One of the old Russian toast wishes everyone more pies and buns, fewer blackeyes and bruises. It seemed the exporters of platinum group metals were following the toast’s advice, until last week’s announcement from Ford Motor Company. The new U.S. accounting rules obliged the auto giant to disclose the value of palladium it acquired last […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, January 26th, 2002
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Now that we are all done with cheering and feasting, it is worth remembering the pagan roots of the 12 Days of Christmas and the celebratory season in general. Long before Jesus Christ was born, the ancient Greeks and Romans held festivals in late December to mark the winter solstice. For them, the rebirth of […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 18th, 2002
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If you want to achieve the miracles required for sainthood, one of the great advantages of the Russian Orthodox Church is that it allows you to perform them after you are dead. This not only relieves qualifiers for canonization of a lot of pressure while they are alive. It also gives them the benefit of […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 21st, 2001
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When President Vladimir Putin this week handed a visibly nervous Vyacheslav Shtirov a bouquet of flowers in a red wrapper, a revolution in Russian diamond policy began. The flowers were a farewell from the Kremlin for the man who has headed Almazy Rossii-Sakha (Alrosa), Russia’s dominant diamond miner and the principal source of wealth for […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 14th, 2001
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Remember the taste test? That was a marketing ploy by Pepsi, when the soft-drinks maker claimed that consumers who sampled their drink preferred it for taste to Coca-Cola – so long as they couldn’t see the label on the bottle. In reaction, Coca-Cola blind-tested consumers, and discovered that if their old sugar formula was changed […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 1st, 2001
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It’s not too early to see in this month’s clash between Saudi Arabia and Russia over oil supplies to the market the first real sign that the Kremlin sees a future for itself as the world’s alternative source of crude whenever the OPEC swing producer tries to make other producers dance to its tune. Playing […]

by John Helmer - Friday, November 23rd, 2001
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When the epic tale is told of how Russia’s defense industry broke out of the chokehold of gunrunning commission agents and of well-heeled U.S. and European rivals, Malaysia will have a prominent part in the story. That’s because the Malaysian air force was the first Western-equipped air force to break the mold and select Russian-built […]

by John Helmer - Friday, October 12th, 2001
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Big events don’t make small minds any bigger. Words uttered in passion usually produce drivel. So, if you are to understand the meaning of the American events, listen carefully to this old, cold man. In 1968, when I was an editor on Madison Avenue, New York’s magazine row, I hired a man called Edward Luttwak […]

by John Helmer - Friday, September 28th, 2001
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To groznify – active verb. Maximum firepower concentrated on an elusive target, with severe collateral damage; derived from Grozny, capital of Chechnya until its destruction in 1996-99; colloquial use, as in “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” (Vietnam 1970). Following President Vlad-imir Putin’s domestic television speech on Monday, and his […]

by John Helmer - Friday, September 28th, 2001
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Sub-Prefect Vyacheslav Ninilin of the Khoroshevsky district is the only genuine revolutionary I have met in Russia since 1986; and I made his acquaintance just this week. In the history of Moscow’s growth as a city, what Ninilin is quietly achieving is as profound as what the architects and planners argued over, but fell short […]

by John Helmer - Friday, August 31st, 2001
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