greed and criminality of bankers have spread from from the US to Greece, Italy and the UK, and on across the world, the London Daily Telegraph headline, “Financiers are being forced out of Russia”, might be widely applauded by a certain section of […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Arkady (right image) and Boris Rotenberg are under investigation by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) for running a cartel and price-rigging to cheat Gazprom, their longstanding business partner and patron. This is unusual for several reasons. One of them is that the Rotenbergs neither produce the goods in trade targeted by […]

by John Helmer - Friday, October 28th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow And now for a Classical breather. According to the Greek myth, Orion was a giant hunter who could walk across the Mediterranean. One evening he pulled one of those drunken turns that give dinner parties a bad name – he tried to make a dessert out of the daughter of his […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Sergei Naryshkin (right image), the Kremlin chief of staff, who has been chairman of the board of Sovcomflot, the state-owned tanker operator, has been replaced by Ilya Klebanov (left), a former federal minister of industry, according to a Kremlin release last Friday, October 7. The appointment appears to have taken Sovcomflot […]

by John Helmer - Monday, October 10th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Mukhamedshin, the man in charge of raising money and covering debt for United Company Rusal, was spotted last week in London carrying bags into his mansion. This is what has been happening to the aluminium he has been selling:

by John Helmer - Friday, October 7th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow In retrospect, Alexei Kudrin, deputy prime minister and minister of finance, has turned out to be less stupid than Mikhail Prokhorov, when offered President Dmitry Medvedev’s poisoned chalice. On the other hand, by declaring yesterday the race for prime minister is now wide open to all-comers, Kudrin invites a chancy political […]

by John Helmer - Monday, September 26th, 2011
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